| Phoenix, AZ |
Took a drive from Nogales, AZ to Buenos Aries National Wildlife Refuge yesterday.
I really knew very little about it prior, as their website is rather spartan. But I did know that it looked remote and their cause – restoration of grassland habitat – was very noble, so off I went.
It was one of those drives where, once you leave the highway, you’ve signed up for a long two-lane country road. 35 miles or so of it. You’ve also signed up for a gorgeous view of rolling hills, far-off mountains, open prairies, all but cloudless skies, and more such loveliness.
Which, as you may have guessed, is a not so insignificant part of the reason I picked the place.
As I drove, my remarkable ability to recognize the blindingly obvious, told me that not too many people were heading in my general direction. And by not too many, I mean almost no one.
Cars, all in all were few. Very few.
Unless that is, you count Border Patrol vehicles.
Of which they were many. More than there were other vehicles. In total.
Really, I counted.
Now this made some level of sense as the refuge bordered Mexico and indeed, a part of it had been closed off a few years back due to drug trafficking and other such incursions.
And after stopping at a checkpoint, then passing a couple more Border Patrol vehicles, and then stopping at another checkpoint, and passing a few more Border Patrol vehicles, it became incredibly apparent that our government was pretty intent on making sure they did their level best to maintain the integrity of our southern border.
My grandfather, a Border Patrol alumnus and former Southern border watchman himself, would have been very proud.
After a bit of driving, I came to the first entrance to the refuge.
I stopped, had some lunch, wandered the paths, melted in the serenity and came to an inflection point.
I could either continue on my current path, or drive a little further down the road to see what the main entrance and the visitor’s center had to offer.
I chose the latter.
I chose poorly.
To be fair, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the main part of the refuge whatsoever. It was absolutely beautiful. The grasslands swayed softly in the breeze as the sun shown down on the prairie below.
And on me.
While I was completely without a sense of direction, or more importantly, shelter.
From the sun.
You see, some of us live in parts of the country where the sun feels like a bit of a far off dream.
Like eradication of mosquitos, or debt-free college.
And thus, when overly exposed to it, we tend to…how shall I put this….melt.
The visitor’s center portion of the refuge was setup more so as a driving tour, than a walking one. And upon learning that, I figured, what the hell, I was here, so let’s set off and see what I can find.
I found a lovely red-dirt road that continually, achingly teased of something just around the bend.
But unfortunately, there was nothing around the bend, but more road, and sun.
But that’s how it goes sometimes.
The idea of this trip was to avoid overly planning it, and to instead discover what was to be found in the vast expanse of territory that we collectively call these United States of America.
And I have. And it’s been amazing.
So it was slightly less amazing this time. But on a scale of everyday life to the world, it was still pretty darn good.
Just hot as hell.
When I was done getting my (over)dose of Vitamin E, I set off for my hotel in Phoenix; about 2 1/2 hours away.
Amazingly the road out was even less populated than the road in, save the Border Patrol folks, and another checkpoint. And to pass the time, I clicked on the satellite radio and wound up on CNN.
It wasn’t my intention – I’ve tried to avoid news and politics during this adventure – but David Axelrod was interviewing Beto O’Rourke; a big man crush of mine and that instantly stopped the channel surfing for me.
I’m not going to go into details about the conversation, because this isn’t supposed to be a political blog. (Though I am really tempted; especially since I really like Beto)
But if you want your politics fix, you know where to get it.
Towards the end of their conversation, Beto told a story that really hit home for me.
You see, his father and he were moderately estranged during Beto’s more rebellious and wayward ‘youth’.
Probably not terribly unlike many parents who have certain expectations of their children, and those same children who often have very different expectations of themselves.
But they reconnected as Beto started to come into his own and come to grips with the reality of adulthood.
And then one night they found themselves in the kitchen of the family home, they started to talk and drink wine, and talk some more. And that conversation apparently turned into, hours and hours later, the sort of conversation that if we’re lucky enough to have had it, is very fondly looked back upon many years later.
Especially because the next day, Beto’s father died.
He’d been out for a bike ride, and he got hit by a car.
And that was it.
So, if you’ve been following this online repository of my journey since it’s beginnings, you’d probably imagine that punchline, hit like a ton of bricks. And kicked my mind into overdrive.
And as the interview wrapped, the 6:00pm hour started with ‘breaking news’ about a powerful set of storms and tornadoes in East Texas and Louisiana.
And CNN had a live interview with an official in East Texas who was on to speak about two people killed in the storms.
The two people were siblings, aged eight and…three.
They’d been incredibly unlucky passengers in a vehicle driven by their parents when a tree apparently got obliterated in the storm and fell on the vehicle.
The parents survived. The children, riding in the back seat, did not.
And that was it.
A few weeks before leaving on my trip, I got to talking with a friend at work.
We talked for a good 45 minutes about a wondrous variety of topics, but the one that weighed the most on me was of a similar vein to the above.
How many people die in car crashes or other such accidents, that otherwise would have lived if one tiny thing in their lives had been different?
For example, a drunk runs a red light and crashes into a minivan that never would have been there at that exact moment in time, if the mother had misplaced her keys. Or been interrupted by a phone call, or a child throwing a tantrum, etc?
How much of life is like that?
Think about that for a moment. Really.
Really step back and think about where you are. Who you are.
How much of it is a result of plain old dumb luck, fortune, or circumstance? Or the absence of such?
I’ve said for quite some time that the purest experiment of such would be to be able to put a child in one of the best school districts in America, with all of its inherent advantages, and then, in some alternate universe, put that same child in a woeful, sacrilegiously underfunded inner-city school district.
What do you think the end result is going to be?
In the first you get a doctor, scientist, entrepreneur, etc.
In the latter you potentially get someone thrown in jail for a minor drug offense, then unable to afford bail, without adequate lawyerly representation and thus sentenced to an absurdly long prison term, and who’s entire life trajectory has thereby been changed by one poor decision.
Person? Or environment?
You likely know where I stand…
How many doctors, scientists, entrepreneurs are we wasting as a result of our vast inherent inequalities in our educational system?
How many people wind up in prison, or still, even if lacking that ultimate severe consequence, still wind up with an extraordinarily different pathway in life, because of one or two decisions?
Or even worse, because more so of the stupid dumb luck of their birthplace and it’s resulting circumstances, than of their personal decisions themselves?
How many people die in completely random and unlucky accidents, where if one tiny, microscopic thing had been different, they otherwise would have otherwise lived?
Maudlin, I know.
But…something to think about.
The Long Road 