Until the End of Time

    It had happened, an overseas trip canceled only to be followed by a road trip also canceled, and now an alternative, a last-minute decision to once again make the ten-hour drive to Sedona, Arizona if only to get away" we told each other.  Granted we were far luckier than most.  We weren't driving to flee a fire, or driving aimlessly because our home had been destroyed and we now had nowhere else to go, or that we were unable to "get away" because we were wondering if we would even have a home because we couldn't be certain of making our rent or mortgage.  Instead we were among the lucky few, able to just drive somewhere in order to temporarily recharge, to lose ourselves in the vastness of the land, the miles and miles and miles of roads and horizons. The British writer James Parker, in a short essay for The Atlantic, described his feelings on a similar drive this way: ...an overwhelming (for a Brit) apprehension of scale, a kind of horizontal vertigo at the vastness and possibility of this great country. I learned to drive on a smaller scale, noodling along the winding country roads of southern England. I was held in by the high hedges, nursed around corners by the dreaming verges, soothed by an occasional vision of a plowed field. But in the roaring U.S., I was out there. At large. Alone...I get it less and less these days. Now, driving in America, I feel sort of --how shall I put it?-- American.

    Of course the vastness of the land did more than make us humble (especially in trying to imagine the difficulty of those who covered such distances on horses or on foot), but it also made us realize that there was little chance of escape. The smoky air from the fires out west would be with us for the entire drive. We had heard that the smoke from those fires was now not only spread across the U.S. but also across the Atlantic and had even made its way into Europe. Satellites from space were sending in images of smoke streaking the world. Our President calmly said that such fires were due to mismanagement by Democratic governors, and that no other countries were having fires (perhaps he forgot that there were also fires in Borneo and the Amazon and Australia, among others...the fires in Australia alone produced enough smoke to cover all of the United States and according to a piece in ELLE, led to the loss of large animal populations: By one estimate, over a billion animals perished. "It's such a big number, you forget how much suffering is involved," says Geraldo Huertas, who leads disaster operations and risk reduction worldwide for the global nonprofit World Animal Protection (and who recently traveled to Australia to provide technical assistance. "Animals can't necessarily outrun the fires, and they can't escape them by climbing into trees. Koalas, for instance, live in eucalyptus trees which catch fires like they're made of gasoline."  Some wildfires were so hot they generated their own storm systems, which then spread fire even further through lightning strikes.  One such strike was responsible for the fire tornado on Kangaroo Island --a wildlife sanctuary with such a high level of biodiversity it's been likened to Noah's Ark-- where half the island's koala population which numbered around 50,000, was feared dead).

    Still five driving hours away from Sedona, we entered a forest large enough to take us an hour to get through, and saw fire damage everywhere – trees still starkly black from the fire six years ago, entire sections of hillsides still showing no signs of new growth (at least to our eyes). It would be the same story or worse in Borneo and in the Amazon where wildfires had decimated hundreds of thousands of acres (the same article in ELLE said that a tipping point would be reached if more than 20% of the Amazon forest was lost...already 17% of it is gone).  It was difficult to imagine that the five hours we had already driven (much of it at 70-80 miles per hour) would possibly not be enough to equal the size of the fires' damage in Australia (the west coast fires of California, Oregon and Washington are already equaling the 5 million+ acres burned in Australia; October is expected to be even worse for those fires in the U.S. as stronger winds generally arrive in the fall and are expected to make the fires even more difficult to contain).

   I happened to read a piece in TheAtlantic about the bushtit, a bird who begins building its nests with the help of spider webs. Both David Allen Sibley and Jennifer Ackerman have written books about birds and the article mentioned both: Describing what scientists have discovered about the vision of a snipe, he (Sibley) asks us to "imagine being able to see the entire sky and horizon, and some detail along most of the horizon, without turning your head." Birds also process images more than twice as fast as humans do; Sibley speculates that our movies would look like slideshows to them. The author added: I learned that birds such as the virious-throated parrot-bill and the black Jacobin hummingbird make sounds beyond our range of hearing, while the mating displays of male black manakins feature a "high-speed somersault" so fast that humans can see it only in slowed-down videos. Birds see colors that we never will, and distinguish among colors that look the same to us...Ackerman writes that veeries, a type of North American thrush, can anticipate hurricanes months in advance, adjusting their nesting and migration schedules accordingly -- but they way they do it is a "deep mystery."  Along with the animals on the ground, I couldn't help but wonder how many birds had made it out of any of these fires, their only means of escape being their wings, valiantly but perhaps futilely trying to avoid being singed or burned.  Along with such fires add in the hunting and pesticides and deforestation and it adds up (so far) to an estimated loss of one-third of our bird population in North America.

    We were numb, my wife and I. The election was ever closer (and growing ever nastier) and still so much was unsettled for so many people just trying to get by.  Despite the smiles and seemingly upbeat attitudes we occasionally witnessed, there seemed to be something else as if the winds had changed and we now didn't know if all that was happening around us was normal or if, as the Phil Collins song said, “I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord.”  There's a treatment sometimes used to treat catatonic patients, people who are mentally frozen in both speech and interaction; but unlike what one would expect (issuing some sort of stimulant) the somewhat-used but often-effective treatment is to administer high doses of a group of medical sedatives called benzodiazepines.  Often followed by electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), the combination tends to “awaken” the patient, “like resetting the circuit breakers” joked one father who was an electrician and watched his teenage son re-emerge from an unresponsive state, reported  Discover.  And somehow, in a strange unrelated way, I was feeling the some of that unresponsiveness, as if this drive into the vastness --not only in distance but in time-- was what I needed to reset my own circuits.

    I had written about Sedona several times in earlier posts and little had changed. The massive red cliffs were still filled with their energy, not even blinking at the frail trees and shrubs and cactus who were themselves almost ancient.  Large money had arrived in the town's outskirts (new single-family homes started near the $1.2 million figure which didn't include options or add-ons such as a view of the un-naturally green golf courses); accessible only by passing through massive steel barrier gates, the homes were likely just second or third homes used only in winter months, the owners never visible to our eyes (not even on the golf course we saw). The security guard at the gate eyed us wearily but patiently as we turned our car around as if used to errant travelers, these “resorts” being located at the end of long canyon drives, far, far “from the maddening crowd.”  But out on the trails, the cliffs and barren hills didn't appear to care or even notice. They were here far before any of this, a time when all of this land was underwater and was merely a small portion of a large ocean. Those cliffs now baking in the sun were ready to face another day, their “vision,” like the birds, probably seeing our comings and goings as mere blips that barely registered, our vast resorts and cars and boots not making the slightest dent in their world, their time scale being so vastly different. They would likely be here long after our bones had dissolved into dust, when another ocean would arrive and again cover it all, our ashes now having washed away to lands unknown.

    Funeral director Thomas Lynch mentioned a phrase by the poet Jim Harrison: “Death steals everything, except our stories.”  In a piece Lynch wrote for The Atlantic, he said: The fear of death, of casing to be, includes the fear that our stories will die with us, and won't be told or will be told incorrectly.  Or that they will be overwhelmed by what erased us from time --famine or pestilence or the horrors of war-- so that our lives and times are not one-of-a-kind but one of the many and meaningless, nameless and nonspecific, elements of a collective terror: a plague, blight, genocide, or bombing, a historic event that buries our individual, personal histories...If death steals everything except our stories, pandemics --like famines and holocausts-- do their best not to grant us the time it takes to pay respects, to get our story right, to get our story told, to share the story with family and friends, to tell them that what took us in the end may have been COVID-19, but that fact is only a footnote, not our story.  What really takes our breath away is the beauty of being, and the beauty of being of the ones we love.

    A friend of mine loves the idea of serendipity, of fate stepping in when you least expect it and having you bump into an old friend or make a connection from decades away.  It's always out there, he suggested, if only we slowed down and took the time to catch it.  As my wife and I again hiked among these towering pillars, these intimidating yet welcoming cliffs of rock, I couldn't help but feel my own hope and energy returning. Tired as I was after a morning in the sun, I only had to glance back at the cliffs themselves, then at the canyons they shadowed, then at the seemingly endless land that stretched out beyond all of it.  I was fortunate enough to have the time to make the drive to be able to recharge, and fortunate enough to be able to return from hiking to a comfortable room, and fortunate enough to be able to jump in a car and return back to our home filled with waiting animals.  I was fortunate to be able to return to a home, period. These rocks, this land, this drive, had all taught me one thing...that I was indeed fortunate.

Leaving the Vermillion cliffs, some 2 hours from Sedona...once part of a vast ocean

Hiking along the Jim Thompson trail in Sedona

The smoky haze from the fires on the west coast, often visible during the day...

When the tops of the cliffs give way, the rocks that fall can be the size of school buses...

Despite the serenity of a few creeks, water is growing scarce due to a severe drought in the area... 

On a final note, the new Google Blogger format has made it extremely difficult to add photos and position them throughout the posts; advanced apologies if readers sometimes see this above format of photos simply positioned together...after several hours of trying to paste photos into the text (and often watching entire sections of text disappear in the process), I decided that it was not worth the time or effort.  Perhaps Google will change their editing format in the future, but until that happens, you may see fewer and fewer photos being placed in these posts...sorry.