back on the road

After four or five days of rain, the weather cleared up, but now I’m on my return trip, for much of the day cooped up in a metal cage going 75 mph. Yesterday morning the leaves in the upper Midwest glowed with classic autumn colors when the sunlight managed to slip past the clouds, but overcast skies remained until I passed central Iowa, where because of the changing climate, many of the trees are still green. This morning the gray oatmeal has returned, and I see windshield wipers when I look out at the parking lot.

I decided to stop in Lincoln, Nebraska, so I could visit Morrill Hall at the state university. Built in the early part of the last century, the museum contains fossils that range from the first signs of microbial life on the planet to a sabertooth cat (traded from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, of all places). There are trilobites and nautiloids, brachiopods, ammonoids, pterosaurs, fish and sharks and a handful of fantastical dinosaurs I’ve never heard of. There’s a massive Elephant Hall containing the bones of ancient mammoths, four-tuskers and mastodons — gigantic marvels more commonly found in Nebraska that in any other state. They and their relatives trod the forests and grasslands of this area and much of North America from roughly fourteen million years ago until the end of the Ice Age and the introduction of humans to this continent, and though this particular traveler along I-80 enjoys the seemingly empty hillsides, he finds it difficult to imagine a time and environment when such creatures were so abundant. He also finds it difficult to grasp the idea that the species he witnessed in that great hall descended from each other over vast stretches of time. But that is how evolution works. Small horses were prey long ago, frogs a few dozen times their current size. Grass-grazing oreodonts, once predominant across the land, disappeared millions of years ago along with entelodonts, the “giant scavenger of the Plains,” who existed for 21 million years.

So too will I be extinct one day, if it’s not solipsistic to say so. Humans may live another 100,000 or million years, but as far as we know, we’re the only creatures ever to exist on this planet aware that extinction is inevitably our fate. But this doesn’t mean much day to day. Foreknowledge gets tangled up with politics and emotion, denial and distraction. An exhibit on the third floor displayed a couple allosauruses and a stegosaurus, or at least their bones. These creatures that once dominated the Earth, particularly the latter, had tiny brains and likely minimal instincts. Did they worry about anything besides what was for dinner? Did they despise each other or love each other, watch out for their young or worry about their appearance or who thought ill of them? Did they watch the skies for asteroids and worry about volcanoes or the twelve-hour drive ahead of them to their next hotel? Oh, that reminds me.