2020: An Earth Odyssey

Ah, 2020. That crazy year of Bizarro-Pax-Americana.

To wit…

A large, three-sided metal monolith was discovered in the remote barrens of the Utah desert, right out of Arthur C. Clarke’s book and Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Wildlife officials spotted the object while counting bighorn sheep during a flyover in the southeastern portion of the state. The monolith was 10 to 12 feet high and there were no indications as to who put in there and why.

The ongoing conclusions ranged from a minimalist avante-garde style artist wanting to homage Clarke’s novel, or Kubrick’s film, or that it was an installation designed by forces from otherworldly sources to test our resolve in one of the worst years of our lifetimes.  Some folks called for Utah authorities to leave it alone, even though it was illegal to install structures and art pieces without authorization on federally managed public lands. It appeared some didn’t want to take the chance we might inadvertently summon a demon or set off a signal to an alien invasion.

The original monoliths in Clarke’s book were artifacts of an alien civilization designed with the purpose of advancing intelligent human life. In Kubrick’s movie, the first monolith’s discovery is famously depicted where a tribe of proto-humans come upon the black rectangular rock, resulting in the now legendary scene of a hominid man-ape first learning to use tools by figuring out a bone could be a club, tossing said bone up into the air, then a satellite transplants the image and reveals the passage of time and the development of progressive sapience.

By the by, most folks think sentience is the thing they’re talking about when they’re defining the monkey brained differences between humans and ‘so-called’ lower life forms. It’s not. Sentience is the ability to experience the world through senses. Most animals do plenty of that. Sapience is the ability to know things, and to reason and abstract and extrapolate within those sensory perceptions. I’ve used the word ‘sentient’ a number of times in this chronicle. That’s just me being a lazy wordsmith, because more people are familiar with the ‘sentient’ term than the ‘sapient’ one. Just thought I’d point that out. You sapient little homo sapien, you. :)

In 2001’s fairly decent cinematic sequel 2010, Roy Scheider comes upon another much larger monolith out near Europa, one of Jupiter’s mysterious moons long studied by astronomers as a potential source of life in our solar system. Once again, the artifact mysteriously directs the course of human evolution. In the original, Dave Bowman turned into a star child of sorts, a being of unlimited power and mastery over time and space (in all fairness, trying to interpret Kubrick’s ultimate cinematic intent in that wacky, psychedelic. sixties heyday tends to be a fool’s errand, which is apparently the way he liked it). In the sequel, Jupiter becomes a second star within our solar system, humans are told by their unseen alien benefactors to stay away from Europa, and they can have all the rest of the planets in the system.

In the 2001 lexicon, the monoliths serve as catalysts for a sapient jump forward for humanity. As such, it was posed the message from the artist who set the metal monolith out in Utah could’ve been it was high time for us to make the next leap of intelligence in our evolution.

The artist wasn’t wrong about that much.

If only we had a true monolith to kick start our stagnation.

At the time, I was derring-do about it, and I thought maybe somebody should go out there and knock on the thing. It might’ve been worth risking demons or murderous, Daisy-singin’ HAL-2000 style super computers if there was a chance we’d get a real time directive from on high. We needed all the help we could get then, and given current world affairs, perhaps even more now, from any sources willing to lend a hand, be they star children or Europans (that’s Europans, kids, not Europeans). With the perfect storm of 2020 and its deadly combination of pandemic and a new ascendancy of American racism, I’d have taken the risk of a monolith’s mystery over more of the same all day long and twice on Sunday.

Eventually, someone did indeed knock on the thing. The monolith disappeared, leaving behind only a few rivets and a triangular piece of metal. Adventure photographer Ross Bernards was out photographing the thing, when four other guys showed up and pushed it over. They dismantled it and took away the refuge in a wheelbarrow, retreating as covertly as they’d arrived. Back then, I’d have flipped a coin as to whether they were diehard desert conservationists, government agents, or American citizens who felt threatened by its mere existence. In that day and age, what with all the raging paranoia bleeding throughout our society, the latter seemed far more likely than men in black or concerned naturalists.

As it turned out, the coin flip wasn’t necessary. Two extreme athletes versed in wilderness conservation took responsibility for dismantling the Utah monolith. Sylvan Christensen and Andy Lewis had large online followings for their social media posts regarding their BASE jumping and slack-lining hobbies. In videos posted on Instagram and YouTube, they admitted they were part of the group that pushed down the monolith and took it away. Christensen said the land wasn’t prepared for the influx of tourist looky-loos and that rangers couldn’t hope to keep up in dealing with the impact of curious Instagrammers. While his group supported art and artists, they believed it was an ethical failure to cut into the surrounding bedrock rock to erect the monolith and moreover, the damage to the wilds around it including litter and off-trail blazing caused by internet sensationalism and tourism would’ve been worse. Not unfair points, but damn, way to kill the romance, dudes.

Only a few days afterward, a similar monolith was reported nearly halfway around the world in the Romanian city of Piatra Neamt, close to the Petrodava Dacian Fortress archeological landmark. The new monolith was erected on the Bâtca Doamnei plateau, near an archaeological site overlooking the city. It was about 12 feet tall and constructed somewhat poorly, welded together shoddily with a reflective metal that refracted light and exhibited wavy, looped markings on its surface. It disappeared as fast as it had appeared.

Later that same week, yet another silvery, metallic monolith appeared, this one erected in the same haunted and vaunted Santa Lucia Mountain range I’ve mentioned before, back when the Dolan Fire was laying waste to Big Sur. It was found atop one of the switchback hills of Pine Mountain in Atascadero, California, a little cow-kickin’ town of which I happen to be readily acquainted. Atascadero is a nice enough central coast hamlet, but it’s rarely a place of significant controversy, nor is it often an art destination.

Here’s where that particular monolith incident gets wonky, and as it happens, pertinent to our ongoing story of 2020’s woes.