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Yesterday I wrote that history is unkind to the human legacy, by popping a quiz to name ten famous composers with parameters spanning hundreds of years and dozens of countries. Well, it must be said here that history is also unkind to the myriad of things that humans make. We assume that what we construct will somehow not only outlast us, but outlast us by some kind of long, almost immeasurable time. Very rarely does this prove to be true.
Basically, our world is always trying to make itself smooth. The erosive agents of wind and water eat away at the earth and all that dwells upon it, with the end goal of creating a planet completely engulfed by a vast shallow sea. Fortunately volcanoes and continental plates work against these smoothing agents by throwing up large mountains and other geological anomalies.
On a vast scale, it is only age that separates the stunted and weather-worn Laurentian Mountains, from the youthfully exuberant and thrusting Rockies. On a much more local scale, it’s the reason I have to paint my soffits every few years. The wind and rain are trying to knock my house down.
Oh sure, we have a lot of old things; art pieces from the Ming Dynasty and the like. However, with no human intervention, the number of things that could survive more than a few decades in usable form vastly decreases. With our egos commanding us in thinking that our constructs are built to last, no matter what the world throws at them, we become surprised at how quickly nature can reclaim areas once developed by humans.
Here’s an example:
When I was a child, my grandmother’s house used to have two train lines near it. I remember seeing trains on both tracks. My family and I, after having spent time in Toronto, now live quite near those same tracks. Or rather, we live near one set of tracks and the right-of-way where the other tracks used to be. Sometime in the late 1980’s, the tracks were lifted.
Recently, my wife and I were taking our dog for an impromptu walk when I realised that we were near where those tracks had been only twenty years ago. Well, not only did I have difficulty finding the old right-of-way, it was overgrown to the point that in some places we had to wave the brush out of our faces as we walked through the dark and spooky forest that wasn’t at all dark and spooky when I was a kid.
Then the old roadbed ended abruptly in a large hill built for a highway bypass, and beyond that it had been mostly usurped by a trucking company.
This process took only two decades, and it shows us the incredible amount of work humans have to do just to keep the things we’ve built standing and functioning properly.
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