The Measure of it All

General Sherman, the world’s largest tree.

I remember the smell of crushed ants, that strange sour warning, but I don’t remember ever crushing them. On the pathway behind my house, I remember prodding at a little red ant as it crawled up the trunk of an oak tree. Somewhere over my shoulder my brother was collecting rocks. The insect crawled for a few minutes as I watched, an overall-clad toddler hunched over the ant like some benevolent titan. How small it looked. Why was it so small? It didn’t seem so different from me, and I was sure that it thought it was normal sized. I said something then. “Patrick, for ants this tree is the biggest tree ever”. We were small then, but not so different.

I was always obsessed with the scale of the world. Reading through countless nature encyclopedias, I was fascinated by the statistics of it all, every numerical measure of size or quantity or speed, like the whole world was in some strange contest for the biggest, the fastest, and the most. A Walrus is 13 feet long and Polar bear is 10 feet tall standing upright. The biggest animal is the 100 foot blue whale and the lowest point is the Marianas Trench at 7 miles deep. A person is 5 feet and a mile is 5,280. You can go 3 days without water, and 30 days without food. A tortoise lives 150 years and a person gets 80 if they’re lucky.

In those early days of your life, you are desperate for every tool for comparison and analysis that you can possibly absorb, every record, every benchmark, every bellwether, every interesting fact that you’ll too soon forget. You grasp at each fascinating measurement, not just because you’re some dumb kid who likes big bears and turtles, but because you are trying to understand the limits for the world you’ve so newly become a part of. The size and speed and number of it all had not yet lost the arbitrary randomness that you had no choice but to cast aside when you cemented your concrete understanding of this world.

Because how random it all is. The bears, the turtles, the buildings, and mountains, and whales - the seconds, and the lightyears, the lifespans and the worlds fastest man. We forget how small we are and how big, and how little both of those words actually mean. We forget how absurd it is that the World is so large, and how absurd it is at all. We don’t have a choice but to forget the chaos, but it does disappoint me how quickly we forget to be amazed.

Although, sometimes when the light falls just right, and that strange sour smell drifts through the air, I think we all do remember, we are living in a bug’s world.