Gone? At Last?

The Grand Canyon...Photo: AARP

    One hears that decluttering phrase over and over: if you haven't used, worn, read or listened to it in a year, toss it out.  It sure sounds like good advice but I'm terrible at it.  I fondle my non-repairable hiking boots as if they have at least as much wear left as the newer ones next to them; and my old tee shirts just seem to grow more comfortable with each wash; and that music, well, how can streaming ever show those liner notes I once used to read a long, long time ago.  So when an unexpected bill arrived for several hosting sites I had pretty much forgotten about, the ones that used Filezilla and CuteFTP and those sort of upload programs that help reveal how current a business or shop keeps its site updated (wait, is that a 2017 copyright in the corner?), I called the hosting service and said that since I had retired that it was time to do the same with those sites (and save me $300 in the process) and that I wanted to switch to a basic email-only program.  Great, let's get all of your earlier emails into the cloud first and then we'll migrate you over, I was told.  And within a short hour or so, everything was done...except for the missing 300+ emails in my "spam" folder.  Wait, said the page, the migration may still be processing.  But alas, they were gone (in computer jargon, "may still be processing" or "may take awhile" generally means less than an hour and not, as I had thought, days).  What??, I screamed (not really), how could an entire folder be "gone?"  But in the end, I didn't really miss them; in fact I couldn't remember much of what was in there in the first place; after all, if they were that important wouldn't I have moved them to my regular inbox folder?  Uhh, I think so...but like those books and movies and clothes I've managed to give away or toss, I haven't really missed them much (the opposite seems true when you unexpectedly "find" a bunch of documents in an innocuous file like Common Files X86 [what??] and you lose another hour looking over things long forgotten). TIME put it this way: In the 2010s, we worried about too much stuff.  A growing awareness of consumerism's effect on the environment and a desire to broadcast our lives on social media led us to prioritize experience over things...Now we've started to worry about something new: too little time.

   James Parker, a staff writer at The Atlantic wrote about his (literal) reflections: From the outside it looks steady.  It looks resolved...But on the inside you’re in deep flux.  A second puberty, almost.  Inflammations, precarious accelerations.  Dysmorphic shock in the bathroom mirror: Jesus, who is that?  Strange new acts of grooming are suddenly necessary.  Maybe you’ve survived a bout of something serious; you probably have a couple of fussy little private afflictions.  You need ointment.  It feels like a character flaw.  Maybe it is a character flaw.  For all this, though, you are weirdly and unwontedly calm, like someone riding a bicycle without using his hands. You’re not an apprentice adult anymore...The stuff that used to obsess you, those grinding circular thoughts—they’ve worn themselves out.  You know yourself, quite well by now.  Life has introduced you to your shadow; you’ve met your dark double, and with a bit of luck the two of you have made your accommodations.  You know your friends.  You love your friends, and you tell them.

    I thought of some of this because just as photos and files memories can suddenly and unepectedly disappear, so too can life itself as in --gulp-- mine.  Not now, of course (I hope), being at an age when it seems that life is ALL that matters and when it still seems as if it will never actually come to an end.  But of course it does, end that is.  One very visible example of that might be the Grand Canyon, a geologic carving that provides a glimpse of what the slow, steady wearing of water can accomplish.  So when my brother happened to surprise me with a book on the geology of the Grand Canyon written by Wayne Ranney (the author had recently been interviewed on NPR) I was again presented with images of how quickly time passes and how little we --or perhaps, I-- seem to matter (the "Grand" can really bring that "we are mere specks" thing home).  But as it turns out, I didn't know much about the true geologic history of the "grand," a natural wonder of the world that predates (as noted in the introduction to the book): Hennepin's discovery of Niagara Falls by 148 years and Meek's encounter with Yosemite by 293.  The Colorado was explored 147 years before LaSalle ventured down the Mississippi...The geographic place that is Grand Canyon has been known to Western civilization since Capt. Garcia Lopez de Cardenas of the Colorado expedition stood on the rim in 1540.   Wait, nearly 500 years ago?*  Somehow I had always assumed that the Grand Canyon was carved out by the Colorado River over the eons, which turns out to be somewhat true except that there was much more to the story.  Back up some 80 million years when there was no canyon and the ocean was in retreat .  Many geologists now believe that instead there may have been lakes forming, one of the possibilities being the formation of the double lakes of Hualapai and Las Vegas; sediment buildup caused runoff to slowly overflow its banks and form another large "holding" lake, Lake Cottonwood.  Repeat once again in geologic time and that lake's banks overflowed and formed Lake Mojave which then overflowed some hundreds of thousands of years later and formed Lake Blythe...and THEN there was the river and canyon we know now, the lower Colorado breaking its way through the banks of Lake Blythe and forming the Grand Canyon (prior to all of this, it is felt that the Colorado River may have flowed west and possibly exited near Monterrey, California, long before the Sierra Mountains emerged and began diverting the river southward, said Wikipedia).

 

   One thing about growing older is that you begin to see things in several ways; you now have time to look back and laugh at what you experienced or think about the friends that you made or the things that you learned.  Which is good because now your physical or mental acuity may be not quite what it used to be, much as one would hate to admit it.  Before long (and with self-isolation time on my hands), I found that I was doing just that, looking back --almost in fascination-- not at what I had learned, but tather at what I had missed.  From the New York Review of Books came this about a qat party (I'd never heard of qat): At the end of a qat party, typically close to sunset, there comes a moment when the effervescence settles, conversation slackens, and thoughts turn quietly inward.  This Solomonic pause—Yemenis call it lahzat Sulayman—serves as a cue.  Guests rise from their cushions; hosts slip back to their own pursuits.  It is a time to be alone...In old Baghdad, it was said that when wisdom descended from the heavens it was carried by the brains of the Greeks, the hands of the Chinese, and the tongues of the Arabs.  I learned from The London Review of Books that today's illegal drugs are often "advertised" through Snapchat or WhatsApp and that even among illegal drug dealers there are limits: ...Coke, heroin and cannabis were one thing, but "fentanyl and firearms...attract law enforcement attenti0n to a much higher degree" -- the sort of attention a well-run business avoids.  I found out that helium (that gas that turns your voice squeeky after inhaling it from a balloon) has no substitute and is formed partly from decaying uranium.  Said Popular Science: If you immerse some solid objects into a vat of the element, the submersible becomes super-conductive -- electricity flows indefinitely without generating heat...The gas doesn't combine with any other compound and Earth's gravity isn't strong enough to hold it down.  Once it enters the atmosphere, it's gone forever.  Quick quiz, what element is named after Marie Curie who discovered radium and coined the term "radioactivity?"  Don't worry, I had no idea that the answer was curium, and no, I have no idea what curium even is, other than it was part of a 1998 quiz for 20-year olds (here's another question from the quiz: One way to deal with insect pest is to strilize them in large numbers and then release them into the wild to mate fruitlessly with others.  How much gamma radiation does it take to sterilize a screw-worm fly?...the answer is "enough to kill 16 people.")  Wow, but wait, what the heck is a screw-worm fly? 

   And as long as we're on the subject of radiation and its longevity (as but one example, take the element xenon whose radioactive isotope has a half-life of 18 sextillion years, a figure that casually works out to a trillion times the age of our universe!), radiation's discovery became one of the "ten experiments that changed everything," said Discover, a science magazine.  Here's what they said about the Warsaw native, Marie Schlodowska (she later married fellow physicist Pierre Curie): Marie deduced that the emission of radiation had nothing to do with a substance’s molecular arrangements.  Instead, radioactivity --a term she coined-- was an inherent property of individual atoms, emanating from their internal structure.  Up until this point, scientists had thought atoms elementary, indivisible entities. Marie had cracked the door open to understanding matter at a more fundamental, subatomic level.  Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, in 1903, and one of a very select few people to earn a second Nobel, in 1911 (for her later discoveries of the elements radium and polonium).   What I found even more taxing was the magazine's effort to narrow down the field to these ten major discoveries.  Why not something much more simple such as where did Earth's water come from (they tackled that in the same issue, a question which apparently remains unresolved as scientists rethink the theory that it came from space and now feel it may simply be from hydrogen trapped in minerals deep within our planet...what??).  Okay, what about this discovery in 1908 by German chemists Frtiz Haber and Carl Bosch that pressurizing hydrogen and nitrogen gas together produced...ammonia (they then found that spraying it on soil made the soil more fertile and productive which led to the huge field of fertilizer);  But as if that wasn't enough, here's this from Wikipedia: The Haber-Bosch Process today consumes more than one percent of humanity's energy production and is responsible for feeding roughly one-third of its population.  On average, one-half of the nitrogen in a human body comes from synthetically fixed sources, the product of a Haber-Bosch plant.

   It's all rather boggling to me, especially since I don't understand chemistry much less "high-pressue" chemistry...or radioactivity.  How could someone stare at an orange growing moldy and think, this could help cure people of sickness?  Or stare at a rock and wonder at the energy hidden within (or develop an instrument to read such energy)?  Or see a drop of blood from a cut and wonder if there were millions and millions of tiny cells, and of many types, moving within our bodies?  Or to ponder how to combine different gases (quick quiz, what is the largest gas needed for our breathing?...hint, it isn't oxygen).  Our lives and minds appear to be filled with wonder as if we yearn for something.  During these tough times, that yearning might be for escape.  Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was interviewed in TIME and said: ...the overwhelming majority have never seen a situation that so severely disrupts our daily routines.  Maybe that’s where history can provide perspective and solace.  There are two points when we’ve weathered this in the 20th century. When the Great Depression hit rock bottom in March of ’33, the vital organs of the economy were closing down.  That was the situation that FDR faced.  Eventually government jobs carried the people through until the Depression finally comes to a full end with the mobilization for World War II.  Which brings you to the second big time that reminds me of this. ..That’s the key. There have been crises.  We haven’t had them in our lifetimes, except for people who remember what it was like during World War II, so this does seem unprecedented.  History does suggest that we’ve had really hard times before—it’s just that we know how they ended up.

   Sometimes one can stumble upon a single book or article or conversation and be surprised at how much there is to learn; from just a single issue of National Geographic (12/19) I discovered that the old city quarters of Jerusalem has nearly 8x the number of Muslims as Jewish people, and that over 3 trillion cigarette "butts" were discarded last year (those filters are made of difficult-to-recycle plastic), and that there are more tigers kept as pets or attractions in the U.S. than there are in the wild in the world (China alone is estimated to have thousands of illegal tiger "farms" for harvesting the tigers' organs).   But even with all of that trivial and not-so trivial knowledge, I've come to find that a rescued dog or cat or child can teach us far more than any years of schooling or books and lectures and magazines.  It's a bit like reading and hearing about life instead of experiencing life.  And that may end up to be the biggest discovery, that like the Grand Canyon, even when life is over that being gone isn't nearly as important as what you've discovered and revealed and left in life.  In that sense, we all become truly "grand."

*500 years before the discovery of the Grand Canyon is, of course, only the version from Western history.  Native Americans not only knew of the Grand Canyon but had occupied the area for over 8000 years prior to the Spanish discovery.