Another beautiful day poolside at the club. Friends, strangers, the usual mid-afternoon mix, water throwing light back up into the trees.
Then the new arrivals. Bags down, chairs claimed, and out comes the can. Held at arm’s length, thumb on the nozzle, and the ritual begins. Maybe a fifth of it lands where it’s aimed. The rest hangs in the air a moment and then goes where the breeze takes it — into my lungs, into the lungs of the woman on the next chair, into the lungs of the kid standing waist-deep six feet downwind. Nobody says anything. We have all quietly agreed that this is normal.
And I sit there and think: how did we become a species so afraid of the thing that gives us life?
Not cautious of. Cautious is a hat, a shirt, and the sense to come inside at one o’clock. Cautious is what my grandfather did on a section of dryland wheat for fifty years. His parents came from Britain and cleared that land by hand, with the skin for Yorkshire and a homestead at fifty-one north, and not one of them ever ran from the sun. They wore hats. What I’m watching is not caution. It is fear — of morning light on bare arms, of a walk to the mailbox in June, of a Saturday afternoon at an outdoor pool in a city where the outdoor pool season runs about eleven weeks.
And the strangest part isn’t the sunscreen. It’s the can.
In July of 2021, Health Canada advised the public to stop using every lot of several aerosol-format Neutrogena sunscreens — the Beach Defense and Ultra Sheer lines, adult and children’s both — after testing turned up elevated levels of benzene. Benzene is a known human carcinogen. Health Canada’s own advisory noted that exposure can occur by inhalation as well as through the skin.
Nobody found that because a regulator went looking. An independent lab in Connecticut went looking, on its own initiative, and tested nearly three hundred batches of sun-care products from sixty-nine companies. A quarter of them carried detectable benzene. Some exceeded the allowable limit by three times. Johnson & Johnson pulled five aerosol lines. And when Banana Boat later traced its own contamination, the benzene turned out not to be in the sunscreen at all. It was in the propellant. The thing that turns the lotion into a cloud.
The cloud I have been breathing every pool day for ten summers.
Now hold that against where we are standing.
Calgary sits at fifty-one degrees north. At noon on the summer solstice the sun climbs sixty-two degrees above the horizon. At noon on the winter solstice it manages sixteen. Light arriving at that angle has to cross more than three times as much atmosphere to reach us, and ozone absorbs the short wavelengths first — so from late October to late February, the UVB that lets human skin manufacture vitamin D does not reach the ground in this city at all. The long wavelengths still come through. A January afternoon here still looks like a sunny day, still glares white off the snow, still ages your face. It simply doesn’t do the one thing.
So the sun is not a surplus we are defending ourselves against. At this latitude it is a ration. The window is about eight months wide, concentrated in the middle hours of the day, narrower still if you work indoors — which is to say the window is that afternoon at the pool. And that is precisely the hour we have trained ourselves to spend under a chemical film, breathing each other’s propellant.
Something happened here. It is worth asking what.
