Tuesday, December 24, 2013

THE FLIGHT OF ROOM 114



Ancient Path


   
     After many years of hard work, one day you fill the hot air balloons connected to your room and gently lift away from all the other rooms in the city. 

                                                      Find a ladder back down.


Exhilarated by the view, you glide over the valley, a vast quilt of farms with packing sheds and processing plants and towns that develop around each nucleus of malls, fast food restaurants, box stores, and gas stations. 


                                             Open a closet door.


You glide over to the foothills, some regions of which still appear natural. You glimpse a network of trails preserved by cattle, and you amuse yourself by trying to map the paths, realizing that they must form an ancient web connecting Native American village sites all over the range, but the trails keep vanishing in the grass. 


                               Find a different path.


You go higher above the smog and notice all the cultivated and urbanized land where wetlands and lakes used to be, the dams on every river, the clear-cut forests and strip mines. 


                   Open a window.


You go even higher where the oxygen grows thin and see a huge fault and the opening of a volcano, the ocean in the distance. 


        Open a closet door.


Every now and then you hear jets and explosions, and you wonder how high you need to go to escape the wars and ecocides and disasters as, breathing through an oxygen mask, you approach the cold blanket of outer space.

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