During a number of trips through Mammoth Cave with college students, I stood with my charges beneath the ceiling of the large Rotunda, a room covering about two acres. The Rotunda serves as an initial stopping point for tourists, a place for a park ranger to explain the “false” saltpeter [(Ca(NO3)2)] mining that provided one of the three essential components to make gunpowder that Americans used to fight the British during the War of 1812.* The tourists then proceed downward into the cavern. Now, if you haven’t been to the cavern, note here that it is, in fact, “mammoth.” Just past the Rotunda the cave opens into a passage called Broadway, a natural underground “highway” wide enough and high enough to accommodate trucks.
 
Mammoth Cave was closed during an unusually strong snowstorm and very cold temperatures in January, 1994, when a layer of the Rotunda’s ceiling collapsed. The timing could not have been more fortuitous. Because Mammoth Cave was closed to visitors, no one stood beneath the collapse, which was, in itself, both unusual and not so unusual. “Unusual” because caves are long-lived, relatively stable features. Why “not so unusual”? At times, changes in temperature can facilitate the weathering of caves because rocks, like other solid substances, tend to expand or contract with heating and cooling. The general principle is that caves tend to have a constant temperature that matches the region’s average temperature, but that January storm brought with it both highway-blocking snow and cold temperatures that penetrated the cave and caused the collapse.
 
Caves might be “relatively stable” environments, but “rather” is a relative term. The stalactites and stalagmites of caverns are slow growers, forming over centuries of stable conditions, often over many millennia. Mammoth Cave began its burrowing through Kentucky’s limestone millions of years ago. As in many caverns, higher sections are usually the driest and the least active, making them “stable,” whereas lower sections are still undergoing development because water migrates downward as it dissolves the limestone. The Rotunda is among the highest sections of the cave, that is, among the sections closest to the surface. It is generally an “inactive” section.
 
Cave roof collapses are not really uncommon in southern Kentucky: Thus, sinkholes abound in the landscape, and Mammoth Cave underlies a pockmocked landscape of scattered depressions. Those sinkholes indicate that the 1994 collapse of the Rotunda ceiling wasn’t the first such collapse. And apparently, two millennia ago a middle-aged man mining for Epsom salts or mirabilite was crushed beneath a boulder that happened to fall just when he was in the wrong spot at the wrong time. Bad timing. But no park service rangers were around to caution him about the dangers of scraping some emetic beneath a precariously dangling boulder. Like him we all make trips to the drug store or grocery store without much forethought about what might happen.
 
Timing might not be everything, but it is certainly something worth noting. No doubt the rangers that repeatedly touted the cavern’s safety to tourists were shocked when they returned to the Rotunda the day after the collapse. They were probably also relieved to know they and tourists escaped what could have been a lethal event. The fortuitous timing of the ceiling collapse was, of course, not a simple coincidence. The cold temperatures of the snowstorm caused a rockfall that was inevitable. That humans decided to close the cave for the day was a matter of necessity. Snow-covered highways made traveling to Mammoth Cave difficult even for rangers who lived nearby.
 
Now think of how timing has played a role in your own life, and ask yourself if it involved free will. One could argue that the park rangers chose to close the cave on the day of the storm, but the closure was precipitated by precipitation over which they had no control. They could have kept the cave open, but to what end? No visitors—at least not in the numbers that would warrant tour guides—could make the trip to the park. The snowstorm determined both the closure and the roof collapse.
 
And what of that guy who got crushed some 2,000+ years ago? Sure, he decided to go into the cave with a torch made of reeds, and that suggests free will in his fatal timing. But he didn’t have all the information he needed to avoid being crushed. In fact, he couldn’t have that knowledge because the 2,000-ton boulder that crushed him fell under chaotic conditions “set in stone” hundreds of thousands to millions of years earlier. Much of our bad timing isn’t avoidable because we can’t know all the initial and ensuing conditions that lead to an event. We can guess, of course, but that’s all we have. Hmmnnn. Free will? I guess. Certainly, we appear to have the choice to put ourselves in some situations that are more dangerous than others, climbing Half Dome in Yosemite or Mount Everest, for example.   
 
In fact, nothing in or on Earth’s lithosphere is permanent. And the timing of some events, like earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, and volcanic eruptions is a matter of chaos. Seismologists and volcanologists can verify the large range of unpredictability they face. On a risky planet, risks occur, and timing is everything.**
 
Of course, you want to know you are in control, that you have free will. You could avoid being crushed in a cavern simply by choosing not to go into a cavern. You could choose to drive on I-65 past Mammoth Cave in southern Kentucky only to find a large sinkhole open beneath your section of the highway. Bad timing isn’t completely avoidable. But it isn’t the norm over the entire planet. True, people who live along the San Andreas Fault in California or the Anatolian Fault in Turkey or in other highly active earthquake zones are subject to numerous incidents of bad timing, but, again, some regions are relatively stable. And that makes me wonder whether or not free will is a bit “freer” when no bad timing incident occurs. Given stability, can’t we all make choices that determine our futures?   
 
Prediction. Isn’t that what we want from our science? Isn’t that what science is about, determining a process or feature so that one can make predictions? Sure, the process works in chemistry and materials science. It works in physics. Physically, the future is determined by set processes and materials. But so much is unknown, those volcanic eruptions, for example, and the occasional roof collapse. Prediction. Isn’t that what we crave in our lives, that is, the ability to move from a secure present to a similarly secure future?
 
You’ll make a number of decisions today. You’ll give little thought to most of them. You might, however, need to make a big decision, one that sends you beneath an analog of the Rotunda Room in Mammoth Cave. You can do your best to account for all contingencies, but you can account for only those that are apparent. As I have often said, what we anticipate is rarely a problem. But we are not often in control of timing in a complex and often chaotic world. And that begs two questions about my statement: Does our inability to anticipate all details associated with our decisions indicate that free will is a fiction—that luck or “good timing” determine the wisdom of a decision? Or, does that inability to know all details, including those associated with conditions of a distant past, mean that free will is simply a matter of freely choosing to ignore our ignorance?
 
 
*The calcium nitrate was then processed to make potassium nitrate (KNO3), or true saltpeter, to combine with sulfur and charcoal to make gunpowder.  
 
** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e83ONiIzyK8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0YhlqP1BgE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SOTv6x1lT4

Kudos to the Indonesians. They’ve figured a way to turn palm oil into biodiesel. Shame on the Indonesians. They’ve decided to turn rainforests into neat plantations for palm oil production.
 
To plant palms, Indonesians knock down endemic plants, that is, clear forests. They destroy ecologies of endangered species in the supposition that to do so will “save the planet.” Of course, there’s a niche market in the “save the planet from global warming” business. That might be the driver of biodiesel, rather than some altruistic love of the planet exuding from the hearts of Indonesians. And as in everything humans do, there are unintended consequences in growing palms. But, hey, a large proportion of people believe “we need to do something,” like using biodiesel and driving electric cars, maybe even self-driving vehicles controlled by AI. But are the things we are doing actually doing anything to “save the planet”?
 
Ana Meijide and colleagues studied the relationship between palm-oil diesel production and GHG (greenhouse gas emissions). They discovered a difference in the carbon emissions between younger and older palm-oil plantations, but drew this conclusion: “Both traditional and enhanced LCA (life-cycle-analysis) point to no GHG emissions savings compared with fossil fuel” (4).* Their study makes me think of the consequences of other “green” ventures, such as the plan by New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection to ban gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. Forget the biodiesel. Livin’ in Joursey? You’ll be drivin’ electric. Get your home charging station in place now. I mean, what could a new 240 volt entrance line cost when it’s properly installed by a licensed electrician under the regulations set by Joursey? California has a similar plan for electric driving.
 
I’m reminded of Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” And the memory of that novel makes me ask whether or not the computers of zero-emission self-driving cars dream when they are recharging. And in that dream do electric cars war with biodiesel vehicles for dominance on the highways?
 
Want electric cars on the highways? Sure, why not? But they have to acquire their electricity from some source. If not from fossils, from what? Solar panels? So, you’re ready to drive your electric vehicle on a long trip. You’ll have to stop along the way to recharge. Figure some extra travel time. And while you wait for the recharge that might take as much as 40 minutes, which might, depending on your car’s tech, take you only 100 more miles, you’ll probably want to snack at the recharging station and look out over an unbroken layer of solar panels overlying once productive farmland. Will you ponder that it might take as many as twelve of those solar panels to generate enough energy for that small recharge? Let’s say we go all electric and replace those gas-guzzling-carbon-emitters; that’s a minimum of 100 million electric cars in need of recharging, not to mention all the trucks. If at any one time along the Interstate, a line of EV drivers queues up, they will see a field of solar panels that stretches as far as the eye can see and that might not be working well because it is, unfortunately, a cloudy day. A dozen panels for every recharge! And all those solar panels connected to their own storage batteries for nighttime recharging. Imagine the arable land covered by solar panels in, say, Indiana along I-80 or in Virginia along I-95. Good for drivers crossing Nevada, of course. Nothing on either side of I-80 for most of the east-west route except sunshine (not at night, obviously).
 
Imagine the EV recharging dream as a nightmare. In it, the Artificial Intelligence that is the car’s computer wanders through a world of lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, and graphite, all encased in a thick plastic, the pollutants of the future making up a large part of the vehicle. The nightmare then flashes pixels of miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the poor are subject to exploitive labor practices just so that the world can get 60% of its cobalt.  
 
Sure, tech will progress and EVs will become easier to recharge. And battery materials will probably transition from lithium-ion to lithium-titanate or lithium-iron-phosphate. The current high costs per kWh will decrease, also. They will carry drivers farther on a charge and charge faster. But like everything we do, EVs will come with an environmental cost, just as biodiesel comes with a cost. Two costs, in fact, one financial and one environmental.
 
Unintended consequences, also. Imagine a powerful electric car accelerating from 0 to 60 in under 3 seconds—driven by a teenager. Somewhere down the road of time there will be an outcry about 1,000-HP Hummers on the streets of suburbia. And all those electric vehicles in New Jersey (sorry, New Joursey) and other states like California will require recharging with home stations that might cost hundreds of dollars to install because of electrical compliance standards imposed by the state. And where will the energy come from? Not coal, obviously.  Not oil. Maybe, a little natural gas if it’s not banned. Windmills, you think. Hydroelectric power? Tidal power (not in Oklahoma)? Or those solar panels, twelve to a car with a hundred million cars on the roads? What are we going to do, by the way, with all that palm oil? Make more Nutella? More margarine? Does that mean eating more glycidyl fatty acid esters as we turn from making biodiesel to making more palm oil for birthday cakes? How will we replace all those cleared rainforest habitats that we cleared when we thought planting palms for their oil was better for the planet because we could make biodiesel from it?
 
Will the EV’s computer have another nightmare? Who’s going to pick up thousands of birds killed when they tried to pass through a forest of windmills? Who’s going to remove the electric car pollutants from our waterways? Who’s going to recycle worn out solar panels?
 
Now, let’s not get all doom and gloomy. Maybe Tesla and the other big companies will invent EVs that run on lightning. Certainly, all the electric car manufacturers have already lowered the costs of batteries per kWh. Yet, green technologies have their recognizable downside in the composition of those batteries and other vehicle materials that will eventually end up in landfills or waterways.
 
And then there’s the cost of shipping raw materials from mine to manufacturer. I don’t think the Democratic Republic of the Congo has an electric car plant. That cobalt and other mined battery materials travel by ships that spew pollutants into sea and air. And there’s a GHG cost of bunker fuel, the sludge-like stuff used in cargo ships.
 
But if the AI that runs cars is like the intelligence of those who want to buy them, more heart than mind will prevail. Nightmares will be followed by pleasant dreams of electric sheep, the animals frolicking and jumping in fields of solar panels stretching as far as the eye can see, or at least to the nearest windy hill where windmills kill birds.   
 
 
Meijide, Ana, et al., Measured greenhouse gas budgets challenge emission savings from palm-oil biodiesel. Nature Communications. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14852-6.pdf    Accessed October 25, 2020.  

“I just read the story of Mikko, the lonely grouper in a Finland aquarium.* Apparently, the lack of visitors during the pandemic was driving the fish into depression. Already sad looking, that grouper was, according to the aquarium staff, really sad. So, they threw him a birthday party, and the staff ate their lunches next to his tank. Heck, they even brushed him gently until he ate the brush and had to be anesthetized for its removal.”
 
“Fish? You’re making me feel guilty because I just bought frozen grouper patties to grill. Now, I’ll be depressed when I eat them. Not.”
 
“Well, you really don’t have to feel guilty. Mikko isolated himself by eating any other fish the keepers put in the tank. His loneliness was for the most part self-imposed. But he seems to have gotten used to having visitors around the tank; when they are present, he seems to be happy.”
 
“If the fish’s misery was worsened by his own actions, then should we be concerned?”
 
“Well, we can act compassionately toward those who get themselves into trouble. Yeah, Mikko caused his own loneliness by eating the other fish in the tank, but he did so without regard for or cognizance of his own future. It’s not as though he said, ‘Give me fish, and I’ll eat for a day.’ I don’t think Mikko was thinking, ‘Train me to conserve, and I’ll be happy for a lifetime.’ And I don’t think Mikko knew ahead of time that his actions would lead to depression. Certainly, even though his keepers put a TV next to his aquarium, he didn’t understand that a pandemic had chased away his regular bevy of visitors, making him realize that if he ate all the fish in his tank, he would have no company during the COVID-19 crisis.”
 
“I have to wonder whether or not Mikko’s ‘depression’ is a real depression. Should we ascribe human emotions to a fish’s behavior? Isn’t that projection gone off the deep end?”
 
“Maybe, but look at how other non-humans act in the absence of company. Dogs, for example. Some refuse to eat, or they just lie around whining when their owners are absent for an extended period. Isn’t that a little more than projected human depression? Who’s to say a fish could not feel depressed when company’s absent?”
 
“But you have to ascribe some blame to Mikko. He did eat everyone.”
 
“Sure, and as Homer has Zeus say, ‘Man has only himself to blame if his miseries are worse than they ought to be.’ We’re the composers of our own sad songs, the authors of our own woe. It seems to me that in our own problems, our addictions, and in the absence of biochemical causes, our own sadness or depression, we reap what we sow. Wait! I want to rethink that metaphor. Sowing implies a sense of a future. Mikko lives in the present. He doesn’t save for any future, doesn’t plan for any future. And that might be the circumstance for some humans caught in non-biochemical sadness or addiction. It’s the present that counts; it’s the future that lacks consideration. And then other humans have to intervene just as the aquarium keepers had to intervene for Mikko. Do you realize how much human energy is devoted to helping those who act without regard for their futures?”
 
“Gives counselors, psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists endless work. There are more human Mikkos out there than we can count, and every day more are born. There’s always a next generation of those who will live without regard for their futures. Maybe there’s something built in, kind of like bears eating as much as they can during the abundance of summer, but then, I guess bears do it for the coming winter. I don’t think human Mikkos plan for their coming winters. Other fish in the tank? Abundance now? Eat away, even though a fish in a tank can’t go out into a big ocean to find more fish to eat, but is, rather, dependent on some outside source, the human caretaker.”
 
“Mikko might be a living lesson we should teach to children. His story might make a good bedtime story. Knowing it, fewer children might grow up to be sad or addicted. Knowing it, more children might grow up with an eye on the ramifications of their actions.”
 
*Weisberger, Mindy. Famous fish that ate all his friends gets cheered up by 16th birthday party. LiveScience, October 22, 2020. Online at https://www.livescience.com/mikko-sad-grouper.html?utm_source=Selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=9160&utm_content=LVS_newsletter+&utm_term=2816625&m_i=G3eG0662kV0w0TPjTI5TS0NhgmkseP50J66PdGMXFqWSLwFovZqdkfsxuWQa33gyY9AME27MPYbpirzKIpmiTp6aChP24AKcXwiYPhGGGr

We can’t avoid road construction zones. They are ubiquitous. New road construction, resurfacing projects, and altered road designs are the nuisances of driving. “Gosh, when will they finish this project? Why are those guys just standing around? Couldn’t they get this done faster; the backups are terrible.”
 
We negotiate the turns on the rough and temporary lanes, and we do so with nary an accident, even when lanes are narrowed by Jersey barriers that eliminate the berm. We might especially note that truck drivers seem to deftly steer their 18-wheelers through the zones just a foot or so from those barriers and adjacent travelers. We can also imagine that while they drive, truckers do what we do in our cars: Listen to music or talk radio or carry on a conversation. Maybe they even listen to both radio and CB, doing so without wrecking. Ah! The cognitive ability of the human adult! Even an older adult!
 
And of older adults, one in particular comes to mind, not a truck driver, but a kicker/quarterback, George Blanda, one time Oakland Raider. To me, a Pittsburgh fan, Blanda was that silver-and-black Raider nemesis of the gold-and-black Steelers. Blanda played professional football for 26 seasons, the last nine with the Raiders. I recall his entering games in the fourth quarter and leading his team downfield successfully, and then, as at that time the all-time leading scorer, kicking the extra point. What intrigued me in watching him is how deftly he led his team, steering them through what was at that time one of the NFL’s greatest defenses with barriers like Mean Joe Green and the rest of the “Steel Curtain.”
 
Should we all be disheartened by a recent study that shows cognitive ability decreases in the fourth decade of life? * Or should we be heartened by that same study that shows 35-year-olds of the 21st century are a bit sharper in chess than 35-year-olds of a century ago? Declining? Yes, but less so and at an older age.
 
So, here I am, past 35 by a few years, more recently by 42 years, and, if the researchers are right, certainly on the decline. What was I saying? Oh! Yes, I’m on the downslope of cognitive ability, at least as determined by an experiment involving the game of chess. The researchers argue that unlike predecessor generations, the current generations have had to deal with a more complex, and therefore a more mentally demanding world involving what is commonly called multitasking. And although they don’t use the word multitasking, they probably mean as much. Driving an oxcart down a dirt path is nowhere near the challenge of driving an 18-wheeler through a construction zone while listening to a CB and a radio or walking down a store aisle with hundreds of colorful products, background music, and the traffic of shopping carts, while reading a text from a spouse about bread, milk, AND eggs. Yes, we have busy minds, not necessarily wise ones, but definitely busy—and busier than those who lived centuries ago. So, if mental exercise is the key to staving off mental decline, well, we do it whether we want to or not in a world of constant distraction and task.
 
Of course, we know that experience often makes up for the cognitive decline in patterned behaviors—and I call chess a patterned behavior. Experienced chess players know the game because the same part of the brain that helps us to identify faces is that part of the brain that sees a chess board’s ‘face’ as defined by the emplacement of the pieces. Chess players recognize movements made by opponents because they have seen such movements. Nevertheless, the masters of chess do retire, giving way to the cognitively more adept younger players.
 
But I’m drawn to comment about the bias some have toward the thinking of ‘older’ people, the bias against ideas just because they are the product of older minds. Here’s a personal example: I had devised a plan at the university where I worked for tying research to local industry and government, and I managed to persuade the administration to consider the plan. It had the potential to bring in millions of dollars in research while providing many students, both graduate and undergraduate, with practical internships and avenues into jobs. Anyway, into a meeting on the plan attended by colleagues who were over 35, nay, over 50, walked an “I’m-an-obviously-busy-and-more-important-because-my-job-new-director-of-university-development,” a guy who had joined the university’s management team about a month earlier at a relatively high salary. He came in late, by the way. We had to await his arrival.
 
When he sat down, he started to listen inattentively and then interrupted, saying, “What we need at this university are more young minds with more fresh thoughts.” That was about it; no exchange of ideas, no detailed analysis. Because the meeting centered on a thought from an “old mind,” it was, in his mind, unworthy of pursuit. The plan essentially died on the spot, so I merely went forward over the ensuing years with research for my own students and with my departmental colleagues. The university lost what I believe was an opportunity because my colleagues and I were perceived to be ‘old minds.’  
 
Undeniably, cognitive skills decline, but wisdom often increases. So, yes, your reactions will slow with age as does your ability to play chess against a younger mind, but your ability to think creatively is mostly limited by the amount of mental energy you intend to put into an endeavor and by the way you connect the dots of experience and knowledge. The experience of an old(er) truck driver who has driven through unnumbered road construction sites on the highways of his career is what keeps his truck in the lane through a bottleneck of pylons and concrete barriers next to a wavering passenger car filled with teenagers. True, at the truck stop diner, he might lose a game of chess to a younger truck driver, but that doesn’t prevent me from thinking I’m safer driving beside the more experienced driver in that narrow construction zone.
 
Before I leave you to your reveries, I would like to mention something pointed out by Morris Bishop in his book on the Middle Ages. Bishop addresses the issue of the Dark Ages, that period after the fall of Rome and the short-lived  renaissance associated with Charlemagne in the ninth century or with Alfred the Great in that same century. We might tend to think people of those “dark” centuries were somehow lacking cognitive skills. Bishop ascribes the “darkness” not to cognitive ability but rather to “incuriosity.” He writes, “Men were not ignorant of the things they needed to know—practical agriculture, weaponmaking, the strategies of survival, and they had no interest in rediscovering the speculation of ancient sages.”** I have played chess—badly, I confess. I never studied the game. I never practiced. If my skill as a chess player is wanting, it’s largely because I had little interest in playing the game. But I’ll grant that good chess players definitely exhibit in their playing some cognitive skills far greater than mine. Yet, I wonder whether or not those same chess players could have survived as well as many who lived in relative ignorance when very few people even knew how to read during the Dark Ages. People devote their cognitive abilities to whatever they deem to be important.  
 
Cognitive ability has always been important. Is it, according to the authors of the study, generally greater today and longer lasting because our brains are busier than our predecessors’ brains? Maybe. However, regardless of the findings of the researchers which might or might not be applicable to everyday life, we cannot discount that what we lose in reaction time we gain in strategy. Lesson? “Don’t take for granted old truckers or old quarterbacks,” I’m inclined to say, thinking of Tom Brady and Drew Brees in 2020. But more importantly, don’t take yourself for granted if you happen to be, as they say, on the downside of life.
 
What do you think?
 
* Strittmatter, Anthony,  Uwe Sunde, Dainis Zegners. Life cycle patterns of cognitive performance over the long run. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Oct 2020, 202006653; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.20066531 Online at PNAS https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/10/13/2006653117   Accessed October 22, 2020.
 
**Bishop, Morris, The Middle Ages. New York. American Heritage Press. 1970. P. 261.

Can you, however you try, alter the processes of the world collective? I ask that in the contexts of both the past and the present. You, for example, might argue that emperors and dictators have altered the courses of many lives and changed the world significantly. Alexander the Great spread Hellenism widely, Augustus Caesar and each of his successors for centuries ruled over a widespread empire, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and others determined the fate of billions over the course of decades; recently Baghdadi ruled over a short-lived caliphate that displaced an untold number of people in the Middle East. So, you could say that yes, there have been individuals who have affected the collective many. And today? Well, the conversation seems to be centered on the power of social media giants and their ability to quash any ideas with which their collective members disagree, in effect, altering the course of human thought and action. But how far into the future will their effects last? 
 
About those emperors and dictators, except for a couple of living examples, they’re all dead if you haven’t noticed—and the living examples will also die. True, those people did set in motion the course of human affairs, and remnants of their effects can be seen in current day China and Russia or even in the continued influence of Hellenistic thinking in the West. One might even say that Hitler, in causing WII, reshaped with the Japanese Oligarchy and Mussolini, the entire world or at least set the stage for its present makeup. Your argument that individuals can alter the processes of the collective has some considerable historic background, therefore. We might not like the changes any of them set in motion—might even disdain them—but we can’t avoid acknowledging that those changes did occur and that we are to some degree the product of what those individuals did to or for the masses and the ages.
 
You might also argue that everything anyone in the past did led to the present and that you are contributing to the future. You are “shaping” the world to come, even if only by operating as a member of the collective, a busy bee in the hive of humanity. Your consumption of goods and energy, for example, though personally small, fits into a larger worldwide consumption and use. And although all humans have consumed and wasted Earth’s materials as shards of pottery and even broken ancient hammer stones reveal, you, individually, leave a larger mark on the planet than most of your predecessor humans. But how big a mark and how far back in human history? Do you leave a bigger mark than people of a century ago? Depends, I suppose. How far back should we go to determine the degree of your effect?  
 
You might have come across the Geologic Time Scale in some science course. It’s divided into eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages, all five of decreasing durations. The Archean Eon, for example, encompassed more than a billion years, whereas the more recent Zanclean Age lasted less than 2 million years. The now numerous time “periods” * (the scale has evolved with ever more specificity) include a new epoch, the Anthropocene, ** named after you, or rather after your species. Distinguishing among the temporal categories is a big deal for geologists and at least a little deal among the general population: Everyone, it seems, is aware of the “Jurassic Period” because of the popular dinosaur films. In contrast, some of the temporal divisions probably mean next to nothing (or nothing) to most people like the Tonian Period of the Neoproterozoic Period of the Proterozoic Eon of the Supereon called the Precambrian.
 
Because so many of those time divisions encompass durations beyond our comprehension and because we live such short lives, temporarily, we’re like split seconds to the age of our planet. So, what’s this stuff about an “Anthropocene Epoch”? Is it just vanity? At the very least, it does show that unlike all past species, probably numbering, according to a rough estimate by David M. Raup, between 5 and 50 billion historic species, *** humans have the wherewithal to name things. In tracing Earth’s past, we’ve discovered something in process or composition significant enough to warrant our designating a boundary between adjacent “times,” such as the extinction of the dinosaurs. Apparently, the name “Anthropocene” entails some actual weighty details, heavier, it seems, than the fossilized bones of a massive Mesozoic Era dinosaur. NO, really: Nine billion tons of plastic, for example. And what of all the chemicals and steel? Although not as numerous as insects which are not even close to the number of bacteria, people are numerous enough to leave a mark on the planet. Your mark.   
 
We number more than seven billion as of this writing. And take all the stuff we produce, from foods to machines. Then consider all we have done to change Earth’s surface and under-surface with farming, water impounding, drilling, and mining. Just look around. Sure, the place where you live will, like the mightiest of pyramids, fall eventually into decay, but your stuff and your effects will last for centuries if you count your (yes, your) nuclear waste as well as your most durable synthetics.
 
We’ve changed the courses of rivers, turning, for example, the once fourth largest lake in the world, the Aral Sea, into four small puddles. And we’ve made those changes fast. The Aral Sea was big in 1959. It took only about 40 years to radically alter its size by diverting the inflowing rivers. We’ve deforested, denuded, and polluted landscapes. Sure, past organisms have also changed Earth. Look no further than the coral reefs off eastern Australia and Belize for examples. But those little colonial critters took hundreds of thousands to millions of years to build their limestone homes. Brasília, a city in the middle of what was once a wild tropical rainforest, was built in a generation. This is definitely a human epoch, one might say “even more human” than all past human epochs, and more planet-altering than the product of any emperor’s avarice.
 
In an article justifying the new epoch’s inclusion in the Geologic Time Scale, Jaia Syvitski and others put up the big numbers that mark our slice of Earth’s time. Among those are numbers associated with our energy consumption: “Human energy expenditure in the Anthropocene, ~22 zetajoules (ZJ), exceeds that across the prior 11,700 years of the Holocene (~14.6 ZJ), largely through combustion of fossil fuels.” **** A zettajoule, in case you are wondering, is 10^21 joules. So, in the Anthropocene, we’ve used more energy than all ancestral humans used prior to 1950.
 
Now, I’m sure you’re wondering whether this is a problem that will keep you awake at night. “Am I using too much electricity? My electric bill is rather high. Should I look into not only my energy consumption, but also into my use of ground and stream water? Do I share a universal guilt for not doing something about plastics, water impoundment behind massive dams, and extinction? And can any individual like little old me do anything to alter the processes of the present?”
 
And therein lies the problem for all of us. In a world of seven billion people, all wanting a life of relative safety and luxury, what role does the individual play? If we turn off street lights and sensor lights around homes to save energy, do we encourage miscreants? Do we jeopardize our safety while simultaneously stumbling around in the dark like our ancestors? Do we shop less with the overall result of an economic decline? Do we nurse along that old car or buy a new electric car? And what if we do buy that electric car? From what source do we derive its energy? Windmills? Geothermal energy? Hyrdoelectric power? Solar cells?
 
The Anthropocene is here to stay until there are no more humans. That isn't long in coming in the context of a Geologic Time Scale. According to David M. Raup, “The average life span of species in the fossil record is about four million years.” ***** Now, it seems evident that sticking around for four million years hasn’t been the fate of hominid and hominin species. But “average” in the fossil record includes critters like the lowly brachiopod species and the moon-driven horseshoe crab, species that have endured for tens of millions of years. Obviously, many species have come and gone like the proverbial daffodils. Remember Robert Herrick’s opening lines? “Fair daffodils, we weep to see/You haste away so soon…We have a short time to stay, as you/ We have as short a spring….”******  
 
Yet, here you are, a human “daffodil,” an organism capable of leaving a mark that will endure well beyond your “short spring.” And you are surrounded by a field of similar “daffodils,” all capable of leaving such marks on the planet. Sure, the Anthropocene will end, but it will, like the epochs and ages before it, leave something behind. Maybe much more than any previous age left in the fossil record. Of course, only conscious beings can interpret the effects of the past. When the Anthropocene ends, the universe might have no way of knowing that there was an Anthropocene—or any age, epoch, period, era, eon.
 
As Raup points out, we live the “Gambler’s Ruin.” Start out with much, play longer. But like the gambler who starts out with little, the end of being in the game will come. The system has no memory. Every coin flip is a new flip. Every species is a coin flip. Some have left some rather enduring marks, such as ancient coral reefs and giant reservoirs of petroleum and natural gas. Most have come and gone like daffodils.
 
But take heart! This morning, in a Pennsylvanian October and under a rain of yellow, orange, and red leaves, I came upon a batch of daffodils. Should I draw any conclusions from their presence in the fall? Should I hope that in the fall of the Anthropocene some unknown years hence, there will emerge a renewal of the species, even if only for a short time?  
 
 
 
*Lest you be confused, note that I use the word period loosely, here. There are specific geologic “periods,” such as the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, the last one ending with the demise of the dinosaurs.
 
**Anthropos (ἄνθρωπος anthrōpos), Greek for “man”; kainos (καινός), Greek for “new” and related to the Latinized English word “recent.”
 
***Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? New York. W. W. Norton & Company 1991. P. 3.
 
****Syvitski, Jaia, et al., Extraordinary human energy consumption and resultant geological impacts beginning around 1950 EC initiated the proposed Anthropocene Epoch, Communications Earth & and Environment (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s43247-020-00029-y
 
*****Raup, p. 108.
 
******Herrick, Robert. (1591-1674) “To Daffodils.”

“Just goes to show ya.”
 
“What?”
 
“Things you thought were so, aren’t really as ‘so’ as you thought.”
 
“Meaning?”
 
“Take Betelgeuse. Until this morning I thought it was a red giant so large that if it were placed where the Sun lies, it would fill the Solar System to the orbit of Jupiter. Now, someone says it’s not as big—and not as far away.”*
 
“Details?”
 
“Not too important. Something like only 750 Sun-diameters and only about two-thirds the way to Jupiter. Still big, I’ll admit, but not what I thought it was. Not what anyone thought it was.”
 
“Okay.”
 
“Yeah, so that makes me think of how I viewed my teachers and college professors. They seemed big, maybe because I was always seated and they were always standing and maybe because I was probably intimidated by their greater wisdom and age. When you’re little, you are little. So, the distance to what they were and difference in size were great. In my youthful mind I would never be ‘that old.’ And the size? Well, I just took it as a given that they were big. And then I grew up and became a university professor and colleague of some of those who taught me, and it dawned on me that their physical size wasn’t what I thought and their thoughts weren’t what I thought. As I gained knowledge and powers of reasoning, I gained some wisdom, and their bodies of knowledge and wisdom began, I thought, to shrink a bit—in some cases, a lot.”
 
“Isn’t that what happens to all of us? We grow and learn. We are larger than the following generation for a while, and we know more for a while—till they grow and learn.”
 
“Yeah. I guess I was reminded of the process when I learned of Betelgeuse’s new size estimate. And it’s closer than we always thought, not that mighty and distant object. Well, it is still very distant, but it’s supposedly now 25% closer than we believed.”
 
“And those teachers in your youth and professors you had in your late teens and early twenties? When you joined them in the profession, they were also closer than you thought.”
 
“So, I thought of something one of my nieces said on a visit when she was a grown woman. As a child, she thought the vaulted ceiling in my living room was impossibly high. When she looked up at it on that visit, she said, ‘I thought that ceiling was higher.’ That’s similar to my experience with Betelgeuse and my professors.”
 
“And, by extension, to most of our perceptions when we think something or someone is somehow bigger, better, and out-of-reach. It isn’t something one can teach to most kids. The size difference makes the perception immediate. But they can learn that everyone’s ostensible size isn’t the same for everyone. Adults, they can learn intellectually if not emotionally, aren’t giants in size or in knowledge except in comparison. Both their size and wisdom seem to shrink as one’s own world grows.”
 
“But there’s a catch. For some people, I’ll call them the ‘head-shakers,’ the idolization of others never seems to diminish.”
 
“What’s that mean?”
 
“I have been watching the political scene for number of years, and I’ve noticed that many journalists—MANY, I want to emphasize—who sit to ask questions of a political candidate they favor, won’t ask any really hard questions, and when they do, they cower, it seems to me, to the inner-brain responses of the candidates angry that they dared to ask a challenging question. I think it’s been my experience that many in the media never grew out of their school desks and their perceptions. Politicians that they support are the Betelgeuses of old, still apparently very large and very remote, beyond the reach of the ‘ordinary’ reporter who seems to have ‘grown’ only with respect to an unfavored politician.”
 
“Yes. Good point. People that other people put on pedestals are Betelgeuses that really aren’t what their idolizers perceive them to be. Reminds me of the Beatles. They were idolized by teens who then saw them as somewhat profound thinkers far removed from the ordinary crowd. Didn’t they do that Hindu mystic stuff for a while? And, hey, I still like their music. Besides, no one can take away their overcoming personal tragedies. Two of them lost mothers early in life, three of them lost a band member to murder, and two of them lost a second band member to disease. And they got numerous awards, even a knighthood because they reshaped twentieth-century popular music and fashion. They were Betelgeuses, and no one can fully take away their size, that is, their influence on the world, nor can anyone take away their financial distance from their followers who made them rich.
 
“They weren’t Betelgeuses in my personal world, however. A couple of catchy tunes is great, but they weren’t enough to make the singers my idols. I’ve never been much of a follower; never been one to idolize much, even when I was sitting in those elementary school desks. Respect, yes. Idolization, no. I’m willing to recognize great achievements and great skills or wisdom, but assume that achievements, skills, and wisdom require some basic inclinations, mental capacities, practice, learning, and especially hard work topped with a bit of luck. If the Beatles are Betelgeuses, it's because they worked hard and had some luck in the early going, getting just the perfect press and opportunities like the popular Ed Sullivan Show.

"Me? I can find Betelgeuses in people ordinarily thought of as ‘ordinary.’ Take carpenters, for example. I had two guys put in a storm door to replace an old one. The door frame on the 50-year-old house is a bit out of plumb. They worked for about four hours on assembling and installing the door, making sure that it fit perfectly and closed tightly. Betelgeuses, both of them. I mean it. They were larger than life to me in their skills, patience, and accomplishment. They put a straight door into a somewhat crooked frame perfectly. Giants in my mind. Watching them, I was sitting in that school desk in elementary school. They won’t get a knighthood from the Queen, but they now sit in the constellation of my universe. And maybe that’s how ‘stars’ should be seen. Starting out as apparently ordinary and moving to a position higher and farther and larger rather than starting out as apparently more distant and larger and shrinking in both distance and size.”
 
* https://phys.org/news/2020-10-supergiant-star-betelgeuse-smaller-closer.html  Accessed October 16, 2020.
Joyce, Meridith, Shjing-Chi Leung, László Molnár, Michael Ireland, Chiaki Kobayashi, Ken’ichi Nomoto. Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: New Mass and Distance Estimates for Betelgeuse through Combined Evolutionary, Asteroseismic, and Hydrodynamic Simulations with MESA. The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 902, No. 1, 13 Oct 2020.
 
 
 
 

Weather on Mt. Washington and other peaks in the White Mountains of New Hampshire is often severe. A good example is the wind clocked at 231 mph that blew over Mt. Washington in April, 1934. That’s a good definition of “severe.” Blizzards are frequent, also, occurring often enough that people have constructed cairns so that hikers can find their way along trails during a whiteout. In extreme weather, these piles of rocks become beckoning ghosts as layers of ice accumulate in temperatures below the freezing point. These tangible ghosts are guides that keep lost travelers from wandering astray.  
 
The icy encrustations on cairns are rime, the cold form of dew. It’s the product of deposition, which is an analog of condensation. When the dew point (the temperature at which air becomes saturated) falls below freezing, water vapor aggregates as ice on exposed surfaces. For any exposed objects, the process of being covered by rime is passive. Just as morning dew appears on grass and cars, so rime appears on all exposed objects.
 
And that’s what happens when we lie exposed to the extreme weather of politics. We don’t have to be active, don’t even have to be political. In the enveloping atmosphere of constant punditry, the rime of partisanship accumulates. All who are exposed cannot avoid the deposition under the blustery atmosphere blowing alternatively from Left or Right. The winds might shift along the treacherous political trail, but the rime continues to accumulate.
 
AH! So many metaphors and images upon which to draw! What of this? The political traveler beset by the storm is so covered in political rime that he or she becomes the frozen analog of Lot’s wife, the rime of political belief locking the mind in place, preventing one from finding another path, another endpoint; rime-covered, the traveler is frozen in place. Or, what of this? The political traveler beset by freezing winds looks for a different path or for an escape to reason along a trail marked by cairns, guideposts that lead away from pure emotion toward pure reason. Or, even of this? Along any political trail lie cairns placed by ancestral pathfinders who discovered long ago the folly of wandering aimlessly in the storm of partisanship. Or this? Rime-covered cairn along an icy path or rime-covered traveler on that icy path, both lie beneath the bitter political wind, and both bear accumulations of political rime, usually deposited in thick layers during the political season.
 
I’m sure you can draw your own metaphorical versions and analogs for the rimes of politics and the cairns of guiding reason.*

*You can see pictures of rime-covered cairns online.
 
 

 
 

 Packing your bags for the long trip? Thinking that Earth is too hazardous a place for life, what with all the earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, violent storms, and viruses? Ready for life elsewhere, like those recently discovered 24 planets that Professor Schulze-Makuch and colleagues say are “better” places for life than Earth?*
 
Is it a sign of the times that during a pandemic year, humans yearn for a home more suitable for life than this old planet? Is the yearning a psycho-social thing, a seeking of, as the academics term it on campuses, safe spaces?
 
Without much of a blink, some see utopian worlds out there—somewhere. They are, of course, unreachable at this time, and probably will remain so unless Nature changes its fundamental laws that govern the physical world. Trips to extra-solar planets are fraught with the dangers of space travel and the dangers that generations born aboard a spacecraft will not know why their ancestors began the journey. Take Kepler-1126, for example. It’s one of those “Goldilocks” planets, supposedly lying in a habitable zone. But it’s 2,112 LY away. That means, of course (as though I would have to explain it to you of all people) that if Julius Caesar‘s contemporaries boarded a ship bound for that planet, their descendants would only just be approaching it. Now, what if, when they got there this year, they found—if they remembered why their ancestors embarked on the journey—that the planet was, in fact uninhabitable? And that arrival this year as figured in "Earth-time," of course, is based on those ancient Romans traveling at a speed that still lies beyond human technical capabilities.
 
“Better” places? Look around. Where does Earth’s surface and crust lack adaptive life? Seems like a pretty good place to live if you can adapt. That’s the key, isn’t it? Adapting. Take black fire ants, for example. In an experiment run by Aiming Zhou and others, the ants literally used “tools” to avoid drowning while acquiring food.** Given a supply of sand grains, ants built a system that used capillary action to draw off a sugary liquid. The ants fashioned a tool--certainly a sign of adapting. 
 
Adaptation. It’s what life has done for 3.5 billion years here. It’s what makes Earth habitable. Sure, life got a start as a bunch of replicating chemicals in what now would be a poisonous environment for most aerobic organisms—like us. But that early life, in unconsciously adapting to its environment, changed that environment, and, walla! Here we are doing the same, often consciously.
 
Could life have done the same elsewhere, say on those 24 “superhabitable” exoplanets? Maybe. Possibly. Even probably. As we know life, we know it adapts and changes, and in doing so, it changes its environment. “Better” for life than Earth? What does that mean? “Better” for what kind of life? Anaerobic organisms found early Earth habitable, even hospitable. But given my druthers, I wouldn’t want to go back to that Earth even though it was “habitable” and inhabited.
 
I suppose that astronomers do as much imagining as they do imaging. Certainly, however, at this stage of technology and physical limitations, their imagining is akin to what I do when I buy a lottery ticket. (Hmmnnn. Here’s how I will spend the money…) In their minds, they have already made the journey to those 24 planets, but in reality, they are Earth-bound. Could there be a better planet than Earth for life? Maybe. But, regardless of the dangers we all face on this planet and to which we have to adapt, I’ll bet you are happy you chose this one to live on.
 
 
 
*Schulze-Macuch, Dirk, et al., In Search for a Planet Better than Earth: Top Contenders for a Superhabitable World. Astobiology, published online September 18, 2020; doi: 10.1089/ast.2019.2161.  Summary found at http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/superhabitable-exoplanets-08919.html Oct. 5, 2020. Accessed October 10, 2020.
 
**Zhou, Aiming, et al. Ants adjust their tool use strategy in response to foraging risk. Functional Ecology, published online October 7, 2020; doi: 10.111/1365-2435.13671. Summary found at http://www.sci-news.com/biology/black-imported-fire-ants-tool-use-08933.html Oct. 8, 2020.  Accessed October 10, 2020.

Ever get that feeling that you are a bit helpless, maybe not in total control of your life?
 
I just read an article published by the editors of The New England Journal of Medicine, one that castigates government officials for their response to the pandemic.* I can understand their frustration. They are medicine men and women. They seek cures, and, if possible, preventions. They are “scientists” who look to double-blind studies for evidence, and they try to deduct rather than induct. But they focus on the incompetence of government leaders, both Federal and state in a process of hindsight assessment. Oh! To have known the game’s score ahead of time! We could all be rich.
 
I’m not up on my medical journal reading, so I went through the Journal’s archived articles, starting with January 2, 2020. Recall that the Wuhan virus began to receive serious notice in late 2019. The first issue (Vol. 382, No. 1) of the NEJM this year had articles on climate change, drug policy, “performance art of student doctoring” (?), ischemic strokes, alcohol and atrial fibrillation, hemophilia, head and neck cancer, fallopian tube torsion, emphysema, statins, CIRIPR, and thrombosis during spaceflight (no doubt, a serious problem for so many of us). I noted no articles on COVID-19, its prevention or cure. I did find an article on “fun” (Yes, fun) in the fifth issue. In the February 20, 2020, issue, the magazine published a report initially published in its online forum at the end of January. That article, “A Novel Coronavirus from Patients with Pneumonia in China, 2019” noted a link between pneumonia and a wholesale seafood market in Wuhan and ascribed the illness to “2019-nCoV” (the “novel” coronavirus). You can read that article online at https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001017 . A follow-up article appeared online on January 31, but it was not published in the journal until March 5. That article contains this statement: “Currently, our understanding of the clinical spectrum of 2019-nCoV infection is very limited.” And this statement: “Finally, this report highlights the need to determine the full spectrum and natural history of clinical disease, pathogenesis, and duration of viral shedding associated with 2019-nCoV infection to inform clinical management and public health decision making.” Keep in mind that that was March 5.
 
Closing the barn door after the horses escaped? The first US case was a guy who had traveled from Wuhan to Washington state. By January 30, the WHO had declared a public health emergency. Maybe I missed the NEJM’s insightful warning and recommended preventions in those early issues. Maybe the editors issued guidelines for whose absence they fault the non-medical leaders. You can have a look through the archived articles for yourself.
 
I don’t know about you, but by the end of February, I was already making trips for some extra groceries (and, yes, for toilet paper and disinfectants) because the disease was spreading, and in early March, on a trip out of state, I took care to avoid close contact with strangers. I did not take those precautions because the medical community—specifically, the editors of the NEJM—had given guidelines or spread those guidelines the way the Weather Channel and the National Weather Service spreads warnings about dangerous storm conditions.
 
In Vol. 382, No. 11 (March, 12) issue, the NEJM began to run articles about COVID-19. Good for the editors, not good enough for the general population. By that time, the disease was becoming widespread. Again, maybe my laziness has prevented me from reading through all the NEJM articles to find specific information about prevention. Maybe I missed the journal’s call for banning all flights from Europe and, more specifically, from China (though any Chinese citizen could have flown to some other country and then to the US). I haven’t found any early articles on using Vitamin D3, or zinc, or turmeric, or thiamine, or Vitamin K2, or any other suspected preventatives. Sure, early on no one knew anything about such dietary additives, and even now there are debates and some conflicting studies. But if the medical community is still debating, why should anyone expect that the medically untrained politicians serving in state and Federal positions to know a precise course of action?
 
What I have witnessed, as you have, is a plethora of blame, of finger-pointing. I have NOT contracted COVID-19—yet (WHEW!). I might not get it.  I might get it and survive. I might get it and die. But I cannot in good conscience look around for a scapegoat. I’ve known about the disease since it was first reported, and I tried from the outset to avoid it. I had no medical knowledge about any therapies or preventatives; I simply tried to keep a safe distance from strangers. Of course, that meant I was around relatives and friends, and I did know of a family in NJ that spread it among themselves at a family gathering.
 
I never died from the flu, but having been a college professor for four decades, I certainly had my bouts with flus of various kinds—until I began to get flu shots. I do remember having a flu once that seemed particularly debilitating—I wasn’t quite sure I was going to make it through the night. Every year the flu spreads. Every year everyone knows that the flu spreads. Every year people get very sick from the flu, and many people die. Which one of us goes around faulting others for the spread of the flu? Which one of us finds a scapegoat in a political leader? Which one of us finds a scapegoat among those in the medical profession? Flus come and go. We have no control over their arrival, only control over whether or not we have taken personal precautions against contracting them.
 
That the NEJM has decided to fault political leaders for not stopping a virus seems to me to be a bit of psychological projection, possibly even a bit of hypocrisy. Did the editors call a press conference? Did they bombard newspapers with information on COVID-19? Did they make a YouTube video, a tweet storm, a declaration on FB, all designed to prevent the spread of the virus?
 
Do we need an analogy? Unannounced, friends show up. You are happy to see them, and you feel you are remiss if you don’t serve them snacks, drinks, possibly even a meal. You didn’t know they were coming; you were unprepared for their arrival. You make do with what you have on hand for entertainment and food. That’s the best you can do under the circumstances.
 
Obviously, a virus isn’t a friend. It showed up on our doorsteps with only a very short warning, not enough warning for even the most highly trained medical minds to know what to do, what medicines to serve, or what specific actions to take. Typical of our times—maybe of every era—we see hindsight assessments. We see scapegoating.
 
Could things have been done differently? Sure, but who can run the clock backwards? Seems that blame is the best the NEJM can do. But what does the hindsight accomplish unless it serves as a lesson for future pandemics? Who, for example, did anything to prevent the spread of H1N1 that infected, according to the CDC, 60 million Americans? And who does anything truly effective to prevent the spread of flus through schools?
 
Our current milieu is an Age of Blame and hindsight even though we have more medical technology than any previous age. And why? Regardless of the great strides modern medicine has made, it still operates in a highly complex globalized world, and organisms still evolve to prey on other organisms. If we could see viruses as plainly as we can see ants or termites, maybe we would operate differently, but even the visibility of those critters, larger by many orders of magnitude than a virus, still invade our homes.
 
Our current milieu is also an Age of Personal Irresponsibility, also. If ants invade my house, it’s because I wasn’t vigilant enough to prevent their invasion. Should I blame the local township supervisor for not warning me and giving me the tools for preventing the invasion? Ants are relentless and ubiquitous, but they don’t even come close to the persistence of unseen viruses.
 
Stay as safe as you can. Do some research. But realize that you are, in fact, a target. Your best defense isn’t some governmental leader, but, rather, self-defense. And, yes, you will fail to defend yourself on occasion, but that doesn’t justify scapegoating medically untrained political leaders in hindsight, especially when the medically trained experts are puzzled about a disease and the vectors of its spread.**
 
*https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2029812?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=986c3e4017-briefing-dy-20201008&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-986c3e4017-44487885
 
**The CDC just reversed itself on the transmission vectors. Really? So, I guess in following their previous guidelines for safety, I was actually exposing myself to the virus. What’s next from the medical professionals?

Your immediate past and your present are probably as familiar as your favorite running shoes. Those and your other shoes are your unconscious biographers. And if you had never thrown away your old shoes, you might have lined them up chronologically to reveal your personal history. “I wore these when I graduated. These I wore when I was dirt poor; they were my only shoes at the time, and I wore them till they ripped. And these are the shoes I wore on my first day of work; they still retain their shine.”
 
But if you are like me, you don’t have all those old shoes. They aren’t available as biographical indicators. I suppose we could say the same for ancestors we never knew, and maybe also for older relatives, now gone and about whom we really remember little or knew little. They knew us as we developed consciousness and identity, but took that knowledge to their graves. I know, for example, that my paternal grandfather’s family had established themselves in my hometown in the early part of the twentieth century, but aside from a great uncle, I really knew nothing of their lives; my paternal grandfather died while my father was still a child. You might differ in this, but in my youth, I was never driven to ask any detailed questions about that generation. As with most youth, I lived in an Eternal Present. Nevertheless, whatever those ancestral relatives two generations removed from me did and, of course, who they were lay in my background like forgotten old shoes in the closet of my personal history. I might not have walked in their footsteps, but they made the trail that led to me and the paths of my early life.
 
In an age when shoe repair shops are almost as rare as Tasmanian devils in Australia, many people choose to buy new shoes to replace their old and worn pairs. Maybe I’m wrong, but I believe most people in an affluent society discard old shoes or place them in some out-of-the-way storage space, where they might lie unworn for years. The modern practice of acquiring new shoes to replace old shoes rather than repairing them might be the result of shoe shop scarcity, but it could also be the result of vanity. Shoes, after all, have long been expressions of the times, and since medieval times have indicated both social or economic status.  
But even if there were a repair shop on every corner, many running and casual shoes don’t lend themselves to repair. How, for example, can one resole a pair of Nike Air Max once the air pocket collapses? No, discarding the old and buying the new is the common practice of those with sufficient funds to do so. And for “dress shoe” repair, too few shoemakers have shops.
 
I mention shoe repair shops because it was in one where I connected with my ancestral family two generations removed. That great uncle, Uncle Jack, whose given name was Cirro, was a shoemaker. On my way home from elementary school with my friends, I stopped in almost daily to say hello, and he always had a friendly smile and greeting for me. I remember that pleasant part of my early school years fondly, and I also remember the smells of the glues he used to repair shoes. Uncle Jack was part of my childhood’s Eternal Present.
 
In those days before Nike, Adidas, Asics, and Brooks and other modern shoe companies inundated the market with ever more “advanced” footwear, people wore leather shoes with leather soles and heels that daily did battle with the friction of a concrete world. Shoes wore out, and people contemporary to my youth chose to repair rather than replace. Uncle Jack took their old shoes and made them new again. He turned the worn past into the useful present; he made it possible for people to walk toward their future.
 
His shoe shop was lined with shelves of old and worn shoes awaiting repair.* In retrospect, I understand how those shoes connected to the lives of those who took their footwear to Uncle Jack. Scuffs and scrapes, unevenly worn heels, and holes in soles, the shoes told tales of the wearers’ pasts and character. Uneven heel? Uneven wear on the sole? Did those shoes reveal a slightly turned ankle fixed by muscle weakness or a flattened arch? Did the uneven wear reveal supination from joint immobility or bad posture indicative of inherited body structure or bad habit? And those holes in the soles? Walking on concrete in the city, obviously. The friction of the modern world revealing itself in wear during less affluent times when people had fewer pairs of shoes and walked more frequently than they rode.  
 
Both Uncle Jack and his repair shop are now long gone. Times are different. In looking back at that Eternal Present of my youth, I see deeper into time, into other generations’ Eternal Presents, all marked by wear on shoes both kept and discarded. I think of Van Gogh’s famous painting, “A Pair of Shoes,” that inspired Martin Heidegger to tie the painting to his phenomenological interpretation of the world. Heidegger writes, “From out of the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth… The shoes vibrate with the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and the earth’s unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.” The farmer’s worn shoes reveal that during his life he could produce a crop through his efforts, but, ultimately, he encountered the hard soil of a wintry field. Try as he could in his own Eternal Present, he could not guarantee a future or a final control over Earth.  
 
We are always in a state of becoming, and that might be what makes us think we live in an Eternal Present. But we didn’t just arrive in the present. It really isn’t eternal. It’s derived. And its derivation can be shown in those many shoes all worn and many discarded, yet all somehow part of the present—descriptors of personal past and present.
 
Were you surprised when a team of archaeologists and paleoanthropologists announced their discovery of 120,000 year-old human footprints in the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia?** I have to say I both was and wasn’t. Years of debate about when humans left Africa to people the rest of the world hinge on the most recent discoveries of fossils, both tangible and trace. The latter fossils can be telling. Long before there were shoemakers like Uncle Jack and even before there were shoes for farmers like those Van Gogh painted in 1886, in fact, long before the first farmer sowed a seed, people walked barefoot. They left no worn shoes, but they did, on occasion, leave their tracks, and those footprints became bas relief sculptures in the ground, an artwork not consciously made ala van Gogh, but made simply in the act of living, in the act of what they might have perceived as “eternally” becoming in what was for the footprint makers their Eternal Present.
 
Maybe during the first exodus from Africa, the migrants turned on occasion to see the marks they left on their way into the Levant. But maybe they thought little of how they got to be where they presently were. It is possible that the past meant little to them since they had no record-keeping. We have no way of knowing. Without such written records and old shoes, we have only fossil footprints to suggest their ties to the nature of their predecessors’ lives or to their own lives. Just footprints, the usually ephemeral markings in the soil preserved only by chance. Those ancient ancestors of everyone whose heritage lies outside Africa left no purposeful record, no famous painting, no shoes lined up in a shoe repair shop, telling the tale of human character. But then, I guess we could say that our own worn and discarded shoes.
 
Though indicators of our lives like the farmer’s shoes of van Gogh’s painting, our old shoes are not the conscious products of personal history. We put on shoes and walk. Once on, the shoes wear down in the act of the wearer’s daily living, slowly recording something about the wearer by the wear. And in a world of concrete, asphalt, and durable flooring, few of us leave much of a life-trace in our footsteps.
 
Strange, isn’t it? Unless you are totally African in your heritage—we are all originally Africans in part—your personal history goes back to those footprints in the Nefud Desert. Those shoeless footprint-makers left the hominin homeland to explore the yielding and unyielding Earth. Their descendants 100+ millennia in their future and 10 or so millennia in our past became the first farmers, eventually leading to the shoe-wearing farmers like the one whose shoes van Gogh painted and to us whose shoe affluence would boggle the minds of those ancients crossing the Nefud.  
 
I suppose I recapture my past’s Eternal Present in my memory of Uncle Jack and that shoe repair shop. But I have no practical memory of all those pairs of shoes I have worn and their relationships to my personal history. Too many shoes over too many years, and none of those that Uncle Jack repaired remain, all of them outgrown, out of fashion, or discarded. And when I turn around to look, I can’t find a trace of my steps except in the people I know that I might have influenced or in these and other scribblings that will, in time and only by chance survive as a record of my own walk through an Eternal Present.   
 
 
*The joke I told elsewhere, but sorry to say I cannot attribute to a particular source: Two people were cleaning out their attic when they came upon an old claim ticket from the shoe repairman. “Honey, did we never pick up these shoes?” “No, look at the receipt. We left them there five years ago.” So, they went to the shoemaker and presented the claim ticket. He went into a back room and emerged, saying, “They’ll be ready next Tuesday.”
 
** http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/alathar-footprints-08869.html  The article has photos of the footprints.
Mathew Stewart et al. 2020. Human footprints provide snapshot of last interglacial ecology in the Arabian interior. Science Advances 6 (38): eaba8940; doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aba8940