A Wider View of Our World - back from my southern migration

 I climbed into my car exactly two weeks ago and headed east, then south. I sped along the countryside, a smile on my face, following my impulse to travel far. Fortunately, my daughter April and her family were glad for a visit from me, which gave me a ready destination: Asheville, North Carolina. I lived in those mountains for 35 years and it still feels like home.

Driving across eight states, I went through a quilt of different land forms. Whenever I was out of the cities, it was wonderful to see the skies, fields, and forests, and watch flocks of birds flying south just like me. And in the evenings, the huge red sun slowly going below the horizon painted everything with a brush of glowing rose. I took a new route this time, avoiding some of the busiest super-highways. And at the end of the second day, I left the Ohio rolling hills and crossed into Kentucky's mountains. There I took a deep breath. It was good to come into the nestled comfort of those tall tree-covered ridges. And eventually they led me to my destination: Asheville.

The wonderful week I spent there will not be covered in this post. But after 9 days enjoying my visit, it was time to get in my car again and head north. The first hour and a half of the journey took me through a huge wilderness between Asheville and Tennessee. It is clearly protected land, for there was nothing but forest. The wide four-lane highway was on the top of ridges so that I had a birds-eye view of the vast panorama below, ridge upon ridge of green. No billboards, no buildings, no mark of human habitation except the road that I was traveling on. It felt truly like I was looking at the outer covering of a grand living being, and I was a little bug driving over it's skin.  I was seeing a view of an untamed planet, natural ecosystems all around. It felt like a privilege to be there, to see this. Probably when the highway was first built, there would have been an outcry from environmentalists, for it was a huge disturbance to the forests. But now, many years later, this very highway gives us a rare precious view of undisturbed nature.

From that inspiring beginning, I gradually came to more and more urban areas, less and less natural landscape, until for several hours I drove through narrow mountain valleys, businesses crowded on either side, stoplights every few miles. It felt closed in, with no horizon apparent. It felt oppressive, and I began to wonder how living in a narrow valley affects people. Does it make them more confined in their thinking as well? I began to long for the wide views and far horizons of the midwest, and when I finally crossed the border from Kentucky into Ohio, my heart lifted and I breathed a sigh of relief. The beautiful protected southern forests were wonderful. But our human impact in the populated areas was disturbing. From one perspective, our species has been a blight on the land. 

Witnessing the human impact on our world became a theme going through my head for the rest of the journey. In southern narrow mountain valleys, there was a somewhat chaotic tumble of buildings, roads, trains and road signs, all with the tall mountains closing in on both sides. Once I got to Ohio and the valleys opened up to wide views, it was less claustrophobic but the road was flanked with huge advertising signs, a reminder of what seems to be most important to our culture: making money. So although there was beauty in both north and south, the human impact was huge and discouraging. We already know this, of course: people have carved up and used what we've found here with little or no regard for the health of our ecosystems. And at this point it's hard to imagine another way of life taking hold very soon, short of a catastrophe. 

There are signs of hope too: the younger generation, like my 2 grandsons, have grown up learning about the importance of the natural world and are prepared to live their values into the future. Or the group of volunteers who meet every Thursday morning here in Johnson County to harvest seeds from native plants in order to plant more prairie. Or farmers like my cousins who are making earth-loving, sustainable innovations on and around their fields. I've come back from this trip half way across our country with a renewed appreciation of our tremendous diversity of life, and the ability of that life to continually renew itself, balancing, doing its part in the whole earth system. Now that I've taken the chance to leave my protected setting for a couple weeks, I've come back refreshed and enlivened. And I'm more determined to do what small things I can toward living lightly on the planet.