A lot of people carve their names into things. Or they paint their names onto things. Favorite places are rocks -- like in these two photos -- the top one in the Southern California desert, the other at Independence Rock in Wyoming where western emigrants passed by in covered wagons in the last half of the 1800s. They carved their names so that friends and family behind would know they had made it that far west.
A lot of people carve their names into picnic tables or into trees. In Calaveras Big Trees State Park in northern California, a trail leads by a fallen redwood with signatures of soldiers from more than 100 years ago. Basque sheepherders from about the same period carved names and images in Aspen trees: most of the trees are gone now.
We don't tell stories with our paintings and carvings these days like American Indians did with their pictographs and petrolglyphs. I think people leave their marks today for a couple of reasons: to come back later to be reminded of their previous visit or to gain some sort of immortality.
Immortality won't happen, though. All the carvings and paintings will eventually fade. A recent TV program concluded that if humans were to disappear from the Earth anytime soon, that in about 10,000 years (or thereabouts) every trace of them would vanish except for one thing: Mt. Rushmore.
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