Hit the highway for the windy city yesterday afternoon. Destination (I thought): the Museum of Science and Industry. Goal: to watch IMAX movie on the creation of the trans-Canadian railway. Steam locomotives, oh boy! (There's an essay of mine that deserves resurrection. Title: "Dinosaurs." The 'train piece.')
In the traveling party: Camille Davis (My wife's daughter, with ex husband Chuck Davis) and Jim Samuel (Camille's new husband. Elsewhere on this blog, I excused myself from the wedding. Jim was born in Kuwait and is a smart Christian bookstore manager of Karatakan -?- descent with a taste for chocolates.)
Jim's goal was slightly different than mine. He wanted to check out the Moody Bible Institute's Bookstore, Lifeway. He had Googled down a tiny square of map. I think I just wanted to get out of the house.
We got a late start. I was bogged down in the blog, and the youngsters are newlyweds and late risers. Del also Googled the museums. She got the notion (false) that the film was at the (Stanley) Field Museum (Natural History). The film was to start at 4 PM. We hit the rough area of the town at 3:30, but had a biotch of a time zeroing in on the parking. In the que at the Field Museum, the man at the ticket desk informed us that IMAX was at the MSI. (Oops, the slip of the mouse.) Well, the bookstore was to close at 6:30. The Field has a great dinosaur collection, including Sue, the T-Rex. The poster on the wall advertised a 3D movie about that. Up to level four we went. The line was formed, but after waiting it out, we learned that the tickets were all sold out.
"No more movies. Let's just look around."
We stood at the entrance to "The Evolution of the Earth." A walking tour. (We're bipeds.) I've seen this story before. I mean, I've actually walked through this exhibit before. It's the one with the six (count 'em six) mass extinctions. Are we (am I) actually going to death march a pair of Christians through a history of the planet, with the focus on the evolution of life? Maybe they're not fundamentalists... and I'm not driving this tour bus, actually. In to the time machine (exhibit) we drift.
This exhibit is a clever (brilliant) way of deploying (contextualizing) one hell of a collection of fossils. You walk your way around the evolution of life on the Earth, starting with single cell pond scum and ending with...(oh, I'll get there, really I will). You go along pretty good, getting attached to a bunch of happy trilobites, when BOOM: a red wedge on the wall interrupts the flow with the message: "mass extinction number one." Each such lists: areas affected, percentage of life lost, cause, and effect. The effect becomes plain. The wiping out of a high percentage of evolved life leaves room for, and sets the stage for, the bigger and better to come. So it's not so bad, except for those at the top of the food chain. Or so our narrative weaving consciousness perceives. The trilobites (Permian/Triassic) give way to the Carboniferous. "All in good time, my pretty."
However: the eons are vast stretches of time. The eons before life emerged make up the vastest stretch. The walk of life in this exhibit is not quite (not at all) in proportion. How could it be? We'd have had to walk up to Chicago from Rantoul before we got to the pond scum at the the entrance to the Field Museum.
BOOM! Mass extinction number four (I think) was a really bad one. Took out 90 percent of all life and half the plants. Reason? Tectonic shifts? Volcanic activity (as a result)? The asteroid strike of science fiction? The evidence is sifted, but we didn't do it. Of course, if the exhibit were in proportion, we'd have been looking at the rise of the hominids in a phone booth at the end of the marble hall. We all know where we're going with this. You know where I'm going: Mass Extinction Number Six. (More of a bummer than Love Potion Number Nine.)
But first: (about those hominids). In the time since I last looked at this exhibit and this time, I've read all of Del's books on anthropology, paleontology, and general ancient history. One such is the story of "Lucy," the adolescent Australopithecine who strolled one ancient day down to the tar pits where she bent over to peek in a foetid pool and was overcome by fumes. Her well preserved (partial) skeleton was discovered and exhumed as fossil record, some four point four million years later. How the anthro diggers jumped up and down over this! The exhibit features a cast of Lucy's remains (RIP) and an actual full sized hirsute model of how she may have appeared on the morning (?) that she died. A young hominid, imagined as a girl with budding hair-covered breasts and a broad simian face, stares out at you from a plexiglass case, about to take a step into futurity, to (maybe) friend you on Paleo-Facebook. It makes one's own hair stand up a bit.
Then, stumbling away from this, trying to avoid the many visitors all milling about with phones, gawking at the walls and cases as was I, I almost fell flat on my face over the footprints of our ancestors, fossilized and plastered back to bas relief and set into the floor. I was looking at the red wedge of Mass Extinction Number Six. Not paying total attention to that which was underfoot. Beside the wedge, a counter. Number of species extinct since 8AM this (yesterday) morning. The number was poised at 37. I kept waiting for it to tick over. (There goes another one!) Some ten thousand have gone missing lately. We're to blame this time. In all the others, the previous five, the causes are speculated about. This one's more personal. We're up close, maybe too close. In all the others, things weren't so bad for some, and others didn't make it. The certain victims were higher up on the food chain. We're near the top, (or so we imagine) sawing away, hacking away, polluting away the bottom. Tra-la! We're going to wake up one morning and find our own selves gone. There are deniers. There were a lot of Dinosaurs happily munching away back in the day, when BOOM! There were trilobites cavorting (Googling and Facebooking, twittering and tweeting, having all sorts of kinky split in half sex) when BOOM!
As I stood looking at the number 37, near the timeline painted on the floor where the time machine stood stopped at 'today,' (yesterday), a boy was pulling his father's hand as he strained for the exit impatient to get to the gift shop. He saw the by now familiar red wedge. He exclaimed, "Six! How many extinctions do we have to have!" He was plainly used to an even faster pace to his narratives, with less repetition. World of Warcraft. The father, stepping on the word "today," said in a flat tone that I could not read for any emotion, "It's us."
Epilogue. (Confusion Finale)
The traffic on Lakeshore Drive was crawling. I exclaimed that "to go from that walk through that survey of the mass extinctions and to emerge out into this! We're clearly headed for extinction." I am not just getting to this line of thinking. I wrote a song by that title for the Black Crack Review back in the '80s. Perhaps the time has come to cut that demo to vinyl. We went down knowing we were going down. Let the fossil record show.
We made it to the Lifeway with some 15-20 minutes to spare. I bought Billy Graham's new (last?) book, "Nearing Home." I stayed up half the night reading it. He's getting out while the getting is still pretty good.
We had a fabulous dinner at a Lebanese place (very authentic - the host looked like a sexier version of Danny Thomas and had an accent you could roast a kabob on) out past the pizza joint that had a line of youngsters waiting to enter. I spoke of my own faith in the sanctity of art. "Being human is not simply biology...," read the placard beside the cave paintings. I spoke of Billy Graham as a master of the theater of faith. This I believe.
Back on the road home, we regretted not having brought a map. My teamwork with Del broke down and we lapsed into a series of errors that slowed our re-entry. But we're happy trilobites. We're in it up to our necks, still finding time to sing.
