Scrubbed Clean

As I drive around through this city, the middle and outer suburbs at least, I can't help but look around me. A famous author once remarked that man would soon turn the world into a garden for his own delight, but he was wrong. I can't help but look around and see a slum, even in the nicer areas. We gave up the forest, the mountain, the open savanna, for this? For a steel and concrete prison, a world of work and worry, war and waste. A place that smells of chemicals, of constant burning, led by the ideal of greed rather than the ideals of beauty or joy. So, I can't help but to look around, and with a long view of time as my lens. I think of how it will be, once man has eventually scrubbed himself off this planet. I think of how the planet will scrub man's works away with him.

I think, a hundred years, and the streets and sidewalks will be broken and sprouting grasses, and trees. The sewers and drains will clog, crack, and cease their draining, and the buried rivers and streams will again flow in the air and sun. Lawns will fill with weeds, and though no one will be around to call them wildflowers, that's what they'll be once more. The mono-crop will be gone, in all its ugly manifestations.

I think, a thousand years, and the buildings will be crumbling, already mostly gone. Fires, floods, rot, and storms will have torn them down. A fallen tree alone may take a house down. Once their shell is broken, nature's work will come easier. Much of the chemicals and waste will have washed away to the sea, diluted and eventually decomposing, or settling with the silt. All our bridges will have rusted away, all our dams long since silted up, or burst. The great forests will again be great. There will be, mercifully, no more fences.

I think, ten thousand years, and at long last the ice will be returning, to scrape away and grind to dust the last remnants of our northern cities. Farther south, they'll be washed away, or buried in the drifting sands of time. I only wish I'd be alive to see it.