Adaptability: the most terrible and wonderful of human traits.
A year or two ago, the bleakness & abandonment of the prairie towns shocked me.
Now I have become used to the vacancy of the Plains
in the same way that I became used to the sprawl & traffic of the East Coast.
Crumpled houses, windswept downtowns, monolithic factories & farm-structures standing silent: do the few people who still live in the middle of America think back on when their towns were inhabited, alive? Maybe once in awhile. But I think that generally, they've adapted; eyes become used to the gray-and-yellow way of it. In the same way that someone on the East Coast will make a vague comment about how that patch of condos used to be pasture, and then move on (nevermind when the pasture used to be forest) Yes, but this is how it is now.
We adapt. We will adapt to a warmer planet: no problem. Life is one way one week and another way another week. And really, who expected the town of Happy, Texas to endure? Perhaps one day a girl ran down the main street of Happy, into the wind with colorful ribbons in her hair; perhaps two old men smoked a pipe together outside a store and talked about the weather. Perhaps there was an Independence Day parade, even. Trumpets in the air. And then the girl grew up, and married and had children and moved away; and the old men died; and the place became vacant. Did we expect Happy to exist, vibrantly, forever? Do we expect the American empire to give us plenty, forever? Do we expect happiness, that strange elusive condition that sparks in the heart and grows out through the eyes, to endure, forever? No, of course not. It wouldn't be the same if it did. We may be unused to seeing towns in disrepair, but it is only part of the cycle, after all / beautiful, too. Frozen-gray-and-beautiful.
I try to live my life as if moving through water.
Fluid. Riding the waves, until they calm.
Then the next thing comes.
There will always be moments of traveling the bleakness, and then something will happen to pierce the gray.
Change is, after all, the only constant.
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