Western Roads and Landscapes
Nothing pleases me more than a Western Road trip. There's something spiritual, compelling, mystical about the naked desolation, spartan beauty in the flatness, openness, emptiness of the high plains, where a single tree, windmill, or grain elevator punctuates and defines the view. Give me a two-lane strip of asphalt ribbon that never turns or climbs for a hundred miles. Give me nothing but flat sky and flat terrain and nothing but quiet questions about where one starts and the other stops. Give me more cows than people, more natural monuments than human markers, more mountain peaks than peaked roofs. Let me be intimidated by the size of the view, its limitlessness, like a dry ocean stretching out between two worlds.
I love the stark, simple yet dramatic lines of modern windmills. I am one of the few, perhaps, who love the sight of a windfarm, the sleek grace of the towering base, the ballet like motion of the blades churning, waving like the grain below them.
And I love the silhouette of grain elevators, their perpendicular contrast to the table land, their lonely stance against the horizon. They are rural skyscrapers. They beckon. They are wooden soldiers guarding the harvest.
Moving west, the natural monuments large and small (cactus), and beyond them, the snowcapped peaks. I've lived in all these places, and I love it all.