Looks like someone was just trying to help.

What my morning commute looked like today.

Lately I've found my mind returning again and again to the gulf between our human-centered perception of time, defined by our blink-of-the-eye lives, and the great expanse of time over eons. Yep, it seems like every time I stop halfway across my beloved Broadway bridge I end up trying to imagine what this stretch of river will look like in 500 or 5000 years. What will be left? The equivalent of smoldering ruins? Will we have recycled everything that stands today into something else during some time of great need? What sounds will echo across the valley? Will people still live here? Will their memory of this city --of cities-- have evolved into myth, like the travelers in Jim Crace's "The Pesthouse" who stumble upon what's left of a freeway in post-apocalypse America and try to connect what they're looking at to the stories handed down to them through generations? Will this place simply revert to the vast wilderness that it was only a very short time ago? I would give anything to be able to time travel into the future and see for myself.

Saturday evening was a gorgeous night to watch the first wave of nearly 10,000 bikers who completed the Seattle To Portland ride as they crossed the Broadway Bridge near the end of their 200 mile journey.





It was also my parents' last night in town after a thoroughly enjoyable month-long visit, so we walked up onto the bridge to watch the sun set behind the hills. The moon was up and the birds were restless.

As the price of gas drifts upward, slowly detaching from decades of government and industry sponsored social engineering in favor of the automobile, the slogan "drive less, live more" seems less and less like something that only someone like me --who rarely sees the inside of a car (I like to call them Denial Pods)-- would conjure up, and more like a semi-voluntary dawning awareness for more and more of my fellow citizens. Imagine how much more vibrant our cities would be if everyone spent more time on their feet and on bicycles and mass transit; how much less socially isolated we'd be; how much we could save, as a society, on medical care due to a sedentary lifestyle that our not-so-distant past as hunter-gatherers never prepared our bodies for; how good it would feel to know that we weren't greedily gobbling up a planet that our children and grandchildren might want to enjoy...



...how much easier it would be to slow down and enjoy the modern petrogyphs in our midst.



Maybe it's time to heed the writing on the wall.

In the words of Duran Duran: "Hold back the rain!"

Shoeprint? Or stencil?