"Four Hours and Nineteen Minutes" by Lillian C

March 23, 2014

            Over four hours straight with no stops, no sing-alongs, and no wifi. Sounds horrible right? For the first sixty minutes on the road, I sat through L.A.’s heavy traffic with my sister in the driver’s seat and my mother beside her. While I stared out the window and into the neighboring car, completely violating their privacy, I began thinking that I was going to dread the next three hours as we headed towards the middle of nowhere. As traffic cleared up and we merged onto the 101 North, I was suddenly exposed to an extraordinary collection of warmth, cold, and amazement all at once.

There before me was the vast Pacific Ocean in a way I’ve never seen before. A clear cut horizon separating the field of azure and the sheet of ivory that was sitting upon it, a hazy sky barely letting the warm sun bleed through its grasp, and a miniature silhouette of what seemed like an ant venturing across the surface of the ocean. Nothing had been more breathtaking than this, especially following the last hour of agonizing boredom.

After about five minutes of this view, I let myself get wrapped up in the ocean’s countless lips while everything else became a slight hum in the background. To anyone else on the same freeway, I would have looked like an extremely strange child in the backseat that was gradually losing her mind just staring out the window. Maybe I was, but that didn’t seem to matter to me at the time. What truly mattered was that I was now surrounded by colossal mountains that completely obstructed my view of the ocean and that I wasn’t going to see it until I return from wherever I was going.

Now, everything was green! I began to imagine myself rolling down these enormous hills. I felt like I was becoming Mother Nature or something of the kind. Just imagining myself at the top of one of these mountains yelling out, “I am Mother Nature! Everybody, love me!” It made me chuckle to myself because I realized how ridiculous I seemed in the confinement of my own mind, like the strange child in the back again.

But abruptly, I was hit with this immense sadness as I came to realize that one day these mountains would turn from green to brown, the sand would start reaching further out towards the horizon, and the sky would become one of the fifty shades of grey. I grew ashamed of how I had already contributed to the deterioration of this world with all the little wrappers I carelessly tossed to the ground and my so-called “symbolic” burning of failed tests. Something that was just an image to me some minutes ago was now of extremely great value. I never felt such a great admiration for nature, the development of it, and the mystery as to where it all came from.

We are blessed. Not with the newest iPhone, not with our dream car, not even with our college acceptances. We are blessed with an increment of the universe that nurtures all of our loved ones, a world covered with a never-ending thread that connects “stuff” to more “stuff”, and most importantly, a place to call our home.

I am proudly the strange child in the backseat, and within four hours and nineteen minutes, I found home.