Lands of Grain

    I have been thinking back to the mountains we passed through, most over a month ago now. The silence and the violence, the peaks in their slow upward advance and steady destruction, the bitter solitude of snow pack, taste in the air of cold roots and wind. Close clouds and dense forests, flaxen meadows slung between the slopes.
    I haven't written much about what we've seen since then. I've been working on other projects, and often I feel the pictures speak for themselves. Moreover, the trail we're on has become subtler, in its beauty and its terror. Peaks no longer scrape the sky. There are no more deep cut gorges. In there place there have been grassy sand dunes in Nebraska dotted with cattle, curves as gentle as the back of scythe blade against the sky; the wide swathes of brown rivers, Missouri, Mississippi, Illinois; horizons of papery corn and ochre soy; the wet dense woods and ponds that divide the fields. If not peak and valley then hill and creek, a wrinkled bed sheet all across Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio.
    Here in what Steinbeck called the middle west, it is harvest time. When the landscape flattens, we see what a harvest it is, that lays out to the ends of the world on either side of this slim road we travel, what green gargantuan machines are required for the reaping. We have exchanged mountains of stone for mountains of golden grain, sky-scraping silos, endless trucks laboring under the weight of seed. The massiveness of this food system has been steadily impressed upon me, until it feels as undeniably powerful and vast as mountains, only horizontal rather than vertical. As beautiful, and as terrible and violent. The stubbled fields stretching as far as I can see, the gigantic windmills standing sentinel, great blades revolving through the mist; rarely thought of as majestic, as are mountains. But this tamed and growing land has its own terrible majesty. Here food production seems both an industry and a force of  nature; perhaps nature's force in us, our need to eat, in all our great numbers.
    Another thing that has been building up for me is the inescapable death at the roadside. From caterpillars and grasshoppers, up through frogs, turtles, house cats, possums, skunks, raccoons, deer and antelope, all crushed and rent; I would venture to say we have not passed a mile without seeing an animal killed in collision, and sometimes many more than one. Recently I saw what seemed to be an entire family of raccoons scattered on the shoulder, tire-strokes of blood. A tortoise smashed and scattered. Sometimes I look down to see limbs lying in the grooves of the rumble strip.
    I've mentioned this here before, but it is the one thing that is ubiquitous in our trip. Through all landscapes, there is always roadkill. It seems fundamentally senseless to me, in that it's essentially accidental, but is far from isolated. All these animals die not to feed any one thing, but so we can go on without slowing. I am not innocent in this; I have killed my share of grasshoppers as they leap blindly into my wheels and gears.
    Like the corn fields, massive and dense and stripped to stubble, it has me thinking of what we ask of the other living things among whom, and upon whom, we live. On the one hand we are exceptionally grateful, and I have had my perspective altered: convenience stores have become cornucopias of calories, a weak cup of gas station coffee a panacea for the spirit and the body on a cold wet day. All this grain powers us as we ride. At once, it seems that we take so much, as a culture, as a species. Is there a better way to live, and still survive, and will we be strong enough to choose it?

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    At risk of making this post a little long, I'd like to put up this poem by Robert Bly as an addendum to my thoughts; I feel it captures something of the paradox I've been thinking on:

Hannibal and Robespierre

We saw new ice in the ruts on the way to school.
Once I saw through the ice, even dying sheep
Could not convince me that the world is not right.

Sometimes ears of corn were left hanging
On the stalks. The picker had missed them. Those ears
Lay touching the ground the whole winter.

The dove's drunken call rising from the orchard
Where the young lambs stood near their mothers
Convinced me to throw in my lot with the dust.

I hope you've stopped saying that people
Are bad and animals good. Bees have their hives.
Every old frog is a son of Robespierre.

Our joy was ruined anyway long ago
For the sake of order; the boy's and girl's Delight
Would still be bound even if Rousseau got his way.

Hannibal's elephants never got back to Africa.
We know that the world loses many things. But
Even wars don't mean that the world is wrong.