Souls Within Stone was my ode to nature and the natural world.
Chapter Forty-eight
Later, Paul takes over the driving. Greg settles into the passenger's seat and looks out of the window, daydreaming about the decade of the 1980's, the years immediately after his forced resignation from the Air Force, when he taught U.S. History courses to community college students at Fort Carson, the large mechanized army base south of the city of Colorado Springs. Soon, he dozes off, describing for the students of his current dreams what some aspects of life on the Western plains must have been like to those who lived in this region more than 100 years ago:
"You know, one morning could feel pretty much like another, looking back, as the cowboys herded their cattle from Texas through Colorado, northward to Cheyenne, here on the western edge of the second greatest prairie system that humans have attempted to traverse, then exploit, and finally settle.
"For a few thousand years before the coming of the cowboy, those who were descended from those who arrived here first both lived and died on these plains. Eventually, the native peoples succeeded in accommodating themselves to the expansive grasslands, up to a point. The layers upon layers of culture that they and their tribes leavened into the topsoil are more profound, if far less intrusive, than the ruts of wagon wheels that European settlers later ground into the rich dirt on their way West in the mid and late 1800's.
"Two centuries before the wagon trains and the cattle drives, explorers ventured out from Spain and from the new Spanish colonies to the south. In the century after that, trappers and traders, primarily from France, culled the western rivers and streams for beaver. And in the 100 years after those hardy Frenchmen nearly wore the furry mammals to extinction, the cowboys pushed their four-hoofed beasts reluctantly out of Texas, to eventual slaughter and mass consumption in the Midwest and the East. These massive cattle drives were made possible by the killing of the buffalo, a competitor to the cattle for the precious grasses of the prairie from Colorado to the Missouri River in the northeast and on to the Mississippi in the east.
"Humans must eat and clothe themselves, no matter how far afield their food is gleaned or the cloth for their coats is cut. Yet the soil anywhere you look on the Earth is more eternal and unyielding than any men or women whom we send forth into each new frontier, for every generation must eventually rest heavy beneath the fading sunset, its daily labors done.
"Even now, sagging prairie barns, once raised and hammered together in starched gingham communities of effort, eventually collapse from neglect. Villages and towns the world over, constructed as seemingly solid as stone, are soon enough settled; however, they eventually decay from their venerable centers outward whenever the world moves on.
"If you cannot conceive of our own extinction, you need only look to the ancient Greek and Roman cities of exquisite granite and marble that once dotted the periphery of the Mediterranean Sea. Centuries before our acquisitive archaeologists began nosing around their Classical remains, these abandoned localities welcomed the migrations of sand and weeds instead of people. A harbor may have silted up, the trade routes may have altered, and the people had moved on.
"You already know that each generation's preoccupation is the next generation's disregard since so much requires attentive rebuilding or reinvention, cyclically testing the renewable energies of humankind that certainly reach limits from time to time. We need to remind each new wave of our offspring of these profound limitations to human habitation all over the world.
"Someday, although we rarely admit this, even to ourselves, we shall, no doubt, lose our lease upon this sacred property, perhaps to another species that crawls up from the crevasses of the earth that we can no longer reach and patch over. If not from our own soil or solar system, competitors could arise quite possibly from the intriguing stars beyond, when a new method that we cannot cope with could seize our veritable souls and scatter what bones of us remain behind, dry as the intricate framework of the buffalo that we once slaughtered and left here to die, to make a place for the cattle that the cowboys pushed onward into Wyoming.
"This is the only life that they knew, those cowboys who rode this range, the only existence that they could conceive of carrying out upon this stubborn topography. Why would they have imagined the future to be significantly different? Why should the wooden wagons that they drove have been entirely replaced by iron trains that railed settlers faster into the frontier and then beyond, from up-to-date St. Louis and even newer Kansas City? Nothing could likely have been any more amazing than the cities they already saw existing in the East, and yet all of that pales when compared to what we have recently accomplished all across the North American continent.
"Historians no longer speculate that the closing of the frontier had a profound effect upon the American psyche. A cowboy in the 1800's would probably have found it hard to believe that human beings could ever fill up this great prairie as he reigned his horse to urge a stray dogie back into a moving herd, bound for the sunset just over the horizon.
"Yet every forward momentum of humanity is really a retreat from one locale to another, as we continue to segue, even in Colorado, from buffalo chips to cow chips, and then to computer chips, fueling the creation of a newer range that no one could have imagined a century ago, as cyberspace, in its turn, supplants this vast and tangible landscape."
Chapter Forty-eight
Later, Paul takes over the driving. Greg settles into the passenger's seat and looks out of the window, daydreaming about the decade of the 1980's, the years immediately after his forced resignation from the Air Force, when he taught U.S. History courses to community college students at Fort Carson, the large mechanized army base south of the city of Colorado Springs. Soon, he dozes off, describing for the students of his current dreams what some aspects of life on the Western plains must have been like to those who lived in this region more than 100 years ago:
"You know, one morning could feel pretty much like another, looking back, as the cowboys herded their cattle from Texas through Colorado, northward to Cheyenne, here on the western edge of the second greatest prairie system that humans have attempted to traverse, then exploit, and finally settle.
"For a few thousand years before the coming of the cowboy, those who were descended from those who arrived here first both lived and died on these plains. Eventually, the native peoples succeeded in accommodating themselves to the expansive grasslands, up to a point. The layers upon layers of culture that they and their tribes leavened into the topsoil are more profound, if far less intrusive, than the ruts of wagon wheels that European settlers later ground into the rich dirt on their way West in the mid and late 1800's.
"Two centuries before the wagon trains and the cattle drives, explorers ventured out from Spain and from the new Spanish colonies to the south. In the century after that, trappers and traders, primarily from France, culled the western rivers and streams for beaver. And in the 100 years after those hardy Frenchmen nearly wore the furry mammals to extinction, the cowboys pushed their four-hoofed beasts reluctantly out of Texas, to eventual slaughter and mass consumption in the Midwest and the East. These massive cattle drives were made possible by the killing of the buffalo, a competitor to the cattle for the precious grasses of the prairie from Colorado to the Missouri River in the northeast and on to the Mississippi in the east.
"Humans must eat and clothe themselves, no matter how far afield their food is gleaned or the cloth for their coats is cut. Yet the soil anywhere you look on the Earth is more eternal and unyielding than any men or women whom we send forth into each new frontier, for every generation must eventually rest heavy beneath the fading sunset, its daily labors done.
"Even now, sagging prairie barns, once raised and hammered together in starched gingham communities of effort, eventually collapse from neglect. Villages and towns the world over, constructed as seemingly solid as stone, are soon enough settled; however, they eventually decay from their venerable centers outward whenever the world moves on.
"If you cannot conceive of our own extinction, you need only look to the ancient Greek and Roman cities of exquisite granite and marble that once dotted the periphery of the Mediterranean Sea. Centuries before our acquisitive archaeologists began nosing around their Classical remains, these abandoned localities welcomed the migrations of sand and weeds instead of people. A harbor may have silted up, the trade routes may have altered, and the people had moved on.
"You already know that each generation's preoccupation is the next generation's disregard since so much requires attentive rebuilding or reinvention, cyclically testing the renewable energies of humankind that certainly reach limits from time to time. We need to remind each new wave of our offspring of these profound limitations to human habitation all over the world.
"Someday, although we rarely admit this, even to ourselves, we shall, no doubt, lose our lease upon this sacred property, perhaps to another species that crawls up from the crevasses of the earth that we can no longer reach and patch over. If not from our own soil or solar system, competitors could arise quite possibly from the intriguing stars beyond, when a new method that we cannot cope with could seize our veritable souls and scatter what bones of us remain behind, dry as the intricate framework of the buffalo that we once slaughtered and left here to die, to make a place for the cattle that the cowboys pushed onward into Wyoming.
"This is the only life that they knew, those cowboys who rode this range, the only existence that they could conceive of carrying out upon this stubborn topography. Why would they have imagined the future to be significantly different? Why should the wooden wagons that they drove have been entirely replaced by iron trains that railed settlers faster into the frontier and then beyond, from up-to-date St. Louis and even newer Kansas City? Nothing could likely have been any more amazing than the cities they already saw existing in the East, and yet all of that pales when compared to what we have recently accomplished all across the North American continent.
"Historians no longer speculate that the closing of the frontier had a profound effect upon the American psyche. A cowboy in the 1800's would probably have found it hard to believe that human beings could ever fill up this great prairie as he reigned his horse to urge a stray dogie back into a moving herd, bound for the sunset just over the horizon.
"Yet every forward momentum of humanity is really a retreat from one locale to another, as we continue to segue, even in Colorado, from buffalo chips to cow chips, and then to computer chips, fueling the creation of a newer range that no one could have imagined a century ago, as cyberspace, in its turn, supplants this vast and tangible landscape."
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