How I learned to stop worrying and love the change

By JoAnne Young

 

We are traveling again. We are venturing out our front doors, off our backyard decks, driving to airports or on interstate highways to mountains and oceans, saguaro laden deserts, high rocky mesas and deep grand canyons. 

 

It’s nice to see the country again with our own eyes, to find the world is still out there. I had begun to wonder after all the home boundedness we have experienced for the past two years, and all the worrying we have engaged in about the political landscapes and divided mindsets we find ourselves in these days. 

 

With a scattered family, all of our kids gone from Nebraska, it means we have three great destinations to explore: the west coast, the Rocky Mountains and the southeast coast. And this year, we are hitting all three. We started in June with a road trip through Colorado, Utah, Arizona to spend several days in California, and then back via Nevada, Utah and Colorado. 

 

It was a lot of terrain to cover, and a lot of windshield time to gaze upon the land and ponder how we’re doing in this country. We escaped the armchair and the drumbeat of how Hollywood producers and New York writers see our world. We got away from the perturbing politics of Nebraska leaders. 

 

Of course, a person can’t run away from all the discourse, so much of what I thought about while watching the cornfields turn into mountains and then deserts, oceans and mesas, was the change we are experiencing in our climate. The heat waves (our thermometer hit 115 degrees in southern Arizona), the communities in Navajo Nation that are suffering from serious water shortages (about a third of households there have no running water), the wildfires in California, Nevada, New Mexico. 

 

Three days on the road and we arrived in San Diego, our respite, where I spent my mornings at the La Jolla tide pools, tiptoeing around the miniature oceanscapes the sea had carved into the rocky coastline and then filled with shells and sea animals, like shoe boxes with treasures from the sea. 

It was my private study in the limpets, mussels, sea anemones and barnacles, and the snails, crabs and sea stars that ride the high tide to the shoreline and find refuge in those pools when the tide recedes. Each decade, as the seas warm, the tides move farther in to reclaim the land. Already we are being warned of crumbling seaside cliffs, eroding beaches and periodic flooding along stretches of San Diego’s shoreline.

 

Such changes are nothing new to our world. It has gone through dramatic transitions for hundreds of millions of years. Humans just haven’t been around to witness the drama and the individual and mass extinction of birds and animals, then creation of new life as it adapts to those changes. 

 

Nebraska was once covered by an inland sea that split the continent for huge spans of time. The busyness of land masses and waters of the world are how those western states we drove through evolved so beautifully.

Learning the history of that evolution somehow gave me some peace about the world, and the desire to quietly be a part of it. 

It’s curious what travel can help you to rediscover … that the earth is an amazing thing. That we can only cast a small shadow on it. But nothing, no one, is too small to matter. Not the sea lions that bark at us from the cove. Not the tiny green crab that shuffles sideways in its daily dance of survival. Not us. 

 

Our swiftly tilting planet is 4.5 billion years old. We humans have been here something like 2 million of those. Our lives are barely an eye-blink in time, but time enough to watch and listen and react to what the land and sea have put in front of us, trying not to leave a footprint or handprint on what the earth has spent so much energy crafting.