When Grant Tipton invited me to stay with him he sent two instructions. “Bring me something to stick to my refrigerator.” That was easy; a yellow magnet man with my card. “If you want to go shooting, get here by five.” What did that mean? Paintball? Darts? Quail? I didn’t inquire further. I just showed up before five.

Grant’s a big gun fan about to take his concealed carry test. We drove to a friend’s ranch and he shot a couple hundred rounds. He’s also a bike mechanic at a local shop who owns eleven bikes, a graduate student in natural resource management specializing in controlled fires, a big-time vaper, a couchsurfing host who’s surpassed the one hundred references mark, and a home brewer with five beer taps in his backyard workshop / man cave. We tried them all before he hit the sack, sometime after two a.m.

Like everyone from these parts, Grant’s a Texan first, and also an American. He’s also a patient and generous man, a heck of a lot of fun, and more complex than any one of his interests would indicate.

How will we live tomorrow?

“The planet is going to run out of resources. We’ll all have to gang up on spaceships and colonize new planets. I think we’ll be on Mars by 2050. That will be the first experiment and we’ll go from there.

“We have a 1,000 year lifespan on this planet. Unless we get to the precipice where people change the way we live and the way we use energy. I’m not saying conspiracy theory – the damage to the planet is real. In 200 years industrialization has altered the earth.

“There is hope. Renewable resources and nuclear fusion, they could extend life here. It has to be a global effort. But people don’t feel accountable. The timeframe is so great. We think about our children, our grandchildren, but we don’t think 200 years. The impact one individual can have seems insignificant.

“I want to be optimistic, but it’s difficult.”