Day Fifty-six: 7/19/08

PeterB and I are waiting at the boat terminal, waiting to board the SS Badger for a fun filled afternoon cruising across Lake Michigan. It's lightly raining outside, so we'll likely be holed up inside on the boat with everyone else. Someone told me the boat has Bingo on board and that "it's a lot of fun". Thankfully, there's also a bar on board. I'm not even sure how long the ride is....

At the risk of sounding about as provocative as a high school stoner, I'd like to let you in on a few things I've been mulling over during these seemingly endless hours in the saddle lately. I was talking with my friend, Sack, (clearly not his first name, but he's one of those mentor types so I can't call him by his first name), the other night about our latest travels through northern Wisconsin. I was telling him about how the trees seem to arch over the narrow roads as if they're trying to bridge the gap between them on either side of the road. Sack commented that if given 10 years without human intervention, they'd likely be able to do just that.

The underlying issue at play in conversation was one that I keep dwelling on lately; namely that the idea that humans have significant dominion over nature - an idea that I had pretty much tacitly accepted most of my life - is tenuous at best, or, at worst, entirely an illusion.

It's so easy to think that somehow we, (as in the collective "we"), have figured it out compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, while we fly down a ribbon of smooth asphalt, encased in two tons steel and plastic, with the AC cranked high and radio even higher. We can surf the information superhighway, (like I am now), and drink foamy coffee drinks from Starbucks five times a day. And nature always seems to be just on the other side of a shut window. And, to me, it's easy for me to see why anyone would think this way.

But the reality of the situation is that humans are fooling themselves if they think they control any of this world. The sun can bake us, rain can wash us out, wind can blow us over, and the rest of nature - the rest of the living creatures who have learned to live within the confines of the natural order, as opposed to control it as we do, will continue to go about their business all the same, even if our TVs never flicker on again, or we run out of coal to burn in our power plants. And at some point this will happen.

At the very least, I'm glad that I took this trip because I'm at least coming to grips with the idea that this land is vast - very vast - and largely uninhabited. NYC or LA are big places, but they are mere blips on a much larger radar screen. And that open space, full of flora and fauna, tries, quite successfully to reclaim the areas that we've bulldozed, drilled, and built on. So I'll appreciate the glass towers in the cities that much more now. Because I know that it's only a matter of time before the trees pull them down.

And that's the opening salvo in my unfolding manifesto. I have to get on the ferry.