As the ground begins to thaw and the ice and snow cover melt away, the forest floor finally starts to awaken from its Winter slumber, the first signs of Spring begin to appear. Thick neon green carpet-like moss and skunk cabbage sprouting leaves the size of a dinner plate rise up through the mud, adding the first bit of color to a nearly six month stretch of an otherwise monochrome world. Streams overflow their banks, the strong currents wash down sediment and dense mud which becomes lodged behind fallen branches and trees limbs creating natural dams and deep ponds. The newfound Spring sun begins to warm the winter mud, awakening a cacophony of Spring Peepers who joyously find new homes within the ponding water.
As the ground continues to defrost, additional Spring surprises continue to emerge from hibernation. The white wall of a 1970s era tire peeks out from the muck adjacent to a large truck tire, the tread worn unevenly, wires in the steel belt sharply exposed and rusted. Just a little further downstream another tire, bald as an egg, erupts from the mire like a swollen wisdom tooth which will never be pulled. Spring showers continue to wash down additional tires as they float through the seasonal floodwaters before becoming anchored beneath downed detritus. The strong sun bakes the mud off from the tires, exposing the black rubber to the elements, which cracks and deforms with the changing temperatures. April showers have filled the inner tire wall with stagnant water, creating a luxurious retreat for Summer-time mosquito larva.
Reaching down to scrape off some green mildew from the outer wall of a deformed tire reveals a seemingly cryptic series of numbers. I am able to decipher the code as "1002" indicating the tire was manufactured during the tenth week of the year 2002. Yet twenty years later, in a stream somewhere in Eastern Pennsylvania the tire barely rots, useless but still as recognizable as the day it was removed from its rim. Hundreds of such tires can be spotted all along the river bank, popping up from the fresh Spring muck like perennial flowers. Unfortunately, these rubber flowers never bloom into anything except perhaps as a somber reality of the byproduct of the American dream.
The automobile is perhaps the epitome of American culture and represents an ultimate sense of freedom. However, the more I continue to explore the industrialized world we've created, the more I begin to ponder if the American Dream is simply just unsustainable at length. While a tire is really nothing more than a hunk of rubber, once its usefulness has been extracted it simply becomes a useless discarded hunk of rubber, the aftermath of a dream; a nightmare. Fragments from the American Nightmare can be found jettisoned everywhere all across this country. I suppose time will tell if the society we've created or the waste we've left behind will become what America is remembered by.
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