Road Cut
Made the long drive from home to the mountains of Big Bend yesterday. As we hurtled along Interstate 10, leaving Ozona heading toward Fort Stockton, we passed through many a road cut, deep dives, if you care to look, at the millennia that have passed between then and now. They represent thousands of years, even millions of years of life on earth, mostly from when that part of Texas was under water. layers of slightly different color each representing long periods during with creatures both big and small lived their lives.
And for all of those creatures their then was just as important to them as ours is now to us. They were alive and the only time that mattered was that time as they went about their business. And I suddenly saw the similarities between them and me. We are the creatures of short lives and we care about the same things and they can be boiled down to two things. What’s for dinner, and do you love me i.e. sex. Everything else is just window dressing.
Seems almost profane to say it, but I think it’s true. We celebrate food and we sing love songs. We watch movies about food, and movies about love. We read books about food and books about love. We eat. We love. We have religious constraints on food and religious constraints on love. Of course, we like to think our brains make us special but we have no idea how dinosaur brains perceived the world. But we know they ate and had babies. And in 100 million years from now this time will be a layer in a rock formation and all anyone will know for sure about us is that we ate and had babies providing, of course, there’s anyone around who knows how to look or even cares.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale