[TRANSCRIPT]

[click, static]

So, I’m on my way to the Grand Canyon, but apparently Arizona is full of cavernous earth. Because I’m standing in front of an absolutely enormous hole in the ground. 

A meteor crashed here. I had no idea. Which is weird, right? Isn’t that something that everybody should just know? That we have an enormous meteor crater in our country? It feels noteworthy. 

But no, I only learned about it from a road sign on Route 66. Thank goodness for tourist trap advertising, I guess. There’s a little viewing deck and everything—apparently, the meteor crashed here over fifty thousand years ago. The viewing deck has a pair of binoculars pointed at an astronaut suit they put in the middle of the crater. Which is a bit of an odd choice if you ask me, but looking through it does give you an idea of the scale. 

If this is just a random meteor crater, how big is the Grand Canyon going to be? Was this all mundane to the average Arizona resident? I don’t know that I could handle it—the idea of driving around my state and stumbling across these massive voids of space. It’s too much—it’s too much of a reminder. 

A rock—a fucking rock—fell from the sky fifty thousand years ago and even now, this land is unusable. The Colorado River pushed through the ground for so long that it wore away at the very earth. 

Random chance versus persistence. Two opposite ends of a spectrum with the same result—nothing where there used to be something. The world, reshaped. 

There’s nothing we can do, is there? To ensure that we carve the path that we want or to be certain that we’re not eroding everything around us. It doesn’t matter if we make one spontaneous decision or we work hard at something for years—the result could be exactly the same. It could be the opposite of what we were going for. There are plenty of rivers in the world that have been flowing for just as long and haven’t made that kind of impact. There are plenty of meteors that hurdle through space without creating mass destruction. 

I don’t know whether to be comforted or disappointed by that. I told you I left my mark on this world already and that I wasn’t sure if I liked what shape it took and that’s true—but maybe there was nothing I could’ve done to make it different. After all, I haven’t had the power of a strong current or a burning meteor. 

I guess I should just be grateful that the impression I left wasn’t a mile wide. I left my mark, but it won’t still be visible in fifty thousand years. It didn’t change the curve of the world. 

[click, static]

[long static] 

[beeps]

You're wrong

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.