From Brigid at Home on the Range:
Guns, Bones and Steel - Our Nation Today
Some years back, I lived in an area that wasn't quite rural, and wasn't quite subdivision either. I had a big fenced yard for Barkley but also had former neighbors that did not fence their property and had two small dogs, both wearing those little collars that would warn them of their property lines, lest they get a small shock. My regular readers will remember my telling of this little story of that lack of fence and those two dogs, but it holds true so true, especially in the context of what is on my mind this morning.
The lots our houses sat on ran from a third of an acre up to an acre but the smaller places were normally fenced. The neighborhood backed up against a broad expense of woods on one side, the bare bones of the trees, stark there in this particularly cold winter. One evening after work, I went over to the neighbor with the two appetizer sized dogs and no fence to warn her that the coyotes had been emboldened by the cold and were coming right up to the houses, my having found one in my driveway that morning. She looked at me (she of the coexist bumper sticker) and said "It's OK, we have an invisible fence". I couldn't' even BEGIN to explain that reasoning to her. The world is not a safe and happy place, something some people find when they least expect it.
In the dark recesses of the world, under the cover of jungle, underwater, are cities, cultures and beings that vanished for no known reason. The dinosaurs, creatures so large that it seems only plausible that they would only have died out by something as major as an asteroid, gone, only to be brushed from the earth by those that study the bones.
There are Mayan cities that emptied overnight, the way a chrysalis of a butterfly is left behind, empty, stark in it's primitive beauty. So much still there, the monuments, and granaries, terraces and temples, structures of empiric power and small dwellings formed by families united by generations. Emptied with no anthropological clue as to riot, invasion or deadly disease carried in on silent winds.
That is the first third of this thoughtful essay - go and read the rest.
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