Over the Thanksgiving week I flew to California. Looking down at the earth from 33,000 feet is spectacular. The interaction between land forms and water sheds is easily apparent from that vantage point. The patterns of civilization are clearly controlled and influenced by the availability of water.

It is truly astonishing that this continent was originally mapped by people on foot measuring a huge expanse with relatively tiny tools through thick forests, over steep mountain ranges and across parched deserts. Everything that I surmised by merely looking out an airplane window had already been figured out nearly a century ago from what was essentially an ant’s eye view.

The contrast between the dense occupation of the cities and the nearly uninhabited thousands of acres of the deserts is the most telling of human instinct. We tend to bunch up. We especially like to be shoulder to shoulder along shorelines of water bodies. It occurred to me that the residents of freshwater shorelines have been dealing with water level changes from the very beginning of settlement. Sea level rise is of little concern if you live on a lake. Climate change will most likely lower your lake water level on the whole.

The area of the west coast that I visited does not have to deal with the wintertime challenges that we face here. The temperature may touch freezing occasionally but the roads and sidewalks aren’t shattered by frost heaving and the assault of snow plows.

When I first spent time with my daughter in California, I noticed that people there overall seemed more relaxed than folks back here on the Vineyard. She pointed out that where she lives, everybody isn’t preparing for and dreading the next season. I always contend that I would miss the change of seasons if I lived somewhere warm all year. But I have to say that to justify living in a place where the air temperature varies by over 100 degrees between August and January.