We humans are amazingly optimistic creatures – mostly, I suspect, because we don’t allow ourselves to be concerned with things we are pretty sure we can’t do anything about. A friend from another life told me humans generally abide by what he called the Fifty-Fifty Rule:
“Anything that has been going on more than 50 years has been happening forever, and farther than 50 miles away never happened at all.”
To which I offer the corollary: “If it’s going to take longer than 50 years, it will never happen.”
There was a major river a few miles from my childhood home. Every year, during spring thaw, the river ice would break up and then pile up into dams. Rushing water that had been collecting topsoil from the surrounding mountains released its load of “poor man’s fertilizer” on farmers’ fields in “the bottomland.”
When I was a kid, I never heard people talk of flood plains. They simply knew not to build in certain places if they didn’t want to watch their labor float down the river come spring. When the Federal Emergency Management Agency came to town to demand local governments pass laws against building in a flood plain, most folks just thought anyone who tried it would only do it once.
My mom was a few months younger than John F. Kennedy when he ran for president. They were 43 years old; I was pretty sure rocks didn’t live that long. My dad’s dad was gone before I arrived. Mom’s left when I was only 16. Those who knew history were gone, the next generation was busy living its own, and I could barely spell the word.
History is built on reminiscences. It’s difficult to gain a long perspective when by the time you’re old enough to want to know history, Grampa has gone off to reminisce with the angels.
When I was a kid, summer was for swimming and filling the barn with hay to feed the cows in winter – which began sometime in late October. There were several inches of snow on the ground for Thanksgiving. Come February, snowstorms became wetter as temperatures began to increase a few degrees a week. March brought a few weeks of the warm days and cold nights for making maple syrup with sap collected in tubs carried on horse-drawn sleds through snow-covered forests.
I already have outlived my dad by nearly a generation. My kids are grandparents. Many folks in my generation are great-grandparents. Photos of four generations, sometimes five, are increasingly common. With that comes old folks with longer memories.
Our television presents conflicting messages with the evening weather report. The weather reporter says to expect “seasonal temperatures” the rest of the week, and then says the planet is hotter than it’s ever been. Both sentences are correct.
Turns out, they only calculate average over the past 30 years. Every year, as the planet warms a tiny bit, the 30-year-average temperature increases, establishing a new “normal” constantly on the rise.
Which explains why we are still in only the early stages of taking climate warming seriously, and why it is the young folks who are most concerned after hearing Grandma remember when early June was once still too cold to go swimming in the creek.
We are beginning to believe that the new shopping center and its accompanying parking lot may indeed be killing fish as storm runoff drains into rivers running to the sea.
Unfortunately for many of us, the sea is more than 50 miles away and any shortage of fish will not be obvious for at least 50 years in our future. But fifty years only seems long to a 16-year-old.
Text and Images ©2025 John Messeder. John is an award-winning environmental storyteller, nemophilist and social anthropologist living in Gettysburg, PA. He may be contacted at john@johnmesseder.com
