rough draft

I saw an old picture today. It was taken somewhere around eighth grade. There are four of us piled onto the seat of an old school bus. But the thing that stuck me was how much everything has changed. The four of us have changed in the years since then so remarkably that I don’t even recognize the others. I don’t even really see myself in that young face. I see me but I don’t see any semblance of the person I am now. It’s a desperately lonely feeling seeing yourself and knowing that you will never be the person of the past. I am now and will never be anything else. When the now runs out I will no longer be. I will just disappear, fading into the eternity I imagine for humanity.
I know that that world I imagine will never exist, I know that we are destruction incarnate and will consume our home until there is nothing but the rafters of mountains and the rotted thatch of a sky left between ourselves and the void of the rest of the living matter out there. The inevitability of it all is overwhelming. It’s the sort of feeling that drives men to faith in God. I don’t have that luxury anymore. Perhaps I did in a life I used to live but no longer. When the final reckoning comes I will die alone like any other thing that has ever lived. We will all die alone.
Please don’t assume that I’m contemplating jumping off a dam or any other drastic measures. In truth I intend to live out my life to the fullest, dangerous end I can manage because this is all I have. I have now. I have no grasp of the past or future or an inevitably destined end. I have now. But I also have the certitude that no matter what else happens Christian men will fulfill their own Bible’s mythical Apocalypse with the machines of industry leading the way. Industry is nothing more nor less than the pursuit of money and money is nothing less than the root of evil. But we praise it as the highest pinnacle of our crude society.
The reason that old picture brought me here is nothing having to do with us four sitting blissfully in our seat. It has nothing to do with any knowledge I wish I had. It has everything to do with the road that stretches behind us. It is a long, dry patch of road with no trees or signs of life. Outside our bubble there is truly nothing to be seen except a long stretch of road running straight away into the horizon. I can tell you what lies at the end of that road. Somewhere, at the very beginning, it has its source in the dusty dirt back-roads of some far away wilderness. Like the streams that came before it, it is brings mankind to those untouched reaches of the world.
I’m not sure of very much. I have known a precious few things in my time here but there is one thing that I know for certain: when we are all dead and gone, and our way of life with us, there will still remain the great expanses of wilderness. When we have outlived our usefulness on this planet there will still be wilderness and there will still be life eking out a life in that wilderness. We are not the end of succession and we are not the final product of life; we are proof that while life will always prevail it sometimes makes forms that, for all their intelligence and supposed sagacity, find the path to inevitable extinction.