The Healthy Sun
I saw a film today from the 1970’s. One of the characters was a woman who spent every day in and around the ocean. The one thing that struck me the most was the color of her tan. It was a color that my neighborhood gang wore well, pretty much year-round. Our skin was a healthy, deep bronze, and our hair was bleached blond by the sun. I remember one year a friend and I had a bet. We were in Ethel Dwyer middle school, when OP (Ocean Pacific) shorts were “the thing”. Anyway, the bet was to see who could wear short pants to school for the longest after the school year began. It ended in a tie. Neither of us wore long pants for the entire year. Anyway, I was reminded of those times and wondered if our ozone will return.
You see, when I grew up in Huntington Beach, CA during the 1970’s and early 80’s, we didn’t wear sunscreen. In fact, we used to butter ourselves up with tropical tanning oils to maximize the sun’s effects and nourish our skin. The idea of sunburn never really crossed our minds because it didn’t happen. The more time we spent in the sun, the deeper our tans would get, period. We would spend entire summer days in the direct sunlight wearing only our swim trunks. As many of those hours would be spent riding waves, our faces and hair also absorbed the rays reflecting off the water. That’s where all our naturally bleached blond hair would come from.
Look, when you grow up a few blocks from the beach in Huntington, unless you’re going to Disneyland or something, you’re going to the beach. We would load up our gear on our tricked out Schwinn beach cruisers and ride down Lake Street to Tower 3. That’s just south of the famous Huntington Beach pier. That once famous route no longer exists. As part of the “development” of the downtown area, the route now just sort of disappears into the downtown expansion.
The Burning Sun – Will Our Ozone Return?
It wasn’t until the mid 1980’s that I started to notice a difference. For the first time, staying in the sun too long meant risking sunburn. It was a slow and gradual change, but it was a change. We later figured out that it was due to a depletion of our ozone layer. In the decades that followed, the sun became something that was downright hazardous in Southern California. People wondered if our ozone would return. We responded to our realization that we had damaged our ozone layer with new products to protect us from the sun. We really never used sunscreen before, and now it was all but necessary. Unfortunately, we have now learned that sunscreens we use to protect us from the damaged ozone has polluted our oceans.
Having given up on Southern California, I moved to Oregon in 2007. I didn’t realize until later that Oregon still had a functioning ozone layer. One hot summer day, my girlfriend and I took a hike outside the little town of Galice. We found the mouth of a small tributary stream of the Rogue River and just sat there all day beneath the summer sun. Without humans to encounter, the only sounds came from the nature that surrounded us. The rolling water of the Rogue River was the constant backdrop. We sat in that stream and watched the sun glistening off the surface of the rippled water, like bouncing sparks. In the distance, a tree covered rock face rose out of the river to towering heights. It was nature in all her majesty.
Grateful to Have Lived It
Getting back to my point, we stayed there the entire day in the direct sunlight, and had no sunburn at all. I knew that day that only certain areas of the planet were damaged, and Southern California was definitely one of them. How ironic. The state known for its beaches and sunshine now had a damaged ozone layer. That meant that the previously tanning and nourishing rays of the sun were now harmful. In short, paradise was no longer. I don’t know if the ozone will return someday, but today it remains damaged.
While some science suggests that the ozone layer is healing itself, it is clear that the damage will not be fixed any time soon. It is unclear whether the ozone layer will replete itself to conditions similar to those in the 1960’s and 70’s. When I think about younger people that never experienced those times, I wish I could share with them how life was. But, most of the time, they look at me with the same disinterest that most young people do when listening to some “old timer” talking about “the good old days”. So, I remember how things were and I am truly grateful. I am truly grateful to have lived in a time and place before the Earth was forever changed, and people lived in communion with the sun.
-Rondym Kiefe