Impressions from the Long Drive Home

Over the past couple of decades, Kate and I have traveled a time or two or twenty to her childhood home, an old stone house by the Skunk River in the southeast corner of Iowa.

Mostly we have traveled by car, taking different routes in different seasons. We have crossed mountains, rivers and farmland, passed towns and cities and metropolises.

We've had mostly windshield views of eight states (Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and Missouri), but have occasionally paused for a bit of sight-seeing.

Regrettably, the big ball of twine is not on our route.

These travels have left a deep impression on me of the vast changes that have swept across our nation's landscape over the past couple centuries. The edifices we have constructed where field and forest once thrived are magnificent and mind-boggling. We have channeled and dammed rivers, plowed the prairies, leveled mountains, and laid countless millions of acres of asphalt. Massive bridges span wide rivers and tall buildings brush the clouds.

My mind struggles to encompass the scale of it all. What quantities of steel and concrete and wood and glass went into the bones of these structures? How many women and men drove bulldozer or crane or wielded welding torch? Who had the nerve and grit and genius to envision such things, draw them, order them, plan and direct their creation?

And yet, mostly the places that draw us off our trajectory homeward are the pockets of relatively pristine nature that dot the landscape, where we spend time walking amongst trees and waterfalls and flowers and streams. The sights to see there are equally spectacular, though often more subtle.

One day, I believe, our planet will be less crowded and our footprints fewer, and those pockets of unspoiled nature will spread across the land. Hopefully that will occur through choice not catastrophe.

And I wonder, when that time comes, what will happen to the countless towers we have built? Do we disassemble them? Or will they stand as monuments to our past? Do we preserve them or allow the persistent and powerful forces of nature to slowly reclaim them? 

None of this will occur in my lifetime, so it falls upon our distant descendants to answer. Yet it irks me when "won't happen in my lifetime" is used as an excuse to dismiss an important long term goal. World peace may be generations away, but should we not still wish for it, work for it?

Not that I have any certainty of the route to follow, or the steps to take. Other than the steps along the path to the mountaintop, or to the bench by the stream. But just maybe that's where the answers lie waiting to be found.