Aahh! I'm back in the high plains. Coming into Rick Husband Airport, at about 5,000 feet just after sunset, the emptiness of the plains glaringly announces itself. One sees the truly huge rectangles of cultivated land or the perfect giant circles of center pivot irrigated land marching in serried ranks to the horizon 90 miles away.
The local roads dividing the plots of land in all this vast panorama, are empty of traffic except for two cars in the far distance, who are driving towards me, their headlights illuminated. Along the roads, clusters of farm buildings and their attached farmhouses sparsely dot the landscape, little spots of habitation randomly scattered, miles from each other, on a checkerboard of browns and greens.
Viewed from 3000 feet up, the windmills, normally seen as giant towers of gleaming steel, look more like sticks of silver birch in a midwinter forest.
It is dark as we land and I can't see the cattle grazing in the fields or the lumbering diesels puffing streams of smoke as they haul their load of 150 or so containers on flatbeds across the treeless plains nor yet the oilfield jacks pumping their liquid gold from the depths of the earth.
That will have to wait until tomorrow.
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