Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today.
Ashley Stimpson | Longreads | November 5, 2026 | 18 minutes (4,985 words)
In the months leading up to the nation’s bicentennial, the rickety wooden wheels of covered wagons began to roll in every corner of the United States—from the evergreen forests of Washington and windswept prairies of North Dakota to the granite peaks of Maine and palm tree-lined suburbs of Central Florida.
Over the next year, the Bicentennial Wagon Train (BWT) would commemorate the founding of the country by performing the reverse of Westward Expansion, as five caravans—eventually made up of as many as 300 horse-drawn wagons—snaked their way toward Valley Forge, where they would arrive on July 4, 1976, just in time to celebrate America’s 200th birthday. Along the way, the wagon trains would stop in hundreds of cities and towns, where residents could watch teams of wagoneers construct historically accurate encampments and perform a musical revue.
If so moved, citizens could also sign a so-called rededication scroll, to recommit themselves to building a more perfect union.
“To commemorate this nation’s Bicentennial, we hereby dedicate ourselves anew to the precepts of our Founding Fathers,” each signer promised, inking their name on a sheath of scratchy parchment paper. Large community dinners and solemn ceremonies were planned around these vows to democracy; in some cities, whole elementary schools and entire churches lined up to sign. To accommodate those not on the wagons’ path, scroll-signing centers were set up in Holiday Inns from coast to coast.
The scrolls were then loaded onto the Mayflower moving van that accompanied each train and carried toward Pennsylvania, where organizers planned to have them microfilmed and placed in an aluminum time capsule interred in the Pennsylvania dirt for the next 100 years. In 2076, organizers of the Bicentennial Wagon Train imagined, future Americans would unearth these scrolls and feel a deep sense of appreciation and admiration for the Americans of the past.
Altogether, 22 million people (a tenth of the population at the time) signed approximately 917,000 scrolls, a stack of paper as high as a 20-story building. By all accounts these scrolls really did end up in Pennsylvania, where President Gerald Ford signed one, right before he signed the decree declaring Valley Forge the newest national park.
And then, somehow, amid the fanfare, fireworks, and period costumes, the scrolls went missing. Poof—gone. Fifty years later, just where this time capsule of Born-Again Americans ended up remains a mystery.
Roughly nine out of every 10 time capsules go missing—lost, stolen, or simply forgotten—according to Paul Hudson, a retired Georgia State University history professor and the cofounder of the International Time Capsule Society (ITCS), a global registry of time capsules around the world.
“There’s all this interest in time capsules, but people tend to forget about them the next day,” Hudson says. There’s a good reason for this, he believes, beyond just our bad memories and short attention spans. While time capsules are ostensibly planted for posterity, for the people of the future, in reality, “they’re actually about us,” Hudson says, the people of right now. We like the heady buzz of seeing our trivial existence through the exotic lens of the future; we crave the intoxicating but ultimately imaginary thrill of designing our own legacy.
After all, a box of 22 million strangers’ signatures wouldn’t dazzle so much as bore.
We’ve metaphorized the term so completely that “time capsule” can mean essentially anything from the past—a stuck drawer or the pockets of a winter coat. But the kind I’m concerned with are the intentional ones: the deliberate, brazen memorials to our own eras and experiences. In this sense, we’re all building a time capsule of sorts—a social media grid, a body of work, a house full of kids—some kind of bulwark that might stand between us and oblivion. It’s why a journalist, no matter how many hard-won or weighty stories she files, hears the same question over and over: “When are you going to write your book?” As a writer, I’ve certainly entertained my own delusions of permanence.
We like the heady buzz of seeing our trivial existence through the exotic lens of the future; we crave the intoxicating but ultimately imaginary thrill of designing our own legacy.
As the country celebrates its semiquincentennial, countless time capsules have been and will be lovingly lowered into the ground. Most of them will never be seen again. And yet, we remain compelled to bury artifacts of our existence, evidence of our lives, unembarrassed by our desire to be remembered fondly—or simply remembered at all.
In 1974, Gloria Boylan was 26, a ski instructor and new mother living in Haverhill, Massachusetts, when her brother-in-law told her about a weird rumor going around their riding club: something about a bunch of covered wagons, a kind of reverse Manifest Destiny, President Gerald Ford, a new national park.
It was weird but true: The Bicentennial Commission of Pennsylvania, with help from a Philadelphia ad firm, would dole out wagons, equipment, and even period clothes for the riders. Five segments of the Bicentennial Wagon Train would retrace historic pioneer roads like the Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, and the Natchez Trace. Each would leave on a different schedule, to pick up states one-by-one as it rolled from the edges of the continent. Every night, the train would trundle into a new town like a patriotic circus, complete with charismatic animals, costumed performers, and musical entertainment.
“The most ridiculous thing in the world,” Boylan remembers thinking. “It was nuts.”
But a few months later, when Boylan found out Massachusetts was looking for teamsters—hobbyists who knew how to drive draft animals—her incredulousness softened into interest. She was a lifelong “horse person” who drove hayrides on her family’s farm. Her father-in-law had a team of mules they could use. The country would only turn 200 once, she thought, and an effort this momentous would surely be remembered for decades to come.
Every night, the train would trundle into a new town like a patriotic circus, complete with charismatic animals, costumed performers, and musical entertainment.
“We knew this was history,” she says. “This is something that we need to do.”
So, on May 13, 1976, when the train from Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire arrived in Massachusetts, Boylan, her husband Bill, and her 3-year-old daughter Kelly left Haverhill in a Conestoga covered wagon pulled by four mules. Their bloodhound, Mr. Bojangles, sat shotgun.
Fifty years later, Boylan laughs gently when I ask her to describe herself at that age. “Feisty,” is what she settles on, her blue eyes hazy with nostalgia. We’re sitting in the sunny atrium of an Embassy Suites, surrounded by a half dozen veterans of the BWT who’ve once again traveled to Valley Forge for the Fourth of July—this time by charmless interstate.
Hoosiers Mark and Marcia Comer were newly married high school sweethearts when they jumped aboard, driving one of more than 200 independent wagons that would eventually join the train. Dave Hutchinson, an undergrad at Utah State, took a job as tutor for one of the Idaho teamster’s kids and ended up seeing 46 states in a year. Jerry James was a Vietnam veteran and Penn State graduate student when he was appointed stage manager of the Wagon Train Show; James rode the train with his wife Kathleen, a performer on the Northwest Route, all the way from the Peace Arch in Blaine, Washington, to Valley Forge. Brad Frye skipped the last half of his freshman year of high school to join the train in Maine.
“You can’t let school get in the way of your education,” Frye recites to the quick laughter of his old friends. They’ve brought whole lifetimes of joy and sorrow, crow’s feet, and gray hair intertwined with the delicate threads of hearing aids to Pennsylvania, as well as a pile of weathered journals, yellowed souvenirs, and photo albums that lay on the table between us.
For the next few hours they recount some of the most indelible moments of their now long lives, from those surreal weeks and months when time didn’t just stand still, it stretched backward. When their only obligation was to cosplay pioneers for the good of the nation.
They hooked up, got married, got pregnant, or got high. They cared for sick horses and pried wagon wheels out of the mud. They suffered through 16-hour days and endured all kinds of weather. They had squirt gun fights and run-ins with animal rights activists. They slept in tents, RVs, and the wagons themselves. They rolled through capital cities and far-flung hamlets, an itinerant symphony of hoof beats and jangling reins. Everywhere they went, they were greeted as heroes. Waving from parade routes, posing for photos, sitting for interviews.
“We signed autographs by the hundreds,” says Mark, for the throngs of Americans who turned out to greet them each night. “People thought we were celebrities, true cowboys.”
And, of course, they collected the scrolls. Personal pledges of allegiance that would soon be presented to the president himself.
These wagoneers weren’t just living history, they believed, they were making it. “So your children can tell their children”—that was the official motto of the Bicentennial Wagon Train.
But the opposite happened. Not only did the scrolls vanish, but “the Bicentennial Wagon Train seems to have disappeared,” says James. These days—besides a doleful Facebook group and a smattering of Google results—there’s hardly any evidence of all that fanfare, hope, and patriotism or the idealistic young people who carried it across an entire continent.
“When I was a kid, I was interested in buried treasure,” Hudson told me. “I would bury something and then forget about it almost immediately. We’re constantly moving on.”
A forgotten time capsule inspired Paul Hudson to dedicate his entire professional life to their study. In 1970, Hudson was a shaggy-haired undergraduate at Oglethorpe College, a small school in northeast Atlanta with declining enrollment and dwindling endowment. Behind the college’s imposing gothic façade, paint peeled, dust gathered, and whole floors had been roped off and abandoned.
Among them was the basement of Hearst Hall, a once ornate building named for the philanthropist mother of the media tycoon. One night, indulging in a little light trespassing, Hudson and a friend tiptoed down the steps, their flashlight beams slashing through the inky darkness. They found themselves standing before an imposing steel door, etched with the following message:
WE DEPEND ON THE LAWS OF THE COUNTY OF DEKALB, THE STATE OF GEORGIA AND THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES … AND UPON THE SENSE OF SPORTSMANSHIP OF POSTERITY FOR THE CONTINUED PRESERVATION OF THIS VAULT UNTIL THE YEAR 8113.
The Crypt of Civilization had been designed to hold the accumulated knowledge of 6,000 years of human history. On the other side of that steel door from a young Paul Hudson sat a former swimming pool that held a veritable thrift store of human achievement and ephemera: microfilms of the Bible, the Koran, the Iliad, and the script of Gone with the Wind. Recordings of Roosevelt, Stalin, Popeye the Sailor Man, a champion hog caller, and birdsong. A container of beer, a set of Lincoln Logs, a pair of lady’s stockings. A screwdriver, a flyswatter, a coat hanger, a grapefruit corer, a Donald Duck figurine.
Dedicated with great pomp and circumstance in 1940, memory of the crypt had faded almost as soon as it was sealed. Even Hudson forgot about it the moment he reemerged into the light of day. There was a Vietnam War protest going on in the quad; he had homework to do.
But almost 20 years later, when he took a job as the university’s registrar, he remembered that night and the strange silver door. He learned he had stumbled on the country’s largest time capsule—but not its first.
That title belonged to the 1876 Centennial Safe, a stunt pulled off by Anna Deihm, a Civil War soldier’s widow. A magazine publisher hoping to boost subscriptions, Deihm filled a fireproof safe with vaguely relevant miscellanies—a temperance manual, an inkwell that had allegedly belonged to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a directory of more than 80,000 government employees—locked it up, and threw away the key. Okay, not really, but close. She gave it to her friend Emma. Then she gifted the safe to Congress. They rejected it, unimpressed.
Deihm died in 1911 and her 5,000-pound time capsule was eventually chucked under the East Portico of the White House and forgotten. It was 1971 before anyone remembered the widow’s weird cabinet that was due to be opened in 1976, and by then, both the key and combination were both missing. A scramble ensued. A safecracker was called. A man in Florida saw an article in the newspaper and thought about that antique key his Great Aunt Emma had left behind.
But on July 1, 1976, as Gerald Ford unboxed Deihm’s time capsule, the crowd of journalists and onlookers gathered was less than moved by its contents. As the president removed photograph after photograph of unidentified bureaucrats, they giggled at the banality of it all.
“It’s just nothing after nothing,” Jill Lepore said on a recent episode of the podcast 99% Invisible. “I mean, really, it’s a dud.”
Or, as an Onion headline written some 20 years later would announce: “Newly unearthed time capsule just full of useless old crap.”
But Deihm’s was merely the first in a long line of time capsules, though they weren’t called that until George Edward Pendray, head of the PR department at the Westinghouse Corporation, coined the phrase in the late 1930s. Looking to show up industry competitors like General Electric and General Motors at the 1939 World’s Fair, Pendray schemed up an audacious project: a rocket-shaped capsule they would shoot into the earth, a ready-made museum of science and technology for the people of the very distant future.
At first, Pendray, a sci-fi geek raised on Orson Welles and Jules Verne, called his invention a “time bomb.” But as Europe descended into war, Pendray decided to soften his rhetoric, but not his ambition. In addition to the normal heap of sundries, he filled his capsule—made of a proprietary material capable of withstanding the next five millennia—with microfilm that held 10 million words and 1,000 images, as well as, smartly, instructions for how to build a microfilm reader.
At noon on September 23, 1938, the capsule was interred in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, to the solemn peal of a gong that had been borrowed from a nearby Chinese restaurant. Viewable through a periscope for the duration of the fair, the capsule caught the imagination of a 5-year-old Carl Sagan, who would one day go on to launch his own time capsule, with his “golden records” on the Voyager spacecrafts.
Today, Pendray may be the man most associated with the time capsule, but he actually cadged the idea from an eccentric Southerner named Thornwell Jacobs, creator of Oglethorpe’s Crypt of Civilization.
“Jacobs was a man of obsession,” Hudson says from the corner of an overstuffed leather couch in the vestibule of Hearst Hall, one floor above the crypt he discovered in his 20s. His blonde hair has gone white; it’s trimmed into a tidy crew cut. Jacobs, Hudson tells me, was obsessed with the distant past—the early American colonialists, the Egyptian pyramids, the origin of the cosmos—as well as the not-so-distant one: the death of his mother during his birth, the Antebellum South, and the college called Oglethorpe University, where his grandfather had been a professor. That iteration of the college had been shuttered in 1862 after investing heavily in Confederate War bonds. In 1915 Jacobs resurrected it in Atlanta, a living memorial to his grandfather as well as the founder of Georgia, James Edward Oglethorpe.
In an Atlanta Constitution article, Jacobs wrote that by reopening the school, he was “determined to build a new life on a ruined life; to make the future nobler than the past.”
Jacobs also fixated on the future. Namely, ensuring that people could access and appreciate his pet ideas and institutions: the promise of science; the supremacy of the white race; his beloved Oglethorpe University. In a way, he was successful on the last point—the crypt is by far the most famous thing about the school.
Jacobs spent four years gathering items for the crypt and ginning up PR. Imagining the repository as a kind of King Tut’s tomb, the subject of some future archeological expedition, he wanted it sealed for a mind-bending span of time. Reckoning that 6,177 years had passed since the dawn of the Egyptian calendar, Jacobs decided to close his crypt for another 6,177 years: 8113 AD.
And so, at the precise midpoint of human history—May 1940—the Crypt of Civilization was bolted shut.
Eighty-six years later, I stood in front of it with Hudson. Once nine feet and five inches tall, “The Great Door of Stainless Steel,” made in Ohio, shipped via railroad, and received in a special ceremony overseen by the president of RCA, had shrunk a couple feet in the intervening decades, thanks to the installation of a fiberglass drop ceiling. Under the glare of fluorescent lights, its two-paragraph plea to the future was difficult to read. An orange trash can, glowing EXIT sign, and wall-mounted hand-sanitizing dispenser loomed indecorously in its periphery.
“How I wish I could be with you when you open this vault!” Jacobs had written to the people of 8113, expressing that universal human longing: an endless, insatiable desire for relevance, the ability to somehow be a guest at our own funeral.
Here’s how Jacobs imagined it would all go down, writing in Scientific American:
The time is 8113. The air channels of the radio-newspaper and world television broadcasting system have been cleared for an important announcement. . . . In the Appalachian Mountains near the eastern coast of the North American continent is a crypt that has been sealed since A.D. 1936. Carefully its contents have been guarded since that date, and today is the day of the opening. Prominent men from all over the world assemble at the site to witness the breaking of the seal that will disclose to a waiting world the civilization of an ancient and almost forgotten people.
Almost forgotten, I think, staring at this outlandish steel door shrinking beneath lurid fluorescent lights, trying not to laugh.
Two years after his crypt was sealed, Jacobs’s ill-timed attempt to open a medical school at Oglethorpe almost bankrupted the school once again. The board of trustees forced him to step down as president, leaving the monuments to his legacy in someone else’s hands.
The Bicentennial Wagon Train was an unmitigated disaster. The plan to fund the project with corporate sponsorship fell more than $5 million short of its goal. Memorabilia sales also lost money. Equine influenza tore through the wagon trains; freak snowstorms and tornados waylaid others.
When they finally made it to Valley Forge, instead of the triumphant welcome they expected, the wagoneers were directed to a muddy campsite two miles away. There wasn’t enough water for the horses or bathrooms for the campers.
“This morning was very strange,” Gloria Boylan wrote in her journal on July 4, 1976. “No one got up until 8:00, and we didn’t have any place to go. The train was over.”
And then the present—gravid with so much hope and promise—gave way to an inevitable future. Gloria and Bill took Kelly and Mr. Bojangles back to Massachusetts, where the couple divorced just a few months later. “That was the hardest part,” of the wagon train, she remembered. Not the brutal weather, the teeth-grinding miles, or long nights on the hard ground, but the end, the dissolution of it all.
Mark and Marcia Comer sold their handmade wagon and went back to Indiana. Jerry and Kathleen James moved to New York City. Dave Hutchinson went back to college; Brad Frye went back to high school. Time slipped by and life went on.
As for the rededication scrolls, they were stuffed into cardboard boxes and yellow trash bags and temporarily stashed in a former insulation factory not far from the park. In the winter of 1977, Thelma Gray, the ad executive who had dreamed up the wagon train, claimed there were also scrolls in her house “piled to the window.” Still more were stacked in her office. The BWT had produced 300,000 scrolls with 19 signatures each, far more than the PR firm had anticipated.
But there was no money left to microfilm them all, and the aluminum time capsule had seemingly been swiped during President Ford’s speech. “We can assure you that we most certainly understand their historic value,” Gray told the BWT newsletter in 1977. “And that we treasure them.”
No one knows what happened after that; the time capsule simply vanished, just like so many countless others.
In 1963, a group of well-dressed Houstonians gathered at the construction site of the Astrodome to embed a time capsule in the stadium’s foundation. But 50 years later, when it was time to open the small silver canister, which had been filled with mementos from 20 different countries, its exact location had become—and remains—a mystery.
The city of Corona, California, managed to misplace 17 time capsules that date back to the 1950s. Since then, city leaders have deployed bulldozers and ground-penetrating radar in a bid to locate the capsules to no avail.
For more than three decades, residents of Lyndon, Vermont, have been trying to track down a time capsule created during the town’s centennial celebration in 1891. Turns out, the iron box may never have been buried since some of those celebrations were dashed by bad weather.
No one knows what happened after that; the time capsule simply vanished, just like so many countless others.
Even Hudson, who had founded ITCS to document the world’s time capsules, very nearly lost track of them.
The organization was active until about the mid-aughts, says Eli Arnold, a librarian at Oglethorpe, “but then folks retired and moved,” including Hudson, who had taken a teaching position at another college in Atlanta. “It kind of went dormant.”
In the years leading up to 2020, Arnold began receiving messages from time-capsule creators around the world. “They sent an application to Oglethorpe registering their time capsule, and, rightly so, 30 years later, they wanted to know where their time capsule was,” Arnold says. But when the librarian went looking for the records in the school’s tiny archives, his search came up empty. “I was like, ‘I know we kind of made an agreement with you all that we were going to keep track of this . . . but I have no idea where your time capsule is.’”
As it turned out, those time-capsule registrations, stacks and stacks of them, were sitting in a spare bedroom in Paul Hudson’s home, like so many rededication scrolls. Lovingly preserved, but not in any kind of geographical or chronological order.
Around the time Arnold moved the paperwork back to Oglethorpe for safekeeping, he was contacted by the Not Forgotten Digital Preservation Library, a Princeton-based company that uses blockchain technology to help clients create enduring family archives, with a serendipitous offer. They wanted to digitize and map ITCS’s records and place them on the internet, humanity’s collective time capsule.
“It was almost one of those things of like, this is too good to be true,” Arnold says. With Hudson’s blessing, he shipped a dozen boxes of time-capsule registrations from Atlanta to New Jersey, where the trust has agreed to care for the archive for the next three centuries.
What could possibly go wrong?
While reporting this story, I was, at last, trying to sell my book. It wasn’t going well. Refreshing my inbox became an involuntary tick, despite the constant, maddening nothing that I’d find there every day. Riding the train across Atlanta and driving through Amish Country to talk to people about their long-lost time capsules, I thought the book would die on submission.
Would that be the worst outcome, I asked myself. If the book didn’t sell, I wouldn’t have to spend two years researching it, writing it, and worrying about it. I could move on to other projects, maybe even better ones. As a freelance writer for the past decade, I’d grown largely immune to the sting of rejection. So why did this all feel so tortuously consequential?
The answer, or part of it anyway, was as obvious as it was mortifying: I wanted to create something permanent. Magazines fade and mold; websites come and go like summer squalls. But books take up lasting space. Books endure. As a woman who has never longed for children, I wondered if this is what the urge to procreate feels like. I wondered if I was trying to build my own steel door, etched with a plea to the future—remember me, please remember me.
If there was a comfort it was in knowing that—as my reporting was revealing—the impulse is a deeply human one.
Ancient Mesopotamians filled the foundations of their palaces with the ephemera of their day—beads, coins, and copper figurines—forget-me-nots for future renovators to find. When King Nebuchadnezzar oversaw the restoration of Babylon, he recorded his achievements on terracotta cylinders and interred them beneath structures around the city, campaigning across time to gild his legacy. In the late 18th century, Freemasons began depositing trinkets into the hollowed-out cornerstones of their new temples. The most famous of these concrete time capsules rests at the base of Washington Monument, where a portrait of George Washington and 71 newspapers from across the country lay still as wet leaves in a little metal box.
All of us, everywhere, we yearn to believe that the relatively brief stint of time we’re given on this earth is in some way uniquely remarkable, and that, by extension, we are too.
“You’d care a lot less about what people think of you if you realized how seldomly they think of you,” my mother used to tell me when I was an insecure teenager. It was supposed to be a relief, I know, permission to abandon my self-consciousness, but it always made me sad. Did no one think of me, really? Did no one care?
During those long weeks of reporting and waiting, a book I had ordered about time capsules arrived in my mailbox. It was out of print now, but still available from a number of online sellers. Opening the package, I did what I always do with a new book: buried my nose in its fold, judged its weight in my hands like a melon. Flipping it this way and that, I noticed a small red word stamped across the serrated edge of its pages: “DISCARD.”
How are we to think about our own legacy in the face of the world’s callous impermanence? Despite our radio-television dreams of immortality, are we all destined instead for the yellow garbage bag of indifference?
The wagoneers gathered before me in Valley Forge said they didn’t hear about a time capsule until midway through their journey, and they’re not too worried about where those scrolls ended up. What they are worried about is how completely the wagon train seems to have evaporated from the American psyche.
“It’s getting lost,” Mark laments. During his and Marcia’s time touring Valley Forge, they’d been asking docents and librarians if they had ever heard of the BWT. “No one knew about it. It’s about to get gone,” he says.
That’s a shame, because, despite the scrolls, the overflowing port-a-pottys, and the financial debacle of it all, these old friends consider the wagon train a huge success. A miracle of logistics, an unprecedented demonstration of grit and patriotism, a life-changing experience that created connections so ironclad, they were all here 50 years later, enduring oppressive heat and the traffic-choked streets of national park on a national holiday just to sit in the same room.
After their divorce, Gloria and Bill ended up becoming close friends. “That’s because he always loved talking about the wagon train with me,” she says, “we had a lot still there that no one could ever take away from us. That was still our bond.”
For years, the former couple tried to find Brad Frye, who, at 15, had taken care of their daughter when they were busy driving or caring for their mules. Bill died before Gloria finally found Frye, now a veterinarian living in Washington, on Facebook. “He would have been thrilled,” she tells me. Sitting close beside her, Frye blushes.
“What will survive of us is love,” Philip Larkin once wrote, a surprisingly saccharine line from a famously dour poet. And yet, I found it running through my mind as I wrote this all down. In the harsh glare of the future, the stories of these time capsules seem to illuminate our hubris and delusion. But, then again, what is as cocksure and crazy and delusional as love?
Even Paul Hudson, who has spent his whole professional life bearing witness to the inglorious fate of our legacy projects, wants to show me his own. Before saying goodbye, he leads me to the busy four-lane road in front of Hearst Hall, to the black and gold state historical marker he campaigned for in 2014, before he finally left the institution where he earned a diploma, a living, and an academic reputation. As thunder clouds loom and cars whiz past, Hudson traces the words with his pointer finger and reads the entire thing aloud. “Chartered in 1835 by Georgia Presbyterians near Milledgeville, Oglethorpe University was the first denominational college established in the Deep South,” he recites. “The Crypt of Civilization time capsule, a vault located in Hearst Hall, was sealed in 1940 and is not to be opened until 8113 A.D.”
We build our time capsules, real or metaphorical, because we love our schools, our communities, and our country. We love each other so much—our shared experiences and beliefs, our works of art and weird inventions—that it is almost unbearable to know that one day we will be separated.
In the end, maybe it doesn’t matter if our great grandchildren forget our names, if our books end up in the discard pile, or if our time capsules languish forever in the loamy soil of time. In the end, maybe it doesn’t matter if anyone cares. It only matters that we did.
Ashley Stimpson is a freelance writer based in Maryland who has written about science, conservation, and the outdoors for outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Popular Mechanics. She is a 2025-2026 Alicia Patterson Fellow.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
