New Mexico Mercury

For years people told me how boring it is to drive east of the Rockies across the Great Plains. I remember specifically my uncle lamenting his drive from Oklahoma City to come visit us in Albuquerque. “It’s all the same. It’s just flat.” He would say. “There is nothing to look at. It just sucks.” I thought the agony of the drive was why his trips were infrequent and so sporadic. Many echoed his sentiments, and these people longed to drive north to south along the spine of the Rockies or travel west from Albuquerque through the Rio Puerco, pass over the White Mountains, and dream of the Pacific. They wanted rivers, rocks, wildlife, and something green; or, at least, the hopes of these things.

As I prepared for my trek to the Northeast across the Great Plains this summer, I quietly resented that I would have to endure the mind-numbing, soul-sucking road trip I was directly and indirectly advised not to take for years, but, in my head, the justification of all the trouble existed in the destinations I would experience and the people I would visit. The road of nothingness was just the medium for time and space travel.

As we (my trusty co-pilot Daniel and I) headed north from Denver with the rising sun burning blood red in the atmospheric soot, the interstate peeled from the Rockies, and, as peaks became obscured behind the spring wildfires’ smoke, the Corolla took a Wyoming interchange to I-80 East which solidified our course. We had turned our back on the Rockies, and the endless, boring, not-so-Great Plains would fill up hours of travel I would forever lose to time.

After watching the prairie for hours with predetermined discontent, I saw something beyond the straight roads, dividing fences, and regular telephone poles. I remember it was somewhere in Nebraska where I saw the grass move like the sea’s waves. Zephyrs caught the tall blades and gracefully danced each one into a ballroom dip. They did this together; choreographed by the breeze, a seemingly-infinite sine curve rolled through the prairie revealing the invisible atmosphere as a stock’s green blade leaned to reveal its dull sheath.  Changes in the wind, curves in the earth, or other gentle impediments caused the wave to break as they do in the sea.

Then I saw more in the prairie: the US Army heading west without question to conquer the indigenous peoples; homesteaders traveling into the unknown, anxiously dreaming of opportunity; the first peoples of the Americas migrating with the seasons while hunting beasts--and being hunted by beasts--today known through fossil and maybe, just maybe, through folklore. 

The vision of the first peoples took me to the Ice Age during which big mammals flourished and climate change pushed humans to adapt with their brains in novel ways. With vast ice caps and great lakes covering North America, the continent was roamed by megafauna--mammoths, mastodons, stag-moose, horses, giant beavers, saber-tooth cats, American lions, short-faced bears, dire wolves, ground sloths, beautiful armadillos, and humans. The grasses of the Great Plains provided primary feeders with nearly an endless supply of food, and, with these animals thriving, the predators also grew bigger and stronger as the environment allowed. Imagine dire wolves feasting on a downed stag-moose only to be frightened away by a hungry saber-tooth cat. This was the land of our wildest dreams.

Of the animals listed, all of them are large mammals, and they are all extinct - well, except us.  The megafauna of the Ice Age, as current theories suggest, succumbed to climate change and human pressures--some scholars suggest that this is first period of humans causing irreversible ecological change, which we know occurs currently at an alarming rate. But, regardless, humans, yeah we, survived the evolutionary bottleneck. And, not only that, the ancestors of these Ice Age people thrived across the Americas for 12,000 years after the megafauna went extinct. And now the Great Plains are the graveyards of Ice Age beasts--entire species, just like us, gone--yet our ancestors made a stand here. We may never know how it played out, but the Plains are hallowed ground where our species somehow, someway survived when so many others did not.

The majesty of the Great Plains came together for me a week after driving through Nebraska in a photo exhibition in Chicago’s Field Museum. Titled Fractured, the exhibit documented the recent decade’s oil boom in North Dakota. Photographs chronicle individuals, families, ranchers, farmers, oil workers, and executives as the process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, allows access to previously untapped oil supplies in the fissures of American shale. The drilling basically creates an earthquake which destroys the rock pockets where the oil (and many other things including water and natural gas) has been geologically trapped; then the pump sucks up the booty. Previously this method was not cost effective, but, about a decade ago, European engineers made advancements in these technologies while trying to access oil in Russia’s Arctic region. Now untapped areas are booming, and, in North Dakota alone, fracking is a mutli-billion dollar industry.

Terry Evan, the photographer, showed how royalties from mineral rights lifted families out of dire poverty and provided previously unemployed men with substantial salaries to send money back home to support their families around the world. But, as you may have imagined, it is far from roses, unicorns, and cotton candy.  As the drilling process occurs and the fissures that contain oil are fractured, the oil, gases, and whatever else is there, seeps into a collection pump but it also infiltrates water tables people drink from and use for livestock and farming.  A photo of a family around a sink faucet on fire demonstrated how natural gas has made its way from the depths of the shale to their kitchen table.

Other photos showed ranchers who were giving up their herds of cattle and horses to allow oil pumps on the land. All the portraits lacked human spirit.  People losing land and lifestyle. Workers beat on by physical labors. The environmentalists defeated by the ever-expanding industry and its exponential hazards to our earth.  Even the people getting rich, corporate executives and land owners lack life in their eyes and posture.  They didn’t look evil or greedy or conniving, but, rather, they looked indifferent to their role in the process.  The process of taking the soul of the Great Plains has left them hollow.

Maybe the most moving photos for me were of the oil industry’s visible practices on the surface.  Scars--no, that’s not right--open wounds of drills rising into the sky, abandoned equipment choking pristine lands, roads clearcut in the grasses, tankers ripping across silence, and sludge left in pools.  The prairie’s peace torn apart for black gold. The previously dreaded drive across the Plains felt somewhat sacred--and sacrilegious--at this point as its future suddenly felt in jeopardy.

In Evan’s introduction to the exhibit, he wrote that humans go to unfathomable lengths to power our lifestyles and our societies by unleashing the sun’s energy trapped in the ancient oils around the world. He went into depth about how organic materials made use of the sun’s energy, directly through photosynthesis, and the ensuing geologic processes that turns those complex carbon structures into oil. The oil in North Dakota is a former Great Plains, a Pleistocene prairie, a Cretaceous jungle, and a Cambrian ocean. Then Evan explained that the current Great Plains are no different. The landscape is covered with organisms trapping the sun’s energy to assemble the ingredients of life. Animals feed on these grasses, and animals feed on animals, so you could say our ecosystem is powered by the sun, or go one step further and say all life is nothing more than the sun itself.

So, in the Field Museum, it came together. The precious Great Plains’ purity was endangered by human disruption. The seas of oscillating grasses were only the sun moving in the wind, no doubt another system powered by our closest star. And, of course the coolest part, I began to believe that we are no more than the sum of millions of years of light. Carl Sagan, my dad, and Neil deGrasse Tyson--all heroes--discuss how we--and nearly everything known--is the stuff of stars, or more poetically as Tyson puts it: the ingredients of life are traceable to crucibles of stars that cooked light elements into heavy elements. And still today, the stars work on their creations as our complexities are held together by the celestial energies they offer us.