The Forest Ozymandias

Recycled from August 2006

Scouting new land on Sunday, Sailor and I came across an old stone farmhouse falling over in ruin. The stones were large and no doubt levered into place without benefit of a crane. Building a stone house is a lot of work.

The farmer, mason or stone cutter putting this house together had thought he was building a house for the ages, but now it was already covered over in forest and drifting leaves, a folly for a small dog and an odd man on a hot day.

I could not help but think of the poem "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

In some strange way I am always comforted by ruins. A road, if left unmaintained, will begin to crack up in a few years under the rising pressure of ailanthus roots.

Ailanthus will be followed by larger trees, until at last massive chunks of tarmac are left tilting in the air and the disintegrating road is shaded over in summer and covered by leaves and snow in winter.

After 30 years you can walk across an old blacktop road and barely notice it was once there. After 40 years, the once glorious road to some important destination is reduced to little more than a collection of asphalt concretions lying under soil and leaf litter.

Asphalt is not forever. There is comfort in that.

Perhaps someday the slate will be wiped clean, and humans will get another chance to do it right. The Hindus believe in reincarnation -- that we come back, again and again, until we achieve perfection. Who is to say they are wrong?

Humans have been hammered down before. The Black Plague is but one example. Is the Great Flood of the Bible a myth? Not according to archaeologists at the edge of the Black Sea. Crawl over Anasazi ruins, walk Easter Island, climb up the buried ruins of Tikal, and gaze at the ancient building stones of Zimbabwe, Angkor Watt, Leptis Magna or Pompeii. These people too thought they were building forever.

Perhaps everything we now think is so important will be wiped flat by bombs or pestilence, genetic defect or computer virus. How many hackers would it take to bring down the electrical grid of the U.S.? How many bombs in the oil fields and terminals of Saudi Arabia would it take for cars to grind to a standstill? How many bombs on the subways of New York City, Tokyo, Washington, Mexico City, Seoul, and Paris would have to go off for those transportation grids to come tumbling down -- and with it the world economy?

Crush a few connecting nodes, and I suspect the thin patina we call civilization will wash away like chalk on a sidewalk after a heavy summer rain. People grown soft and dependent will wither like hothouse roses in the real world.

Mother nature always bats last, and she swings a mighty stick. "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
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