In the late 1970s, journalist Gail Sheehy helped a lot of people understand their lives with her book “Passages.” Alas, I was not one of them. I tried to read it, but didn’t get far before setting it aside for my usual fare, a murder mystery. In those years I was more into detection than introspection.

The subtitle of Sheehy’s book is “Predictable Crises in Adult Life.” She describes those crises using the framework of decades: The Trying 20s, The Catch 30s, The Forlorn 40s, The Refreshed (or Resigned) 50s.

The Library of Congress listed “Passages” as one of the ten most influential books of modern times. But that was then. A thirtieth anniversary edition of the book was issued in 2006. In the new introduction, Sheehy (who died just last year) wrote she’d been asked to address what had changed since the book’s initial publication. 

“What hasn’t changed?” she asked rhetorically. “Passages” is steeped in the culture and mores of the ’70s. An apparently younger reviewer on the website goodreads.com declared, “I’m SO glad I didn’t grow up then. [As a woman] I’m so grateful for my ‘freedom.’”

My own adult passages did not coincide with the decades but occurred like clockwork every fourteen years with a major event in my life. At age twenty-one, I married my high school sweetheart, which he observed much later, seemed at the time “like the thing to do.” The next fourteen years included an amicable divorce, much searching and discovery.

At age thirty-five I married my soulmate, John, and settled into fourteen years of maximum productivity, a full life. When I was forty-nine, John suffered a brain stem stroke, resulting in total paralysis and catapulting us both into an era of disruption and deeper discovery. Fourteen years later, when I was sixty-three, John’s death coincided with a sense of my own maturity.

Now at seventy-seven, it’s not a personal event but a global pandemic that has ushered in what is most likely my final fourteen. I don’t know if that’s fourteen years, months, weeks, or days. Google says the number fourteen in Chinese tradition means “guaranteed death.” Well, we’re all guaranteed that. 

I do know that I’m afraid, but not of death, which Jane Goodall at age eighty-seven describes as “the next great adventure.” My fear comes with the certainty that the next fourteen years are critical for the life of our mother, Earth. She and I may be on a parallel path, and her health is already more fragile than mine. Climate crisis is not some day. Climate crisis is now. As recent months proved, our four seasons now are autumn, winter, spring, and hell. Moreover, hell is sneaking across the boundaries, invading spring and autumn. 

In the darkest of black humor columns, New Yorker writer Dennard Dayle suggests, “You’re not looking at the death of the human race. Just the death of the  human dream.” I disagree. We may be out of time, but we’re not out of opportunity. And opportunity offers passages to dreams, to hope.

We have the opportunity of choice. We each make hundreds of choices every day. Many, if not most, affect the whole of creation. When we make choices as captives of a consumer culture instead of as free children of a beloved Mother Earth, we diminish the dream. Paraphrasing theosophy writer Alice Bailey: “Let Reality govern my every thought, and Truth be the heart of my life. For so it must be for all of humanity. Please help me do ‘my part.’”

99,999. When I spotted the numbers on my car’s odometer, I pulled off the highway onto a rural road. I wanted to be out of traffic so I could celebrate 100,000 by honking the horn, a family tradition.

When I was growing up, my family never had new cars. High mileage — not miles per gallon but miles travelled — was the norm. Whenever the odometer was about to line up the zeroes, the driver would alert all aboard. We’d wait in hushed excitement. Time itself slowed as the odometer rolled out a perfect symmetry of ovals. The horn would honk and onward we’d travel, a milestone reached with jubilation and relief that the old sedan had managed to transport us across yet another ten thousand miles. 

I was a teen by the time my parents managed to achieve the status of actually having two cars — both used, of course — in their two-car garage. My mother wryly explained that we needed a car that started so we could push the one that didn’t. It was sometimes tricky to tell which was which.

My current vehicle — the one that just turned 100,000 — had fewer than thirty miles on the odometer when I bought it ten years ago. It’s a 2009 model, a special order that sat unclaimed on the dealer’s lot for two years. The original buyer apparently suffered an economic setback and forfeited their deposit. It still had the new-car warranty when a neighbor tipped me off that it was there.

“You’re the only person who could manage to buy a two-year-old new car,” a friend observed.

Those 100,000 miles are only a portion of my travels over the past decade. For three years I also owned a camper van in which my dogs and I crossed multiple states, West to East, North to South. What adventures we had! But like many RV owners, I ultimately decided maintaining the van was more burden than blessing. 

Down to one vehicle now, I ceremoniously honked the horn as the zeroes rolled into place. The road was quintessentially rural: a field of corn stalks growing tall and green on one side, a wooden fence looming tall and brown on the other. The fence shielded the sight but not the smell of one of Okanogan Valley’s more odoriferous crops, cannabis.

Instead of heading back to the highway, I meandered along the backroad, no particular destination in mind. The skunky smell of marijuana gave way to the pleasant perfume of ripening apples and pears. As I drove slowly alongside orchards, I thought about another measure of travel on my dashboard — the speedometer.

A friend recently remarked how time passed so slowly when we were children but races by as we age. Just like the speedometer. Drive slower than 10 mph, and you feel like you’re barely moving. But over 70? Hey, wait! Slow the heck down! I can see 80 on the horizon. 

With aging comes the dilemma of when to give up driving. I hope to see the zeroes line up at least a few more times before I get there.