My geology books have started to arrive. Got a small one on volcanoes and another on how our continent was formed. I really want to know the story of the terrain from Fort Davis to Study Butte. In particular I’m attached to the Trans Pecos Volcanic field which erupted when the edge of a plate, subducted under the North American plate, reached the area. By my reckoning it took about 120 million years for that to happen.

I’d like to be a being watching from afar who turns to his friend and says watch what happens here, and they sit there for 120 million years marveling at all the changes happening in North America as the plate slowly, and slowly on a scale we can never appreciate, disappears into the bowels of the earth. Then, when it’s done, they get up and say, that was quite a show. Because it would have been. Giant volcanos. Pyroclastic flows. Smoke and ash and fire. Then, when it all calmed down, if they felt like it, they could have watched the rain fall and the wind blow and see everything start to melt away until it is what it is today.

Of course, we have some slow changes now. Our rivers are drying up. Rivers I’ve canoed and swam in since the 70s. With no flow to wash away the silt, eventually they’ll fill up, until one day they’re just shallow swales marked by highway signs saying, for instance, The Dry Pedernales or The Dry Nueces. And no one will much wonder what that was like just as very few people wonder what The Western Interior Seaway was like even though at one point it covered all of Texas. Which seems a little sad, but change is inevitable. We can mourn the past and yearn for it or we can live in the present and make the best of what we have, which is how life goes on.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale