We Got It All

Winter Solstice, 2008, 6:30 AM

    First thing I did was admire Venus rising to the east over the Sapphires, and give a nod to my man, Scorpio, on the far-eastern edge of the still-starlit sky, ready to fade with the coming sunrise, because it was winter and his time was still yet to come. Then, as Herman Melville would say, I fell to, chipping the ice off my son’s windshield out in the barnyard with a dull scraper so he could drive to school. The moon was a night away from being full and the snowy mountains around us were shining, huge and quiet. That’s not unusual, although our local pack of wolves sang to them last night up the canyon, a master choir singing from the gut of the Earth. But other than that, we were enjoying not paying attention.

    So we weren’t looking up, but suddenly from directly above us there was a bright flash, just out of Scorpio’s clawed reach. Lightning is the usual suspect around here, since such Big-Picture luminescence in the Northern Rockies is common in summer. But this was Winter.

    I thought of Pakistan and India, nuclear-tipped nations currently at each others' throats, of our voracious, never-ending wars in Iraq and Afganistan. I thought of Iran, nuclear-curious, and of George W. Bush and of the upcoming elections that would probably oust him if something really scary didn’t happen first, like planes crashing into tall buildings. Or something like that. Trust, it's hard to argue, is in short supply these days.

    Standing out there in the snowy barnyard in the exquisite dawn with my teenage son who would soon inherit this goddam mess we have bequethed, trying to explain a flash of light above us, I resisted, but the thought leapt forward anyways. 

    Nuclear war. 

    Of course I dialed it down a notch and thought that maybe it was just something gone haywire. Maybe just Global Warming. 

 “Did you see that?” I asked Daniel, who had been busy stuffing his guitar into the cold back seat.

“Yeah,” he said. “I thought it was lightning. I looked up and it was just like when lightning is flashing from behind a cloud at night. That bright and big.”

“Was there any red in it?” I asked incongruously. Daniel, being a kind person from the time he was a baby, considered this for a moment.

“No,” he said honestly. “I just saw bright. I was waiting for a boom. What do you think?”

I owe my son an answer to anything. That’s the deal I made him when he surprised us with his birth on the eve of the first Gulf War in 1990. So I considered the thing. The Kmart scraper hung idle in my numbing fist. Scorpio waited patiently, not quite ready to fade into morning. Global Warming? Wolves? Nuclear war? Certainly that last one should be the last for a father to mouth because if it's that, why bother? And once again, in the instant it took my synapses to jolt enough neurons with the information that I had actually had that thought, my synapses reversed course and passed back a new bit of information, a reasonable answer. 

“Star Wars.”

“Huh?”

“They were going shoot down a spy satellite,” I riffed. “Sometime soon, I think. I read it in the paper.”

“Oh,” Daniel, my teenager, said, and that was all he said. 

We stood another moment in the moonlight together, considering this. I purposefully lingered. Nothing happened. Nothing bad, anyways. I went back to scraping the windshield. 

“This scraper sucks,” I finally said. “You need a new one.”

“I didn’t know they could be better,” he said. 

I hugged him, told him to drive carefully and that I loved him, because that's always the least you can do for your kids.

Right now, 45% of my fellow citizens believe the Earth was created less than 10,000 years ago. An equal number don’t believe in Global Warming. This at a time when there is no serious disagreement within the scientific community about either evolution or human-caused climate change. The subject of peer-reviewed science--and not the peer-reviewed science itself--has devolved before my eyes to the level of partisan politics and, like Galileo, Copernicus or the vast multitude of historical unknowns who have known bullshit when they saw it, I haven’t been able to do a thing about it. Just like the Popes of Old, corporations who profit from unregulated greed define the subject of Science--not the Science itself--and a few hundred years is nothing in the big scheme of the evolution of human consciousness. It’s pretty simple then. We’re fucked.

 I wanted to write a book once about how weird the beginning of the 21^st Century was, how beautiful it was, how beautiful I hope it will be for those who stumble upon it in the future, how beautiful I know it is and still can be. I’ve been lucky, I would tell those future readers. Through circumstance I’ve been given the opportunity to tell you that luck is where you find it, and please don’t take this as trite. All I really want to say is that I hope you’re finding your luck, like I did mine.

The human brain is, if nothing else, a fascinating example of how nature can take a chain of anything—in our case the junction point of two neurons across which nerve impulses pass the news of the instant, be it pain or unexplained event—pour it into a dirty bag like the the one holding my rusty tire chains that live in the back of my pickup all Winter to honor a lifelong struggle to be impulsively adventurous, and create from the nondescript heap of crap the infinite patterns that, taken together, represent Life.

 There had just been a lightning flash in Scorpio's bedroom, a winter sky unimaginably-depthless and dark above my me and my teenage son that, without stretching possibilities too much, could have been the start of a nuclear war, and we had looked up.

Maybe times have always been this precarious for humans. It certainly seems so now.