Good evening RPR Readers or, if you’re located on the other side of the globe, like Aussie Rita Greenwald, G’day.
I know this is late, but in my defense, when I initially sat down to write up this update, I thought this past Sunday (May 1) was actually the last Sunday in April because I can never grasp the 30 versus 31 day month thing. So in my head, this is only two days late — instead of a week and two days late.
We’ve had quite a few storms over the past month were the creek behind our house rose up pretty significantly and caused me a little bit of mild panic. Luckily for me, I wasn’t home much this past month. Since March of 2020, I can count on a single hand how many times I’ve slept in a different location than my kids. This month? 11 days!
8 States in Three Days!
A big chunk of my time away from home involved helping my brother-in-law, Joe, move from South Philadelphia to Great Falls, Montana. Joe rented a U-Haul and he, myself and his co-worker took turns driving the truck and his Camry through the following states eight states en route to Montana:
Pennsylvania. The Keystone State is really freaking big. It’s not an ideal place to start a road trip — especially if you’re heading East to West. After five hours of driving you want to make some headway and cross some state lines. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen when you start in your journey in a state the size of multiple European countries put together. Also, the tolls are out of control in Billy Penn’s good state.
Ohio. OK place to drive through, but I wouldn’t want to stay longer than a piss break. The most remarkable thing about Ohio, IMHO, was the Boston Terrier I saw at rest stop near Toledo.
Indiana. Pretty sure I drove through the entire state of Indiana without realizing it.
Illinois. Don’t remember much about Illinois, but hitting Chicago at one in the morning at the tail end of a seven-hour driving stint was something I don’t see myself forgetting any time soon. If you’ve ever dabbled in psychedelics, you know there’s a certain point where everything changes; the lights get brighter, the volume increases and rushes inward and your entire reality shifts noticeably. Well, that’s what happens when you run smack dab into the Windy City after driving scores of hours through the nothingness of Illinois after dark.
Wisconsin. After 15 hours of driving Madison, Wisconsin, looked liked the most beautiful site I’ve ever seen, when we rolled in there and stopped at our hotel at three in the morning. Five hours later, it looked a little more like the quaint little college town I’ve sure than it is.
North Dakota. It’s fitting that I mention North Dakota in a newsletter all about natural disasters because the bulk of Flickertail State looks like Chernobyl post 1986. I both pondered my own mortality and thought some of the real cows I saw on the road were decoys during my time in North Dakota.
Montana. The Treasure State really should be divided in two states: Montana and whatever word best fits the apocalyptic hell-scape of the eastern half of the state. Few things I’ve seen in my forty years are as breathtakingly beautiful as the majestic mountains and endless sky of the central and western part of the state, but that eastern part, well, that gives North Dakota a run for it money.
100 Subscribers and growing
River People Rebuild hit a key milestone this week; we just hit one-hundred subscribers. Substack, the fine platform that hosts and distributes this very newsletter, sent me a congratulatory email along with some not so subtle hints on how to boost my metrics. For me, getting those first 100 subscribers was about as hard as grinding out that first million was for Drake. We set there in the 90s for A LONG TIME. Now that we’re over that first threshold, my goal is keep growing it until it’s big enough for me to snag Elon Musk for an exclusive interview right after he purchases the emotion of fear and uses it to power the next generation of Teslas.
Finally, as promised, I will be doing something special for the 100th subscriber. Stay tuned for details.
Thank you all for reading, seriously. If you know anyone who may be interested in reading incomprehensible nonsense like the last paragraphs, please sent them here.
Earth Day Verse
On Earth Day, we took the kids to a planetarium right here in Collegeville, and Adam Chantry, brother of the great comic Chip Chantry, put together a fantastic presentation that kept our kids educated and entertained for more than an hour. Somehow, the elder Chantry weaved Carl Sagan seamlessly into material geared for the under eight crowd and read his famous Pale Blue Dot poem, a work about the famous photo of Earth (aka, the pale blue dot) as seen from the Voyager spacecraft billions of light years away.
Maybe because of my recent country trip, a trip in which I saw how vast and beautiful this country is (except for most of Illinois and Indiana) and how small we are in comparison, the poem hit me especially hard.
Instead of giving you RPR readers a clumsy, fumbling explanation of why this poem affected me the way it did, I’m just going to post it here (with the express written consent of the Sagan Estate, of course) and hope it does the same for some of you:
Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan
… Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.
On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there -- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner.
How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.
In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.
Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.
To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
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Til Next Time,
Jared