Travels in America

Any place that has a population density of less than 6 people per square mile is considered by the US Census to be uninhabited. I don't know if this is an average figure over a large region or if this applies to every square mile in the country. By the latter standard, I have been traveling in a largely uninhabited area. Every mile or two one does spot a farmhouse and some outbuildings upon a knoll or somewhere behind a stand of tall corn.

I have been driving hundreds of miles in western Minnesota and eastern South Dakota for the past few days and the word "uninhabited" keeps popping into my consciousness. Not that the land is desolate. On the contrary, it is miles and miles of verdant, rich, productive cropland giving proof to human intervention on a grand scale. Some of the towns along my route are little more than trailer parks (figuratively, the houses are all real and permanent) while others have lovely tree lined and canopied streets in a region not distinguished by trees of any sort.

Minnesota is known by its self-dubbed nickname as the "Land of 10,000 Lakes." There are a lot of lakes here but eastern South Dakota, as I have often noticed while flying across it, is riddled with one lake after the other, large and small. At ground level these lakes appear to be large holes filled with water with no accessible shoreline other than thick healthy bullrushes leading to the water's edge. I am told they are filled with fish and I even saw some water birds frolicking in their dark blue waters. Some are quite deep. But on the whole these lakes are, for the most part, featureless. Many are just round without coves and most are surrounded by flat land making the distinction between water and land a matter of only color change. The usual pattern of gently sloping wooded hills forming a bowl containing the water does not hold here.

Today, I drove more than 400 miles fronted on both sides as far as the eye can see by waves of light and dark green soybean leaves rippling in the wind, seas of brownish-yellow tasseled corn carpeting the land, golden swaths of harvested wheat and green lawns of newly mown hay fields. Depending upon the level of the fields relative to the roadway the views change, sometimes showing an incredible symmetry of rows and sometimes only showing an unbreakable surface of one color or another. All this accompanied by the redolence of livestock and other farm odors which is even more pronounced when traversing the region in an open convertible.

Of all the millions, possibly billions, of ears of corn I passed today, the one I bought for dinner this evening was the worst I have ever tasted.

Go figure.