Articles of interest

Thursday, April 23, 2020

Ten Days to San Francisco!!



From April 3, 1860 to October 24, 1861 the Post Office ran a service for quick delivery of mail between Missouri and California. Called the Pony Express, it employed small young men to ride quick ponies between stations so that the mail moved nonstop. Each rider would pass on the bag of mail to the next rider who was ready to go. The Pony Express was heavily subsidized and the cost of sending mail did not cover the actual cost. The service went bankrupt just as the Civil War was heating up.

I think of this in terms of the state the world is in right now. In the developed world most have become accustomed to instant high speed Internet service wherever they are, on their phones. We don’t have to wait. The disparity, of course, is economic in nature. In many rural parts of the world, in Africa, rural India, Central America, and other similar locations, people living in poverty have to walk miles to get clean water. Medical care is a luxury.

In the developed world we have lost patience to a degree that I question whether it can be recovered. I recall as a kid that I’d sometimes put an order for something or other in the mail, with a coupon clipped from the back of a cereal box. My parents would see that it got into the mail. The next day I’d ask if the item had come. My parents would tell me that I needed to be patient, that the order hadn’t reached the company yet and they wouldn’t know that I had wanted it. With time I grew to accept patience with such things as a normal part of life.

But now, we don’t need to be patient. Pre-plague, Amazon ramped up same day delivery for a price. Prime delivery was reduced from two days to one on many items, using their own in-house delivery system. Why wait if you don’t have to?

Then came the plague.

Prime deliver is now guaranteed in two weeks. Holy crap! Two weeks? I can’t wait that long. So I try eBay instead and I can often get it within a week. Whew. Dodged that bullet, ayuh.

There are some glimmers of hope. People at home with their children are learning how to work on projects with their children, which still strikes me as odd because growing up, I was accustomed to that. It was the norm. And, some have found that projects that don’t involve a phone or a computer can actually be fun. Quaint.

RenĂ© Rapin (1621–1687) was a French Jesuit and a prolific poet. He wrote a book-length poem “On Gardens” which was translated into English in the later 17th century. In Book II “Of Trees” Rapin writes how it takes time for trees to mature:



Their Rise and Form proceed my Muse to sing,
Tho’ lofty Oaks sometimes from Suckers spring
With tow’ring Heads, and when transplanted spread,
And with their Branches cast a noble Shade
Yet of all Trees they rear the lofty’t Brow’
Which first from Seeds and swelling Acorns grow
I grant, before they to Perfection come,
They will in tardy Growth an Age consume.
Yet then they cast a more majestic Shade,
And Loss of Time with Goodness is repaid….

In other words, it takes time for a beautiful and majestic tree to mature. It can’t be rushed. The beauty of a mature tree only comes about by slow, steady growth.

But that Amazon Prime package had damned well come tomorrow, right?



Wednesday, April 8, 2020

A Raindrop from Hundreds of Millions of Years Ago

Several years ago Anita and I visited one of my sons in California. We decided to drive from the Los Angeles area to Colorado to visit Anita’s mother and sister. We decided to drive through the unearthly landscape of southeastern Utah to get there.

I have been to the Southwest a number of times now, but the landscape of Utah caught me by surprise. The natural sculptures were unearthly. Canyons, buttes and bluffs in a variety of colors ranging from gray to tan to red and all shades in between.

We decided not to stop at the national parks in the area and instead stopped at several rest areas. At each one I poked around for rocks. Wherever I go I bring back interesting rocks. One formation caught my eye. It was a mud flat. Not a fresh one, probably a rarity in a desert. Instead, it was a mud flat that was probably hundreds of millions of years old. It was delaminating so I felt not regrets in picking up a piece to take home. I found out later that it is called “mudstone.”
I love my piece of mudstone. It captures something very ephemeral—a rainstorm and the aftermath.

A rainstorm that happened hundreds of millions of years ago, before anything even remotely resembling a human being walked on the earth. What a thought.

My piece of mudstone is a light tan in color, almost gray. It records not only a few raindrops but also the sunny days that came after the storm. The surface is cracked, as a stretch of mud will do when it lies in the sun drying. Any one of us has seen this countless times and not given it a second thought.

I remember my mother commenting on a leaf that had been trapped on a patch of mud in our yard. She said that that’s how fossils were made, and wasn’t it interesting that a fossil that wold be found hundreds of millions of years later began with a patch of mud and a fallen leaf. What are the chances that that could happen?

Hundreds of millions of years ago Utah was at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. The western half of the state was under water, and the eastern half was a huge mud flat. That is probably the period that my stone was made. Just another rainy day when the mud dried a bit, and more silt was washed on top of the dried mud, preserving what was below. The same process repeated again and again as the layers of sediment stacked up to form many hundreds of feet of mudstone.

My piece of mudstone is a record of a moment in time that is gone forever.

Our lives are like that too— we are here for awhile and we blow away like dust. Shakespeare reflected on it well:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.


Prospero, The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158