fellow student

It was raining when I got up this morning at a mountain lodge, cheaper off season in an overdeveloped ski town in northern Colorado. I drove on slick mountain roads through a forest exploding in yellow and orange. Later I climbed out of Laramie during a lightning-stoked thunderstorm, steered my way past countless semi trucks and witnessed multiple rainbows on my way into Nebraska. Now I’m more than 1,800 miles from Salinas in a tiny agricultural town surrounded by open hills. At the Sinclair service station, I heard a familiar language behind me and saw a woman who could be one of my neighbors. I mentioned this to the hotel clerk and spent the next 25 minutes inching away from a rambling rant about much of what’s wrong with America today. Most of the poor clerk’s complaints had nothing to do with the woman using her mother tongue to harangue her teenage son in the pickup truck while I filled up a few yards away.

I’m not one to argue that society is changing or that a cohesive one no longer seems to exist. I miss good manners and integrity and humility, and they were never that common. I don’t know what happened to the schoolyard bullies of my youth, but if I were to put money on it I’d say they hooked up and reproduced. Is it the case that people treat each other with less respect in all directions or is it just a matter of perception? One might say we benefit from enormous shifts in cultural attitudes. Another might say we’ve gone to far. At the University of Wyoming today I walked past a sign for the office of “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion” on my way to the Geology Museum, a gem (wink) of a place with a 75-foot Apatosaurus skeleton and multiple other delights on display. Outside the building in front of a full-scale metal sculpture of a T-Rex I encountered another familiarity: a gaggle of Pokemon Go players intently tapping on their phones. When I mentioned this to the nice young college students at the desk inside, I received no disquisition on the ills that plague our ailing nation. Instead I got a laugh.

I feel odd around college students these days, and I don’t know why. All my life I’ve spent my time with older people. Everyone grows older, so now those people are in their 70s and 80s. But if I were to spend time with 20- or 30-somethings people would eye me strangely, even cynically, and so even though I’d like to know younger people I hesitate to do so … and, also, I don’t play Pokemon Go.

I meant to take a picture of the Sinclair dinosaur logo when I was at that station here in Broken Bow, but I was distracted. Without WiFi my phone won’t connect, so it’s difficult to navigate. I have paper maps, though, and because I’m “of a certain age,” I know how to unfold a big sheet of paper. In the morning I’m headed to a state park three hours from here, where paleontologists dig up fossilized evidence of a different time on this continent, one of many eras unrecognizable to the inhabitants here today.