About 100 years ago, the Old-guard Geologists were confronted with an uncomfortable question: How could horses have crossed the Atlantic Ocean? Turns out some fossil-diggers had discovered matching fossils of a horse species on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Similar matching fossils were found across the Atlantic and other oceans, too. I imagine the O-gGs shuffling nervously and scratching their heads until they came up with something plausible, which was the following: Land bridges must once have spanned the oceans, providing passage for horses and what-have-you. Later, the bridges sank.
Easy-peasy, question answered, please go away.
By the time I was studying science in junior high, most geologists had switched their allegiance to plate tectonics, a new model of Earth’s land and oceans that held no truck with static continents and land bridges. Plate tectonics explained not only matching fossils and rock formations, but the distribution of mountain ranges and volcanoes, and why earthquakes were so common in California but rare in my home state of Minnesota. Nevertheless, I remember learning about land bridges across the ocean, as if they were a thing. I remember a lesson that included a crossword puzzle for the vocabulary words. The clue was something like “idea that explains matching fossils,” and the 11-letter answer was “LANDBRIDGES.”
I always thought of these land bridges as akin to the Julia Tuttle Causeway, which is a 4-mile bridge across Biscayne Bay in Florida, and which I had been driven across on vacation. A longer example—24 miles—is the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, which you can view when your plane approaches Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans. That’s 24 miles without an exit or a gas station or a modern rest area with bathrooms and donut shop, and with the main scenery being waves lapping incessantly on your left or right. Of course motorists manage these bridges just fine, but the trips take a number of minutes, not hours or days. No one has need to hunt or forage for food on the bridges, nor seek springs or pools of fresh water, nor find shelter for the night.
Can you imagine a horse or a lizard or an emu or something waltzing across the 3,000-mile span of the Atlantic Ocean? As a boy—and three cheers for me—I thought the idea was absolutely nuts.
Today, in my capacity as professional science writer and editor, I can tell you with confidence that land bridges never existed, never were supported by any evidence, and never made any sense. They were the invention of otherwise intelligent minds that were invested in a wrong idea, which was that Earth’s continents and oceans occupied fixed positions. Up and down motion, sure, but no side to side. Some of the old guard held onto their dogma even after the ocean floor was surveyed. The discoveries included no sunken land bridges, but instead an underwater chain of volcanoes that, in the south Atlantic, paralleled the matching coastlines of South America and Africa, explaining an observation once assumed to be a coincidence.
Which brings me to the following paragraph, published in the Wall Street Journal, about Chris Wright, the CEO of a fracking company, and the presumptive nominee for Secretary of Energy in the upcoming Trump Administration, Part II.
A fracking executive, Wright acknowledges that burning fossil fuels is contributing to rising temperatures. But he also says climate change makes the planet greener by increasing plant growth, boosts agricultural productivity and likely reduces the number of temperature-related deaths annually. “It’s probably almost as many positive changes as there are negative changes,” he told conservative media nonprofit PragerU last year, referring to climate change.
Well, glory be! Climate change is good for us all. More positive changes than negative ones! Who would have seen that coming?
I’ll spare you a detailed analysis, but the logic and conclusion presented in the excerpted paragraph is utter bunk. The scientific reasoning is right up there with the land bridges, although a lot more consequential.
I recognize that Mr. Wright is personally invested in the business of acquiring and processing fossil fuels, and perhaps that investment is emotional as well as financial. His background certainly provides a bias, and we all have our biases.
Nevertheless, is this man really as stupid as his argument suggests?
Mr. Wright could be lying. Maybe he wants to bask in the warm glow of gasoline-powered automobiles and coal-fired power plants, for as long as the glow lasts, and to cast aside all worries about the ill effects (flooding coastlines, failing farm crops, acids poisoning the fish and plankton) if or until they arrive, when they will become Somebody Else’s Problem.
Or maybe he and his pals have a secret Plan B. Perhaps they’ve commissioned sketches of utopias under geodesic domes, complete with golf and ski areas, for the enjoyment of an enraptured and wealthy few. Perhaps they have notions of colonizing Mars, or moons such as Europa and Enceladus. Hey, why not? We screwed up Earth, let’s go screw up some other world.
Another possibility is that Mr. Wright is nursing a death wish. Maybe he secretly desires to bring on the hurricanes and forest fires, the epidemics, the refugees and the poverty, and so on, like a testosterone-fueled teenager playing one of those awful video games. Maybe he has some axe to grind with an enemy of some sort—perhaps a relative or a schoolmate or someone else who mistreated him—and now he wants to claim his measure of revenge on all 8 billion of us, including himself.
Or maybe he’s just blisteringly stupid.
The incoming president, Mr. Trump, has talked about rising ocean levels providing more beachfront property. Famously, Mr. Trump’s current legal residence is a beach resort that he owns in Florida.
Heavy sigh.
Sighing, I am told, is good for you.
You want to hear about my biases, do you?
My parents used to fly us down to Miami Beach, Florida, for a week’s vacation in the middle of winter, which is how I learned about the causeways that connect Miami proper with the neighboring barrier islands, not that I knew to call them barrier islands at the time.
Miami Beach was a lot of fun in those days, and I suspect it still is. The ocean beach was long and wide and very sandy, thanks to sand that they hauled in from elsewhere. You could walk endlessly up and down that beach, with all the fancy hotels on one side and the pounding surf on the other. I remember building sand castles, I remember collecting sea shells. I remember my brother Danny wading into the water and taking delight in the incoming waves. When a wave was ready to splash over him, he’d call out “Here comes the judge!” which was a catchphrase on Laugh-In.
In the afternoons we took in the tourist attractions—Parrot Jungle or Sea World or the Miami Zoo, or Fairchild Tropical Gardens. I returned to Parrot Jungle as an adult, and the parrots were still doing the same routines. Different parrots, I assume, but I remembered the little tricks: walking a tightrope, ringing a bell, wing-waving hello and good-bye.
I learned all sorts of things on Miami Beach. Ocean water was salty and you shouldn’t try to drink it. Jellyfish have stingers and you need to stay away from them. The tide comes in, and then it goes out, and they published the timing in the newspaper.
I marveled at the electric sign for Wolfie’s Delicatessen—the letters lit up sequentially, then flashed in unison.
Once my parents invited both Great Uncle Teddy and Great Aunt Sylvia to our little apartment at the Nichols Hotel. Teddy and Sylvia were inlaws through the marriage of my grandparents. Both had migrated from Minnesota to Miami, both had never married, both enjoyed seeing us when we came to town, and otherwise they had nothing in common nor anything do with each other. Teddy was a radiologist, a confirmed bachelor with a string of girlfriends, and a man who knew his way around a martini. Sylvia had severe arthritis that bent her over like a question mark. She received a per annum from the National Association of Maiden Aunts as their spokeswoman and mascot.*
“Hello Sylvia, how nice to see you,” I remember Teddy saying as he bent down to kiss Sylvia on the cheek, who grimaced at him. That was their one interaction, at least in front of me.
The United States is my home, was home to my recent ancestors, and with the exception of two cousins who escaped to Australia and New Zealand, respectively, it is home to all of my family. The country has tested my patience, and certainly it has disappointed me, especially with election results, but I have not lost faith, at least not yet.
As a boy I checked out—and repeatedly renewed—a book about the 50 states, featuring a map of each along with assorted facts and statistics. I memorized the state capitals and the largest cities, I knew where to find the national parks and the wheat fields and the salt flats.
It helped that I got to travel a lot, thanks to my parents. They took us to Florida for winter sunshine and Colorado for winter skiing, and to California to visit relatives and check out Disneyland. But it was never enough. My life in Minnesota was pleasant but boring and repetitive, whereas travel was exciting and full of possibility.
I remember sitting aboard the Northwest Airlines plane at the Miami airport, awaiting to be flown home. I looked out the window at the neighboring planes—Eastern, Northeast, maybe some others—and wondering what life was like aboard them. Somehow it was different flying these other carriers to New York City or Boston or Washington, instead of flying Northwest to Minneapolis.
Here in the present day, all these years later: Thanks mostly to business travel, I have flown those other airlines to those other cities. I have flown in and out of every major airport in the United States, and many of the smaller ones, like ROC (Rochester, New York) and PSP (Palm Springs, California) and ICT (Wichita, Kansas). Have I flown to Akron, Ohio? Yes, Virginia, I once flew into Akron.
As I know very well, every airline flight is essentially the same as every other flight. Sure, they differ in details like length and weather delays, and a screaming infant or two. First class remains a world of luxury compared to coach. But every airline flight is essentially the same.
I can describe differences in the convention centers of New Orleans, Kansas City, Denver, Boston, and St. Louis, but none of those differences are especially noteworthy. Plop me into the lobby of a Hilton Garden Inn, anywhere in the country, and I would struggle to tell you just where I was.
Nevertheless, I keep a travel journal of every flight and every hotel stay. It all means something to me, even if I have no idea what.
Why do I want to ski North Carolina?
My choice of North Carolina ski resort is called Cataloochee, located outside Asheville. You can go online and read all about it. Mountain Web cams, at least for today, show a healthy crowd of skiers and boarders enjoying snow-covered runs. The place looks like any other small but popular ski hill, albeit surrounded by more greenery than one traditionally would expect.
I want the experience. I want to claim this place, as if I were collecting the resorts instead of just skiing them. I also want to defy climate change, while that’s still possible. Skiing in North Carolina should be called attention to, because it seems poised to be an early casualty.
The resort is on the Indy Pass, so I’ve already paid for the lift ticket
That’s all I got for today. Feel free to give me a holler if you’d like to talk and catch up, or to commiserate, or to share a memory or two. We cannot live in the past, but I expect we’ll need to keep our memories alive.
*Yeah, I made this up.
