Fifteen Minutes from Now By Laura J. Oliver

Yesterday, we drove east across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge for fun and adventure. For a change of scene and spiritual renewal.

Everybody else was going to the beach.

I have an almost visceral response to the forest-encircled fields on the eastern shore, perhaps triggered by my midwestern farming-ancestor genes. I look out at a pasture of horses and remember that when she was a little girl, my paternal grandmother rode a horse named Barney Linzo to her piano lesson each week. Gentle but nervous, Barney Linzo had been a famous racehorse in his youth. Her father had given her strict instructions never to give the horse his head—he was just too fast for a six-year-old to control at anything but a walk.

But one day, while riding along the dirt road home from her lesson, a cluster of mares in an adjacent field began to run alongside Barney. “That, he couldn’t take!” my grandmother recalled. “He instantaneously aired out, flattened his body, and took off! And oh, how he ran for more than a mile! It was like being in a rocking chair!” She was, of course, in big trouble when her father collected the sweating horse to take him to the barn. “You ran this horse,” he said grimly. But what could she have done? Barney was born to run.

On the other side of the family, my mother’s older siblings, Ralph and Lenora, were not allowed to ride the farm horses because the animals worked so hard all day in the fields. The creative solution? They rode cows. That is, they rode cows until in adolescence, they became too embarrassed to be seen out on the road with, as my uncle put it, the cows’ “big flapping bags.” He tried to cover his mount’s unsightly lady parts with his sister’s raincoat, but the cow got hold of a sleeve and ate it.

So many farm stories must reside in my DNA as I cross from the present, carrying my grandparents’ pasts to a future they could not have imagined. Each time I do this, the delivery system is the Bay Bridge.

Driving the bridge is not unlike flying——if you don’t look down, you are suspended in a steel gridwork of tunnel right through the sky—and if you do look down, there’s all that sparkling water. If you were to float under the bridge you could float all the way to England— Africa—to the Cape of Good Hope. I used to sit on the end of our pier and imagine that I could float from the cove to the river, from the river to the bay, and the bay to the ocean—I could get anywhere from there. Now, I drive over it, and the feeling is the same.

I can get anywhere from here.

And none of it would even exist if it were not for an asteroid one to three miles wide that hit the east coast of North America 35 million years ago—a glancing blow that created a shallow crater 25 miles wide that, over time, the Susquehanna River filled in, creating by chance, the nation’s largest inland estuary.

There are over 30,000 Near Earth Objects orbiting the sun, any one of which could eventually collide with this planet. We are hit every day somewhere on the globe, and usually, these collisions do no harm. Like the asteroid that formed the bay, perhaps they eventually give more than they take, but we all know the K2 asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs after a 175-million-year reign took 60-to-90 percent of all life on Earth along with it.

Six miles across, K-2 hit the atmosphere above the Yucatan peninsula at 55,000 miles per hour and blasted a hole in the earth 20 miles deep and 120 miles wide. Even though we have found the evidence, this is almost inconceivable. A hole 20 miles down into the earth???

But! Did you know that if the asteroid had hit only 3 minutes sooner or 3 minutes later, the dinosaurs might well be here, and you would not be? Of all the places on Earth to make impact, K2 hit a shallow ocean floor with a high concentration of gypsum. Upon impact, the gypsum turned to sulfur, almost instantaneously becoming acid rain. Three minutes later, the point of impact would have been the Pacific Ocean, where the combined deeper waters and composition of the ocean floor would not have been nearly so deadly.

It is only a matter of time before the Earth is struck again by a life-annihilating asteroid.

Sometimes, when I am meditating, and my thoughts are monkeys at a barn dance, which is, I’d say, roughly 100 % of the time, I imagine this—that an asteroid is on a collision course with the Earth, and we are 15 minutes from annihilation. Like the K2, it’s sailing in from beyond Jupiter. No time to find those you love, no time to say goodbye, no last “I love you’s.” Fate is a non-negotiator. There is only enough time to accept and let go, to merge your life and soul into all that is.

What if we are always 15 minutes from nothing? Like hummingbirds, always 20 minutes from starvation? Or mayflies, with only a day to dance?

Maybe it’s not that we live 15 minutes from nothing, but 15 minutes from everything.

I have learned that when you have asked the universe for something big, sometimes something big has to happen to prepare you for it. Maybe death is a collision of cosmic proportions that gives more than it takes. It’s not a loss. It’s a portal; it’s a bridge.

I read recently that everything will be ok in the end.

If it’s not ok, it’s not the end.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.