Six Hours

Today we drove over three hundred miles from Pennsylvania to Vermont: six hours in the car, watching the scenery slip by. The landscape changed as we left the populated areas of New Jersey behind and traversed New York. Forests and occasional farms dotted the countryside.

At over sixty miles an hour, it's difficult to discern small details. Trees with papery bark. Increasing snow cover. Grain silos laced with winter-robbed foliage. Horses wearing blankets. Rocky outcrops with ice curtains.

I spotted a hawk perched high in a tree. Was he hunting for prey, or was he watching the cars zoom by? Did he dream of out-racing us in an aerial dive at 120 miles per hour? Or coasting behind us at a mere thirty?

We passed a sign for the Appalachian Trail at one point, which reminded me of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. I tried to imagine what it would be like to walk from Pennsylvania to Vermont. Every tree would be an individual in the midst of endless trees, instead of glimpsed forest. How long would the journey take?

In the same amount of time, we could have flown from Pennsylvania to California. Colored swatches of landscapes and sheets of cerulean sky would have replaced the forests.

If I rode in a rocket ship, how far would I go in six hours? Chances are I wouldn't see any trees at all, just distant continents buffered by oceans, the airbrushed clouds, and the curved atmosphere giving way to endless night.

Think of our lonely spacecrafts, like Voyager 1 and 2, journeying into that night, and what it would be like as a passenger on that trip. We would be back to where we started when we had to walk through the forests and across the plains, facing a landscape that seemed to never end. We would have to learn to cope with the meditative sameness of the scenery.

Perhaps our future astronauts should train by walking the Appalachian Trail.


by Christy Devonport


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