One thing I've noticed, traveling
around this planet of our as much as I've been able, is that
everywhere I go, the landscape is home. Surely, different parts of
the world wear different colors, and sometimes the shapes and scale
are unique and surprising. There is always something new to see,
around the corner, if you are curious enough. But the land is brown
and green. The sky is blue and white. The sun shines yellow and pink.
The stars and moon glow silvery against black and purple. Traveling
through winter, the land faded to sketch and monochrome, every tree
is shadow-brown, all small plants are in their quiet tan pajamas, and
everything else is dusty white. I could be skirting Chicagoland,
nearing the foothills of the Rockies, crossing upstate New York. But I am
racing though Bavarian countryside, and this blizzard could have
followed me from Stockholm, or it could be a stranger from Russia. I
haven't done much traveling in the winter (some part of me has always
been too skeptical to allow for possible frostbite on a lonely train
station) until now. I love the spherical intimacy of it, the land in
focus only nearby, the colors subtle. From a train, snug and
speeding, the familiarity of the landscape has a special magic all
its own.
It's only when we cross into the
acreage of civilization that shapes begin to look Foreign. The
different ways different people use hills, or roofs, or the edge of
their claims. The little towns crowded into Black Forest valleys,
vertical like a tapestry painted on silk, never minding perspective.
Switchback roads and yellow faces and linear yards of crenelated
edging, mirroring the pines above and causal river below. Steep tiled
roofs in drainage undulation or dragon scale. Tight and idyllic,
efficiently antiplanned, like a bird's nest.
And around the bigger cities, where we
might have a Fitchburg or an Urban Sacrifice Zone, there are summer
gardens. Little plots of land where urbanites, missing nature but
unendowed with a summer home, can tend a bit of earth and fly a flag.
Which I guess is another kind of sacrifice. The cute crowds of small
fenced yards and sheds are always along railroad corridors, so I'm
not sure what they garden. Summer memories. Even in winter, they look
tidy and happy, some terraced and some wreathed in years of wisteria
vines. Miniature national/natural dream colonies. Every bit of land
is a door to all of Earth.
