Altitude sickness.

When you drive the New Jersey Turnpike through Linden and Elizabeth, the oil refineries whip past your windows in gray flashes. If you’re heading northbound at night, the Linden Cogeneration Plant rises out of the swamps, a tangle of spidery wires, spindles and smokestacks strung and woven through the darkness. An eternal flame burns atop one of the smokestacks on the southbound side, a lighthouse guiding us toward oblivion.

The sites fill you with an overwhelming sense of dread that we’ve so tortured the earth and the water that they are no longer earth or water. They are just like the gray, indiscernible, fleeting masses of the refineries. They have become their creator.

If you look up, though, as your car hurtles through space, you’ll see jets queuing up to land at EWR. The spectacle lifts you from the gloom. Somehow, you think, we’ve managed to master flight. Surely we can straighten this mess out, if we want to. 

Your head swims with the comings and goings of the passengers traveling twice your speed overhead. Their arrivals and departures whisper about the possibility of better places in better times.

But anyone who has flown into EWR will tell you that it’s no better up there. After hours of breathing in your fellow passengers’ farts, you look out through a dingy window to see a dingy horizon on the other side of the dingy Arthur Kill. In the middle of the Arthur Kill, beside one of the Linden refineries, is an island that bares the name of some distant relative who used to farm salt hay there in a time when salt hay was more useful than petroleum. Only birds live there now. 

And maybe that’s it, you think, as you watch that appendix-shaped spit of land flicker and fade into the night as it’s swept under the jet’s wing. 

Winter has given way. The nesting birds are sleeping just above the gray waterline in the meadowlands. You think, maybe there’s still hope for this species, too.

No service.

I'm not one to complain about the advance of technology. I'm no Luddite. But I do worry about its pervasiveness.

As a kid and a teen, I'd spend at least a week every summer at Scout camp. Like a good portion of the early Millennials, I grew up during the inception of the mobile revolution. If you had a phone -- and only the adults had them -- it didn't get service on top of that mountain in upstate New York.

My parents couldn't keep tabs on me. Later on, I couldn't keep in touch with my girlfriend. And in so many ways, that was the point. For that one week, the cord that connected me to them was cut. I was forced to reckon with reality alone or with my peers. I did more growing up during those one-week intervals than I ever did during a school year.

I remember my first campfire. I was maybe six. I had helped build it, so it was all the more memorable. It was on a Cub Scout camping trip at the defunct KOA campground in my hometown. I found a dilapidated shed and peeled some rotten plywood from its floor and laid it on the woodpile. I remember staring into that fire until I was forced to go to sleep, the splintered edges of that plywood curling into long, orange fingers as the flames leaped into the starry August sky. There was something primal about the way that fire held my attention. I wanted to watch it more than any cartoon. I wanted to keep it going further and longer than any video game.

If you haven't noticed this feeling before, next time you're sitting by a campfire, you will. I don't think it's a feeling that technology ever will be able to conjure. It's profoundly human, and the thought of losing that feeling is profoundly terrifying.