Fresh

Lake Washington, 1957

A newborn infant will be my age in the year 2085.  What will our fair city be like by then?

Will people still be able to ride their bicycles past homeless encampments set up alongside the International District or will the whole area just be tents and tarps and stolen bikes?

Will they be able to congregate on the rocky shores of Lake Washington on the north end of Seward Park and enjoy the holy grail of both fire-lighting and water-immersing on a perfectly clear late summer night or will the pebbles have disintegrated and the water turned to goo?  Will there even be stars visible overhead with forests scorched all across the West?

Maybe things will be better, who knows?  I’m pretty sure, for instance, that the water quality in Lake Washington is superior to how it was in 1957; there’s surely less sewage in it, as attested by the information gleaned from a highly-reliable source that not a single swimming beach from Kenmore to Renton was closed yesterday for excess fecal coliform.

Will there even be geese in six and a half decades from now?  And if so, maybe they’ll all be fitted with aerial porta-potties that process their poop before it finds the ground or water, why not?

I’ve heard that the bicycle was developed, at least in part, due to the die-off of horses following devastating feed-crop failures in the wake of the volcanic explosion of Mt. Tambor in 1815; so maybe human ingenuity will save us.  

Maybe today’s newborns will ride their solar-powered flying two-wheelers to the shores of a pristine Lake Washington through a city that provides housing and sustenance to all people everywhere.  Maybe they will ignite a non-fossil fuel burning conflagration alongside the water with a  wave of their hands, whose leftover coals will cool automatically and immediately with a snap of the fingers.

I hope the best for them; if they’ve got it as good as us, that’s great.