Centennial

Some quick and dirty research reveals that my yard sale copy of James Michener’s novel, Centennial is about as thick as 4 slices of Oroweat oatnut bread, give or take a slice. Nearly 900 pages long, the epic story covers 136 million years of Colorado’s turbulent history. Currently I am navigating my way through a chapter elegantly entitled The Land. Here, we learn of the Ancestral Rocky Mountains, born 305 million years ago not in showy roadside display of magma and fireworks, but through a simple act of stubbornness: slow, determined rock pressing upward, determined to meet the Colorado sky.

Eventually the Ancestrals disappeared into the earth’s basement or across the plains of Kansas and Nebraska and then later, much, much later, the younger, more extravagant teenage Rockies that we know and love and remember because they are prettier and taller arrived in the Ancestrals’ place. We are headed to the Rockies Friday to celebrate them both.

As I grappled over the decision of what to prepare for dinner, Michener whispered the answer to me:

“The earth is much like a prudent man who has an an alloted span of life and a given amount of energy. Using both wisely, conserving where possible, he can enjoy a long and useful life; but no matter how prudent, he will not escape the ultimate death. The earth uses its materials with uncanny thrift; it wastes nothing; it patches and remodels, but always it expends a little of its heat, and in the end – at some unpredictable day billions of years from now – that fire will diminish and earth, like man, will die.”

Read = You must eat more tasty carbs, for you will die regardless. Our life on wobbly planet earth is decidely short in geologic time. Taking the sage words of Michener, I threw caution and calories to the wind (which from what I understand will also die), and prepared a fresh pesto pasta and basket of butter-laden garlic bread for Casey and myself. Yum! Ain't got no time for prudence anymore.