Two Young Women Wounded Me at the Gas Station, Yesterday

 For better or worse I like to write about travel in terms of subjective experiences.  I prefer not to write about breathtakingly beautiful scenery, how many solar panels you need, or whether RV toilet paper should be one ply or two.  When you camp in the backcountry, and then return to civilization, you notice things that you probably wouldn't notice if you lived in town all the time.  In that sense, it is a 'travel experience.'

Rolling into a gas station in the "big" city, I noticed a couple obese female customers.  Why oh why didn't they at least wear long pants and shirts?!  It is not exaggerating to say that they 'wounded' me with a special type of sadness.

What was causing this reaction?  Was it just a male-sexist-pig being deprived of his fair share of eye candy?  No, I don't think so.  As a man gets older he places less emphasis on his own pleasure or excitement and looks at the Big Picture of the human condition.

The punch in the gut that I felt was more like that felt by someone looking at the smoldering remains of a burned forest or house.  Or looking at a formerly rich green agricultural field destroyed by a flood or blight, or an animal injured by a passing automobile.

Spending time camping or tramping around in the outdoors makes a person a little more 'pagan' -- that is, prone to personifying and anthropo-morphizing the natural forces that make life possible.  And it is Life, not scenery, that I am talking about.  The females of any animal species are especially important.  A young woman should have her time in the sun, her years of glory, when she is proud of her looks and drives young men crazy.

At least that is how I remember females from the age when I started noticing such things:

from sunrise forever, on pixabay

But the photo doesn't show America today.  I feel sad for those young women.  And yet, a few babies manage to get born in America, every year.  Don't ask me how.

It might seem like foolishness, but all those years of life we were bequeathed, all those years of complicated organs and chemistry grinding away, doing their job -- it all resulted from the ability of our mothers to inspire a few minutes of foolish behavior in our fathers. 

America probably thinks it is environmentally-friendly, at least compared to what it used to be.  But is that the same as being nature-friendly?  How could one be connected to nature and accept biological extinction with the indifference of those two young women in the gas station?