Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...

    "Time may change me, but I can't trace time," wrote David Bowie.  And I'd be among the first to admit that while going back to a place you loved or grew up in brings joy and a tinge of youthful memories, it also makes you realize that 1) you can't go back; and 2) the world has moved on.  What overrides all of this are your friends and the people you'll meet, causing the rest to blur as if you don't want to know; surely this wasn't the way you remembered things, the buildings so modern and the people around you so young.  The realization that accompanies those thoughts is that you must have somehow gotten older...or at least that's how I viewed it.

     I was traveling back to my old haunts in northern California, ready to take a slow drive up the coasts of both California and Oregon with my wife; before long we would journey through the wilds of the redwoods in Humboldt County and move beyond those into the rocky and spectacularly long beaches of Oregon.  Our eventual destination was yet another old haunt of mine, Seattle.  For us, it would be a welcome escape from the disastrous fires and smoke ravaging the inner forests nearby and now well into the Lake Tahoe area, the devastation now entering its second month of destruction and death for forest life, its trail of cloudy choking smoke now graying skies almost daily across the whole of the continent.  To "get away" meant only to pause time for us, to look out to our left and see the tantalizing amount of water in the ocean and yet realize that almost none of it was usable, not for drinking or cooking or even putting out fires.  Animals, trees, structures and whatever else would all helplessly try to flee as the fires rushed inward as if early-day Vikings ready to conquer more territory.  But to tell this tale I need to back up for our journey had started way before then...

Painting inside one of the restrooms at the SLC airport

     When we arrived at our new airport, the old one was completely gone, its rubble no longer in piles but cleared away as if wiped clean from the chalkboard.  In its place stood a rather plain and seemingly dated exterior of a building, one hiding the modern inside that awaited us.  Widescreen kiosks and panels matched the wide aisles and gate areas; security checkpoints now sucked used baggage trays down as if mimicking the many airports in larger European cities; bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled our feet as we checked bags, the luggage tags already printed out at our kiosk as we checked in.  Art, some rather strange, was everywhere.  But the walks were long (one person posted 4000 steps on his FitBit to get to his gate); the posted time between concourses was 7 minutes; the walk to our gate took even longer).  Just as with Heathrow, our tiny town of Salt Lake City had entered the big leagues of adding walking distance to your flying experience.

    It was little different in San Francisco, my decades away making me see that electric trains to everything had been added, a nice convenience if you could endure the walk to get there.  We rarely check our bags but in this case we were glad that we did, the straps of even my carry-on now starting to pinch at my shoulder.  Then came baggage claim (a wait), then asking directions to the rental cars (the signs were behind us meaning that we had to go back in the direction we came from to change levels to --you guessed it-- board a train), the right train (stops at different stations, BART, cargo facilities, and then rental cars), then an hour wait for our car.  Phew, I told my wife, that was a lot of walking to which she shrugged and mentioned that perhaps we were just getting old(er).  

    The rental car from Budget took so long because they were not only busy but the add-ons we wanted weren't available, things such as Sirius XM (we figured that we'd be in fairly remote areas) and a navigation system.  Nobody uses those anymore, the agent told us, they use their phones.  Well okay, we could do that but we did sort of prefer (and paid for) the larger nav screen and the variety of satellite radio channels vs. our downloaded playlists.  The agent sighed and asked if we really wanted those (yes, we replied), then marched off to try and find a vehicle in their vast inventory that might have those features (standard in most other parts of the country) but...no luck.  You can wait for maybe another hour, she told us, just to see if someone turns such a vehicle in.  Sigh (by us), welcome to the home of Silicon Valley.  Time to catch up, the eyes of so many younger people buzzing behind us wondering what on earth was taking so long.

    So off we drive, entering minnow-like into the stream of freeway traffic then funneled into the tributaries of Market Street and the hills of San Francisco proper.  The buildings had gone up in price even as some of the more massive structures, their condos priced in the $5 million range, were sinking; but overall the town itself needed a good wash (or was it my memories that needed that).  Old signs and buildings stood out now as if out of place, perhaps just as I now was.  We were skipping our normal stay in the City because every place we had wanted to revisit --our hotel, our restaurant, our jazz club-- were now gone.  Time and the times had moved on.

    Soon the Presidio popped in and out of view, a new exit out almost whooshing us past the old Exploratorium and into underpasses that widened our path as if to generate a feeling of relief from leaving.  To our right stood the Golden Gate Bridge, still as elegant as ever and still wrapped in a foggy mist.  Are these lanes smaller, my wife asked as we drove across the bridge; alas the effort to add an extra lane seemed to come at the price of reducing the others, even as cars and motorcycles whizzed by us as if angered at the old people driving so cautiously (or so I felt, even as I kept up with the pace of traffic).  Despite our lacking all the comfy touches we enjoyed on earlier rentals, we were still in a new Toyota Highlander (with New York license plates, no less), and happy to be sitting slightly above the fray, blanking out the lane "assist" beeps that came on every few minutes as the lanes seem to grow more confining.  Our destination (thank heavens) lay just a few miles ahead...nine hours from when we left our hometown airport, we had arrived.

    It was all mirroring something Peter Brannan wrote in The Atlantic: We live on a wild planet, a wobbly erupting, ocean-sloshed orb that careens around a giant thermonuclear explosion in the void.  Big rocks whiz by overhead, and here on the Earth's surface, whole continents crash together, rip apart, and occasionally turn inside out, killing nearly everything,  Our planet is fickle.  When the unseen tug of celestial bodies points Earth toward a North Star, for instance, the shift in sunlight can dry up the Sahara, or fill it with hippopotamuses....But like our own teetering world --one strained by souring trade relations, with fractious populaces led by unsteady, unscrupulous leaders and now stricken by plague-- the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean were ill-prepared to accommodate the deteriorating climate.  

The piece continued: While one must resist environmental determinism, it is nevertheless telling that when the region mildly cooled and a centuries-long drought struck around 1200 B.C., this network of ancient civilizations fell to pieces....The Roman empire's imperial power was vouchsafed by centuries of warm weather, but its end saw a return to an arid cold -- perhaps conjured by distant pressure systems over Iceland and the Azores.  In A.D. 536, known as the worst year to be alive, one of Iceland's volcanoes exploded, and darkness descended over the Northern Hemisphere, bringing summer snow to China and starvation to Ireland.  In Central America several centuries later, when the reliable band of tropical rainfall that rings the Earth left the Mayan lowlands and headed south, the megalithic civilization above it withered.  In North America, a megadrought about 800 years ago made ancestral Puebloans abandon cliffside villages like Mesa Verde, as Nebraska was swept by giant sand dunes and California burned.

    After all of our walking and waiting and realizing that our travel skills were quite out-of-shape, and as we watched the clouds of smoke under us still filtering into the city we were leaving, we began to realize that we needed to look back not only to our past, but to Earth's past.  It was there that we would find that little had changed overall, even as the world had moved on...and we were so fortunate to be alive and to be witnessing a tiny sliver of it.  We were now part of the glue that seemed to hold all of this together...we were with friends...