QUILTS

Originally Posted on Land + Artscapes, 10/6/17 

Long before I understood what they represented, the circular shapes in aerial landscape photography have held some fascination.  Once I get over the bit of fear that almost always arrests me during moments of take off, I can’t help but marvel at the views below. As the plane soars cross the grid patterns of cities, looser sprawling designs and through surprisingly combative clouds, I crane my neck to witness how we have shaped and not shaped the land.

Browns, tans, sienna and various shades of green formed by the center pivot irrigation systems cover much of Middle America.  From New Jersey to California, North America is dotted with circles with a radius of about .25 miles.  The linear arms of galvanized steel and aluminum are electrically powered and rotated on wheels to water crops at regular intervals.  Each circle represents soy, corn, wheat or bare ground. The corners of the squares that run tangent to the circumference to each irrigated square may contain some other crop or, usually, weeds or native trees.  Collectively these circles and squares create quilts of varying sizes and shapes that blanket hundreds of miles of land that were once one continuous swatches of prairie grasses with contrasting clumps and splatters of wholly bison, white pine and cottonwood trees.

We fly over this vast landscape to land in places like Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco and seldom have any reason to set foot on this strange and artificially crated landscape. It is a landscape no more artificial than ours, yet artificial all the same. What do aliens beings think when they see the earth spotted with circles?  Yet I am reminded that people live in the corner pockets and strips of non-circular land, surrounded by evergreen trees that shield them from harsh winds and glaring summer sun. These people in whose minds are etched the line of highways or long flat roads connecting town to town.  Theirs is a landscape of large swatches of blue that touch yellowish-greenish-brown shapes receding into an endless horizon. The circular forms seen from above are lost to them. 

These quilts are colorful fragmented skins and layers of centuries of struggle, neglect, abuse, waste, abundance; layers and fragments of promise, betrayal, deception, upheaval, drought, violence, triumph, hope and uncertainty. These quilts feed us. They allow us to live alternative lifestyles and create spaces over which we can fly and wax poetic whenever we dare venture out for short trips.