Road Blogging 2

Out for a walk again. Wind is a bit fiercer this time but I don't mind it.

I dislike walking on the road. Don't want be to hit by a car or anything, so I tread on the soft earth. I like the feeling of soft earth beneath my shoes. Feels a bit firmer, while the asphalt on the road is just hard. No sponginess to it, no natural feeling. Just hard industrialized pathway for miles and miles around.

Landscape round here is rather empty. I've made a note of it in my previous Road Blog, but it's a salient feature of the Midwest, the flatness of the landscape. Empty, harvested cornfields littered with the grey remnants of stalks; little one-story houses dotting the countryside; the interminable stretches of highways that go on and on into eternity; the lonesome road signs; the distant silos that resemble ruined follies or castles; all of these beneath grey cloud walls and a burning red sunset. It's all so picturesque in its familiarity but isolated in its flat expanse. There's lots of land but little else. Massive space between little towns and unincorporated communities, all to vanish into the great mouth of the interstate highways as one moves towards Lafayette or Indianapolis.

I am tempted to wonder why people stay here, but it seems the answer is a trap of nostalgia and lack of hope. When one inhabits a land as flat as that of Central Indiana, how can one hope for anything? It's all been laid out.