soft low hills with crops picked and unpicked... sheep vacuuming up the remains in meadows already harvested.
distant views at what i can only call a human scale: can see perhaps two or three miles to further dark green forested hills that form the backdrop to this farmland, but I can't see much further. there is something very comfortable and relieving about these intimate views across the green and tan rolling hills, so unlike the grand but almost incomprehensibly vast landscapes of the American West. I simply love this landscape, as i do the similar ones of NZ: nothing oversized, nothing grotesquely disproportionate, and -- i just realized -- no billboards.
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Litter is almost non-existent: yes, i've seen a few beer cans and such, but unlike our roads with their dismayingly frequent beer cans and bottles, plastic bags fluttering along barbed wire fences, and the steady stream of fast food packaging, these roads are virtually litter free. I'd like to attribute this to an appreciation of the land by the people, but the fact is that there are few fast food places and, as Michael Pollan says, where you fuel your car is not where you fuel your body. Gqs stations here certainly do have the usual racks of candy and coolers of soda, but they don't have fried chicken, pizza, sausage or breakfast burritos.
In a neglected paddock next to a neglected house, a neglected small cabin cruiser on blocks; scrawled on the prow where the name would usually be proudly painted, the boat's new name: "not for sale."
the few cars passing are too close and going what feels like too fast on these narrow roads...
in a small-scale landscape like this, even my 14-mile bicycle ride today leaves me feeling i've been somewhere, traveled some landscape, experienced it, breathed it.
If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time - Edith Wharton
