How to Ruin a Beautiful Drive
I had eight hours of Colorado splendor ahead of me. Why not press "play" on an audio book, to help pass the time? WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED by PETER MOORE
MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK is 430 miles from my home. But that’s where the annular eclipse was visible last weekend, so that’s where I drove.
And drove.
And drove.
I watched the sun go away then—whew!—come back. I climbed around ancient ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings. And I violated federal laws on cannabis use. (National Parks are federal land, where the stupid national prohibition against nature’s Ambien trumps Colorado law. I gotta sleep here, people. My tent isn’t that comfortable!)
But then Monday morning came, as it does. So I folded my tent and wondered: Is there anything that might make my eight-hour drive back home slide by a little more quickly?
I know: An audio book!
Soon, my book group will be discussing Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky, so I downloaded the spoken-word version. I’d never read a book with my ears before, but hey—there’s a first time for everything.
I revved the engine in Mesa Verde and hit play. Here’s what was ping-ponging around my brain pan, as I drove north.
Kolbert says:
“People have, by now, directly transformed more than half the ice-free land on earth- some twenty-seven million square miles- and indirectly half of what remains. We have dammed or diverted most of the world's major rivers. Our fertilizer plants and legume crops fix more nitrogen than all terrestrial ecosystems combined, and our planes, cars, and power stations emit about a hundred times more carbon dioxide than volcanoes do. We now routinely cause earthquakes.... We have become the major driver of extinction and also, probably, of speciation. So pervasive is man's impact, it is said that we live in a new geological epoch- the Anthropocene.”
I thought: This cliff dwelling was abandoned. Will we drive ourselves off, too?
Kolbert says: “Since the 1930s, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles.”
I thought: Is Great Sand Dune National Park an oddity, or our destiny? Better buy a camel, just in case.
Kolbert says: “Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success. Such is the pace of what is blandly labeled ‘global change’ that there are only a handful of comparable examples in earth’s history, the most recent being the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago.”
I thought: A dinosaur is a perfect spokes-reptile for a gas station.
Kolbert says: “Pissing in your pants will only keep you warm for so long.”
I thought: Forest fires are cozy, too, until your house burns down.
Kolbert says: “This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. In the course of reporting it, I spoke to engineers and genetic engineers, biologists and microbiologists, atmospheric scientists and atmospheric entrepreneurs. Without exception, they were enthusiastic about their work. But, as a rule, this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt. The electric fish barriers, the concrete crevasse, the fake cavern, the synthetic clouds- these were presented to me less in a spirit of techno-optimism than what might be called techno-fatalism. They weren't improvements on the originals; they were the best that anyone could come up with, given the circumstances.”
I thought: What a perfect way to ruin a beautiful drive.
Kolbert says: “The choice is not between what is and what was, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing.”
I thought: It’s dark, and getting darker.
Maybe I’ll listen to something more soothing, next drive.
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Greetings, dear writer/illustrator! I do enjoy what I'm seeing here, or here, or especially here, so please consider yourself a hero of mine. I’m grateful you're having a lot of fun with this, even though it’s also your work, and I know you'd rather not do it as a volunteer. I know what you mean. I have a million friends who I'm going to sing your praises to with the hope you'll get 100,000 new subscribers!!!
I watched most of Ken Burn's "The American Buffalo" last night. I had to fast forward through parts that were so tragic and horrendous, thanks to Manifest Destiny. Even the attempt to increase the Bison numbers is based on the greed and arrogance of man. Oh, the shame of it all.