Freebird 2010 - 2035

Introduction

My name is Freebird. Yes that’s my real name. I was given this name for a host of reasons, and also as a reflection of the time I was born people would name children after plants or animals or things. There has always been an underlying current within our culture to assign names derived from the world around us. For example, from the plant kingdom people have been named Lily, Violet, Hyacinth and Jasmine, among others. From the animal kingdom you have the legendary name Tiger Woods, for example. And of course from outer space you get names such as Zoe Bowie and Moon Unit Zappa. All this adds to the richness of our experience, and I feel in certain ways proud to be contributing to this cultural repository with the inclusion of my own name.

So how did the name Freebird come about? I thought about that many times over the years.

Free. Bird. Simple.

What were my parents thinking? Well, let’s start with the word “free”. To me free conveys a sense of control over one’s destiny. Or so I thought. Now I realize it’s quite the opposite. It’s about placing one’s destiny squarely in the lap of some higher order. A number of people in my culture would refer to this higher order as God, holy spirit, Jesus, angels, prophets, or the laws of physics. Others might call this pure chance. Or perhaps some may think of this as what James Lovelock called “Gaia”, to denote earth itself as a living organism with us as its temporary inhabitants.

There are so many different names to describe something that in the end is indescribable. The mystics struggled with this since the beginning, or least shortly after humankind moved beyond focusing strictly on where the next meal came from (or how to avoid becoming that next meal). As I went down my own path and understood better what the word free can really mean, I began to understand at the same time what at least some of these mystics seemed to be talking about. Or perhaps stated more accurately – the more they understood, the less they said.

And then there’s the bird part of my name. I know my dad liked jazz of all sorts as I was growing up. I have such vivid memories of waking up, then moments later my father would put a vinyl album on the sound system in the house. It became such a part of my morning ritual, that I just took it as given that I was named after Charlie Byrd, the legendary jazz musician. It wasn’t until years later I discovered Charlie spelled his surname with a “y’. For two days I was crushed. Then it finally occurred to me to ask my dad why I was named Freebird.

He just smiled and told me someday I’ll understand. Terrific. So my Dad was one of those mystic dudes as well!

I also have a last name. But it’s too early in the story for me to share that with you. For now I want to focus on giving a sense what this story is that I’m about to tell. It’s a simple one really. I am beginning a journey starting from Boston and making a large circle around this country I live in what is known as the United States of America. It’s a very large, expansive country. In terms of landmass it’s the fourth largest country in the world behind Russia, Canada and China.

For a very long time, and by various economic measures, the USA was far and away the wealthiest country in the history of the world. It’s still considered the most innovative in many respects, though other countries have achieved similar levels and in certain areas of innovation have surpassed the United States. But the lines across what we would refer to as countries at the same time have become increasingly blurred.

I speak to you of this journey that I’m starting tomorrow. The year is 2035. It’s an important year in my life, for I just turned 75 years old today. And I made a choice to revisit a journey I made exactly 25 years ago, the day after my fiftieth birthday in June of 2010. It was the culmination of a 30 year dream for me, to simply get in my vehicle and just go explore around the country. All told, this ended up being an 11,000 mile journey.

And I loved every second of it.

And I’ve remained so grateful every waking moment since then.

So what is special about this journey is this: By retracing my voyage of 25 years ago, I’d like to describe what I experienced back then in contrast with how the world has either changed or remained the same today. I want to reflect not just on the complex aspects of our society, but equally important the day-to-day. Especially these seemingly trivial elements of what make up our lives, and yet those same elements are the ones from which we derive the full meaning of who we are.

My journey today begins in the Boston area, where I have lived for the majority of my years as I was raising my children living in a pristine suburban community about 25 miles due west of the city.

By many reporting standards, the quality of life we lived was simply off the charts. According to traditional definitions we possessed affluence in the form of a large home, a large piece of property, upon which was a very large lawn of perfectly cut grass. The homes in our neighborhood were located far enough from each other that we typically

saw our neighbors around Halloween as they went trick-or-treating with their kids. As the kids grew older, that last form of community bonding gradually faded away as well. Of course, there was the occasional neighbor sighting at the mailbox, which I continue to treasure to this day.

Life seemed simpler back then in 2010. Yes, I know every generation says the same thing about the times of their youth as contrasted with their adult world. Yet in many respects life as we knew it then was far more complex and destructive than it is today. Something clearly changed.

And this change had an extraordinarily transformative effect across the entire planet.

When I began my cross-USA journey in 2010, we as a society were in a mixed state of fear and denial over what we’ve been doing to our planet. While historically there have been forward and ancient thinkers whose vocabulary regarded the earth as a sacred organism, those voices were quickly lost within the torrent of audio and visual information overload that permeated the waking day. Over time this overload factor spread to all the remaining senses – taste, touch and smell and virtually any aspect of how our systems and electrical fields interact with the world around us.

Somehow we lost sight of an intimate sacred knowledge that had been with our fore fathers and mothers, so to speak, since the beginning of time. And yet inside we felt there was still something very precious. Hiding. Waiting. Hoping.

There was a connection.

Soaring Birds as Guides

Somewhere around eastern Kentucky I realized something important. It was pretty much right in front of me all along, but being a middle- aged male, I guess it’s a classic example of not noticing something right in front of me, while easily being able to discern the slightest, most insignificant changes taking place at the periphery.

It began with my noticing a baby hawk flying above the highway, with Mom nearby gently guiding him (?) along. I thought about the sense of freedom these wonderful beings have through a combination of immense control and letting go. The more I thought about it, the more I noticed there were magnificent soaring birds almost everywhere I drove. I speculated at first they hovered above the roads out of boredom, or due to some variant of convection currents resulting from the heat of asphalt and cars providing sustained updrafts for the birds to fly effortlessly. As I noticed more birds along the way, at times I envisioned they were

doing some form of square dancing. Everyone knew what to do and when, and it all appeared so relaxed and natural.

I also thought about the Israelites spending forty years in the wilderness as they were in exile from Egypt. An entire book in the bible was written about this, yet unlike the “exo-dus of ancient times to me this was something more akin to an “intro-dus” as the journey was most clearly within. I thought about the cloud that guided the Israelites during the day, along with the fire that did the same during the night. I also kept wondering why it took them forty years to get to their destination, but here I was at age fifty still well along my journey with no end in sight.

Can it be the whole story was an allegory for the journey each of our souls has to make in order to grow, evolve and to know that overarching presence we might refer to as God?

Nope.

I was brought back to the reality of 2035, as a swarm of aero-bikers came barreling around the bend. This was the lighter-than-air version of the Hell’s Angels, who in their frustration to see the majority of bikers consisted of tough-looking but mild accountants, teachers, lawyers and gynecologists, sought out ever more radical ways to define themselves. Hence the birth of the aero-biker.

These were winglets that attached to the body via a kevlar harness, and were very strong and light. The early versions were like one- person gliders, and were already being used back in 2010 by people like extreme base-jumpers who would free fall off cliffs several thousand feet before opening up their parachutes (alas, not always in time as this was a very high-risk sport to put it mildly).

The next-level evolution came in the form of tiny rocket propulsion systems that generated very high speeds quickly, but were difficult to control. Sometimes a daring young man in his flying wing machine would hit the throttle too quickly only to end up transformed instantly into a two-dimensional being at one with the side of a mountain. This phase didn’t last very long, but proved critical to jump-start innovation into very light, ultra-responsive propulsion systems.

What finally opened up the highways (and the skies above) to the aero- bikers was an Indonesian farmer/part-time-engineer who rode the 350mph Shanghai maglev train back in his youth, and kept wondering how to apply this to aircraft. One day he realized how simple this would be, as he built a small prototype. With his loyal dog strapped onboard, albeit unwillingly, the small aircraft with dog on board gently rose, arced and took off over the horizon returning smoothly to where the journey began. This was all done via radio control, although had the dog been more relaxed he would have been able to control the craft

directly using thought-linkage technologies that were perfected over the past ten years. The owner felt it wise to do human backup here, as the dog had a tendency to see a creature running by and quickly bolt off to chase it. Doing this from an altitude of two-thousand feet would have been a disaster.

Soon word spread of this invention. The farmer/engineer also had a cousin with a background in international patent law. So he and the cousin soon became wealthy beyond measure, while their technology became deployed across all sorts of light, air-based transport systems. Including those pretty cool-looking, lighter-than-air winged gizmos the aero-bikers were riding and which broke my concentration as I gazed at the fine soaring birds in the sky.

Nyack, New York

@mikebalin Jun-04-2010 12:54:37 PM Started my cross USA trip today from Stow, MA. Enjoying iced coffee in surprisingly lovely downtown Nyack, New York.

My game plan in 2010 was simple enough. Leave Boston the day after my fiftieth birthday. Do a big clockwise loop around the country, as much as possible avoid places I’ve already seen, and make sure to get to New Orleans, Las Vegas (where my wife was to join me for a few days) and Seattle, from where I’d meet my brother Jeff’s family. From Seattle the plan was for Jeff and me to continue back to Yellowstone, where he also worked three summers after I did. I’ll spare you the suspense here, and just say all that pretty much ended up happening. As I got closer to my departure date, I actually planned less and less to where I usually booked a room online at most one or two nights out, bought an out-of-production model GPS system which I used to estimate how long I’d be driving each day, and made sure to drive during daylight so that I could see everything. And yes, I mean everything.

Each hill, turn, farm, fence, on-ramp, construction site (and there were thousands along the way thanks to a frantic government effort to try to recover from the Big Recession of 2008), strip mall, ghetto and state house I passed by filled me with remarkable peace. Peace in knowing I was fulfilling a dream of more than 30 years. Peace in knowing at last that by trusting in uncertainty one finds certainty to be its most complete. Peace in finally gliding and soaring along the currents of life as the free bird I had become.

All this is a prelude to telling you about Nyack. Why Nyack? What was surprising then in 2010, and why would I want to talk about it now in 2035?

The first time I visited, I was learning how to use the GPS and learned there was a Starbucks somewhere down there just after the west side of the mile-plus long Tappan Zee Bridge spanning the Hudson

River. The first time I stopped there I had a small, and what I thought, very fuel efficient car that used a petroleum-based substance we at one time called gasoline. Kids today sometimes joke about this smelly, explosive liquid that not only powered vehicles but was embedded in most every possible manufactured item used by society. As an "old-timer" seventy-five years of age, kids laugh when I tell them this was how we got around till not all that long ago. I guess this is much like hearing people a generation or two older than me describe life without running water or electricity in their homes.

I guess I wanted you to get some sense of appreciation for how the ZPF drive technology your transport vehicle uses today so completely changed the way we not just get from place to place, but also our entire relationship to energy. When I was a child, and for perhaps ten generations before me, fossil fuels such as wood, charcoal, petroleum and natural gas powered the human-based motive energy of our planet. These reserves came from millions of generations of life and death, anaerobically decomposed as concentrated reserves of energy derived from just one source.

The sun.

Yup.

All that energy we used came from the sun, which itself was powered by fusing hydrogen atoms together in such a frantic dance of joy that matter literally vanished, transformed and burst across the void traveling 93 million miles in about 8 minutes to reach us as sunlight. The sun today is dying a very slow death that will take several billions of years to reach its climax as a supernova. By then both you the reader and I the scribe will long before then have had our molecular structures combined and recombined to where we and all that ever existed will contribute at a physical level to bringing down the sun’s final curtain. Or more to the point, we at some miniscule level will be a part of the curtain it self.

Which brings me back to Nyack. Finally. Never mind that you’ll just have to wait a bit before we talk about that cool ZPF drive technology stuff. Let alone discuss what GPS is, and how all it took was a 16- year old hacker with an immersive holo-fractal transcendence drive (or "hofrac" as they’re commonly known), a fertile mind and a couple of unclaimed hours to cause twenty-four geostationary satellites to be zapped into stardust. It’s been more than ten years now, and experts continue to scratch their heads as to how this could have possibly happened.

The Nyack I visited in 2010 had been a vibrant community that saw its first and perhaps only glory in lockstep with the rise of riverboat commerce along the Hudson River more than one-hundred and fifty years

ago. Yet, visiting the large town/small city in 2010 I was struck by how vibrant it remained in yet a completely different way. There were many immigrants there. A testament to the town’s origins. And there was also a robust earthy culture there which I was not aware of. Perhaps this was a counterculture center in the 1960’s. I don’t know. What I saw and felt was a nucleus centered on sustainability or what we called "green" practices back then. I found it refreshing and uplifting to see this. And I hoped to see it more and more as my journey progressed.

This time I passed through Nyack to see how this green focus evolved over the course of twenty-five years. What I saw did not surprise me. As with much of the country, what had been macadam surfaced streets for gasoline powered vehicles now provided the foundation for tiered micro farms that produced close to seventy-percent of town’s food. The remaining streets had long ago been replaced with solar-inductive road surfaces which enabled every square inch of the road surface to produce and store electricity. Efficiency rates long ago surpassed ninety-percent for both generation and storage, so there was now a 100% renewable-based infrastructure to provide light, heating, cooling and vehicle-based transport throughout the town.

And it was quiet.

Gasoline-powered vehicles still existed. And while the fuel to power them could be obtained, especially in more impoverished countries, the formerly giant oil companies of 2010 quickly shifted their focus toward ZPF distribution (there’s that term again!) as their profit margins went up a hundredfold with this emergent technology. So the problem now is gasoline-powered vehicles are range limited to only a few hundred miles, as what were called “stations” are now very hard to find. This reminds me much like how drive-in theaters which were ubiquitous during my childhood are now designated national historic landmarks staffed by the National Park Service.