To really understand the full size of America, you need to drive across it. If you only stop to sleep, eat and refuel, you can make it from Oneonta to Tucson in three days. Of course you have to be willing to drive for at least 800 miles per day or 14 hours straight. It is an exhausting and slightly insane proposition. Guess how I know all this?
Driving cross-country in winter was a bit like traveling through the history of photography. New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and half of Illinois were snow covered and overcast. Flurries and fog gave the sky a grayish cast for the first day. The world was dressed in a monochrome. Forests, fields and buildings conformed to the grayscale . Only the occasional sign or patch of blue sky would remind you everything wasn’t black and white. The snow began to recede as we moved south through Illinois and by the time we crossed into Missouri, only scattered patches remained. Sepia tones from the exposed earth and tree trunks began to assert themselves and grow stronger as we reached Oklahoma. Somewhere in west Oklahoma or the Texas panhandle, color began to subtly appear; A stretch of rust colored bare earth, a olive cast to the shrubs, grasses in ochre or gunmetal hues each becomes bigger and more common until the muted palate becomes prevalent. Sometime before the New Mexico border, the sky became pale blue again.
Nothing prepares you for the vastness of the west. No photograph, film or written description could properly convey the sheer sense of relentless, uninterrupted empty space. The plains stretch out forever in every direction until they fade into the haze of the horizon, swallowed by the infinite sky. It is a cliché to say the sky is bigger here, but you certainly feel the weight of it’s expanse more here than anywhere else I‘ve been. The road beneath you becomes an exercise in one-point perspective, becoming narrower towards the horizon line down into a vanishing point. In the flat voids, each object gains a sense of heightened importance. Overpasses become monumental. Cows, patches of brush, trees, windmills, and distant buildings grab and hold your attention like rare ornaments in the ocean of emptiness. You focus on a spot in the distance because of the scarcity of them and the astonishment of scale. It is difficult to believe you can see a farmstead so far in the distance that it looks like a toy. I can’t help but wonder if our relationship with the vast wind swept prairie made it possible for us to conceive of space travel.
Arroyos, mesas and miniature canyons ripple up from the land more frequently as you go further west. Maybe because I became accustomed to the surrounding open space , New Mexico’s gently rolling expanses dotted with juniper were a pleasure to look upon. Shortly after we crossed the border. I spotted a herd of pronghorn in the distance, thirty or forty individuals biscuit brown and snowy white against the pale tawny grasses. The New Mexico landscape reminded me of an immense rumpled blanket pulled into peaks and valleys of gentle contours. Vegetation collected in the folds of valleys and dotted across the surface, accenting rather than obscuring the shape of the land. The mountains around Albuquerque towered into the sky, snow cloaked and elegant in their immensity. Some unusually altruistic civil engineer decided to replace the drab industrial raw concrete color of infrastructure with reddish pinks, bands of turquoise, and petroglyph inspired accents. In the green river floodplain just past the city, gray sand hill cranes drifted in search of food. The sunset painted the edge of the desert mountains in delicate pinks and oranges, the sky turned gradually deeper purple and into black as we drove further south and west.
We crossed the Arizona border in full darkness with only the stars, moon, and headlights to illuminate the way. We came to the earthbound galaxy of Tucson around eleven at night, tired, saddle-sore and very much aware that it was one am on the east coast
Driving cross-country in winter was a bit like traveling through the history of photography. New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and half of Illinois were snow covered and overcast. Flurries and fog gave the sky a grayish cast for the first day. The world was dressed in a monochrome. Forests, fields and buildings conformed to the grayscale . Only the occasional sign or patch of blue sky would remind you everything wasn’t black and white. The snow began to recede as we moved south through Illinois and by the time we crossed into Missouri, only scattered patches remained. Sepia tones from the exposed earth and tree trunks began to assert themselves and grow stronger as we reached Oklahoma. Somewhere in west Oklahoma or the Texas panhandle, color began to subtly appear; A stretch of rust colored bare earth, a olive cast to the shrubs, grasses in ochre or gunmetal hues each becomes bigger and more common until the muted palate becomes prevalent. Sometime before the New Mexico border, the sky became pale blue again.
Nothing prepares you for the vastness of the west. No photograph, film or written description could properly convey the sheer sense of relentless, uninterrupted empty space. The plains stretch out forever in every direction until they fade into the haze of the horizon, swallowed by the infinite sky. It is a cliché to say the sky is bigger here, but you certainly feel the weight of it’s expanse more here than anywhere else I‘ve been. The road beneath you becomes an exercise in one-point perspective, becoming narrower towards the horizon line down into a vanishing point. In the flat voids, each object gains a sense of heightened importance. Overpasses become monumental. Cows, patches of brush, trees, windmills, and distant buildings grab and hold your attention like rare ornaments in the ocean of emptiness. You focus on a spot in the distance because of the scarcity of them and the astonishment of scale. It is difficult to believe you can see a farmstead so far in the distance that it looks like a toy. I can’t help but wonder if our relationship with the vast wind swept prairie made it possible for us to conceive of space travel.
Arroyos, mesas and miniature canyons ripple up from the land more frequently as you go further west. Maybe because I became accustomed to the surrounding open space , New Mexico’s gently rolling expanses dotted with juniper were a pleasure to look upon. Shortly after we crossed the border. I spotted a herd of pronghorn in the distance, thirty or forty individuals biscuit brown and snowy white against the pale tawny grasses. The New Mexico landscape reminded me of an immense rumpled blanket pulled into peaks and valleys of gentle contours. Vegetation collected in the folds of valleys and dotted across the surface, accenting rather than obscuring the shape of the land. The mountains around Albuquerque towered into the sky, snow cloaked and elegant in their immensity. Some unusually altruistic civil engineer decided to replace the drab industrial raw concrete color of infrastructure with reddish pinks, bands of turquoise, and petroglyph inspired accents. In the green river floodplain just past the city, gray sand hill cranes drifted in search of food. The sunset painted the edge of the desert mountains in delicate pinks and oranges, the sky turned gradually deeper purple and into black as we drove further south and west.
We crossed the Arizona border in full darkness with only the stars, moon, and headlights to illuminate the way. We came to the earthbound galaxy of Tucson around eleven at night, tired, saddle-sore and very much aware that it was one am on the east coast
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