Living In The Future

By: Charles Bowden

One day when gray clouds rolled in I sat in the low light and wanted the words and metaphors to be over.

Maybe someone can write a scene like this: we are all on a train and it is racing toward a bridge that is out but no one on the train cares because they are busy arguing about train security measures or who gets to sit in which car or whether the train is only for people or whether the train is only for one sex or the other or maybe the train should be divided up according to race or language or religion and still the train races toward the bridge that is gone, races toward some chasm that will shatter it and so the people argue and do not care that their behavior means that they can never reach the future.

But words are all I have, my skills are limited and the words at best are a veil, maybe even a shroud, between us and this world we touch but cannot embrace, a ball of dirt we stand on but never can really know.

We want a clean thing, we want ten commandments, a list of solid answers, a form we fill out and then we’re done with the mysteries, perhaps, a chant we can murmur in the dark hours. But the real writing is not on any page, it is everywhere. Cities have morphed into giant splatters of flesh and materials and we call them mega this and that but our words cannot capture the reality that slaps our faces.

We can’t wrap our minds around the vast dying now taking place, the exit of plants and animals without even a goodbye note as they leave us behind, and it is not like the near-beer version peddled by the Good Book merchants of gloom, no, it is the silence of life fleeing this place of life, the silent caravan of beasts and fish in the sea and whales leaving our world and going over Jordan, but this time the land is not promised but forsaken.

People, we can’t talk about people, people everywhere, crowding the beaches, jamming their lives into the canyons, smearing the plains with their houses and ribbons and bows, terracing hillsides with shacks that barely get them through the lonely nights. We cannot say this thing about people, that there are too many of us and not enough of everything else.

And so we turn away and dream of the warm soft times, when lullabies caressed our faces and we bathed in the twinkle of the stars on those first summer nights. We have ceased to say things. Soon, as more cities go dead, we will struggle to remember their names. Just as the vanishing beasts are nowhere on our tongues.

I am driving down a back road and find a tortoise sitting on the asphalt. I stop and move it to the ditch and it clambers off into the tall grass.

Living in the future, both of us.

Charles Bowden (1945-2014) was an American journalist and author known for his writing about the American Southwest and its social and environmental issues.

He began his career as a journalist, working for newspapers including the Tucson Citizen and the Albuquerque Journal, before becoming a full-time freelance writer and author.

Throughout his life, Bowden wrote extensively about the borderlands region between the United States and Mexico, focusing on issues such as drug trafficking, immigration, and environmental degradation. He was known for his vivid, poetic prose and his willingness to confront difficult and controversial topics in his writing. Some of his most famous works include the books "Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America," "Desierto: Memories of the Future," and "Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields."

You can find this passage in Bowden’s important book—Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing