Rural form seems static when we look at it as a landscape. A crisscross of roads,
telephone wires, signs punctuating fields, fences, gates, forests and
waterways. It stands in rotting barns or sunny porches or in anonymous highways
whispering through to another place. The farmlands have been as they are for a
hundred, two hundred years. Or two thousand years as we poke through their
dikes, their ditches, their weedy ditches, their dusty or gravelly roads.
Crops
change in texture and color and in the shape of plants and paths. But has this
landscape, undulating or flat, shady or sunburnt, ever looked different? Farms
go on for miles, forests as we pass them present a wall of green or of brown
and black and white, light is freckled, flecked through them or blocked like a
solid, depending on the season.
A hill or mountain in the distance far or near
renders a green blob with a cloud at its top, a barrier to the destiny of our
vision. A vista stopper or a shadow maker or a vertical thing to overcome.
Small and large towns, cars, implements, signs, trees, hills, sad pokey places
with old churches and new gas stations and motorcycles and sheds. Decay or life
the rural landscape is more social but asocial and curtained, cordoned,
clamped.
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