The beguiling beauty of gas pipelines. When I was a kid my favorite room in every art museum was full of what I thought of as the muddy road pictures—sombre dutch oil paintings of the lived-in countryside. They all seemed to have a road in the foreground, and the roads were always filled with ruts of various size and shape, and most of the time the ruts were full of water, the surface reflecting partly cloudy weather conditions and maybe some skeletal tree branches. The background would be some spectrum of human-modified landscape—cow pastures and such or aggressively second-growth scrubby forest. My love of these paintings perplexed me because I was a wilderness kid, screw human habitation. But the roads invited me in to these places from long ago, and the ruts made them real—both the people who made the road and the organic world forever coming to reclaim itself.
I wish I did but I don’t hate this weird elongated forest gap, the way it beckons me down into the more expansive opening below, the ominous closeness of the towering trees, the obviously mowed plant community but with gnarly brush reaching through in a combination that says “people are here! … at widely spaced intervals”. People call forest interiors cathedrals but this is also a cathedral. It’s a soft bed. Except that we know the value of contiguous forest canopy—here is one more clump of New England forest broken into separate islands. What birds and other animals have now moved on? What non-native plants are now creeping in from that much more edge habitat. And for what? The silent gas sliding unseen beneath looms over the whole place.
I was wrong as a kid, of course—do not screw human habitation. And wilderness… isn’t even a thing? It’s all just living communities at varying degrees of thriving, and that includes the humans. Our fingerprints are the most interesting part of almost every landscape to me. But it’s nice when they’re soft, slowly receding, and tell some kind of story about how we lived with and belonged to some place. I like this vantage-point—I always wonder about the clump of trees in the far off hedge row—but it’s not a good story. When I walk by this spot, after taking a moment to appreciate the view, I always feel less anxious by the time I get back under the cool interior of the forest canopy.
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