Travel as Art - Part I

I just came back from a three week road trip with my family, and, since this is a blog primarily about art, I am going to pretend that travel is art and write about it.  You can pretend along with me or return to what you were doing before you mistakenly clicked on this link.


Art
is an experience, public and private.  Public, because, presumably, more than one pair of eyes wired to a brain may look upon it.  And being a shared experience, it becomes culture.   


But art is also a private experience because each individual reacts independently when confronted with it.   It may cause a flatline in one person's brain, while in another, it may excitedly bounce about the cranium, causing joy, discomfort, awe, arousal, laughter, confusion, recognition, inner peace, inner tumult, indigestion, and any number of other private inner thoughts and reactions.


Likewise travel is a public and private enterprise.  You can see me driving past, but you can't be sure I'm wearing pants. 


Now erase that image.

Let's just get back to pretending that travel is art.   While a  painter may begin with a blank canvas, we started out in a Prius - two adults, two children, and for the first and last ten hours, a dog 

detail from "Dog and Hydrant" by D. Goodrich (see full image)

(the dog, Django,  jumped train outside of Buffalo, NY to spend quality time with his grandparents and Uncle Boomer).  


Sixty-five hundred miles would be required before the work was finished - a gallery full of portraits and landscapes, and still-lives with coffee and dashboard.


Among the early portraits viewed along the way was Joseph DeGroat, my Montana born wife's great, great, great grandfather, resting in peace in the town of Champion, NY, his name carved in marble stone.   A letter notes that he was the best ax man in the county.  Some twenty miles away from this cemetery was a mystery.  Joseph's father Samuel disappears from all records at some point, last seen plowing roads in Boston, MA.   But here was a grave in LaFargeville marked, "Rachel, Wife of Samuel DeGroat".  Could this have been the wife of same?   And, then, where is her husband resting?   We might never have the answer, but these folks led to several Montana generations which eventually produced my wife Lisa.  We would travel to the land of her childhood before turning back east toward our home in Vermont.


Our road took us through the wide open spaces of the midwest, the pre-mountain assortment of flat expanse and rolling hills of corn and scattered farms.  Early on, a confused detour presented us with a panoramic view of the Chicago cityscape - and some bumper-to-bumper traffic to remind us of the public nature of art.  But soon we were back under uninterrupted sky and legally driving 70-75 miles per hour.   Corn, corn, soybeans and corn.   Early August and this part of the country is endlessly green.  


Speaking of "green", we saw the harvest of wind in full swing.  The white towers and graceful blades, slowly turning, first appeared on the horizon, then drifted past us in neat rows.  Wind power is controversial.  Many say the windmills make noise, kill birds, destroy the natural beauty of the landscape.  I don't know about the noise, but these peculiar farms seemed distant from any dwellings or public libraries.  As for birds, our living room window has killed a few, and there are more windows than windmills, so which should be banned first?  
As for beauty.....ahhh....beauty.....art...hmm...art....beauty.   
That is a subject for another post.   Let me just say, I found them pleasing to the eye and mind.   Tall, slender, curvaceous, pristine, sprouting from the midst of cornrows, providing occasional adornments to the otherwise miles and miles of green.  Steadily gathering energy for our use.


Somewhere in Iowa, we came across an extra wide load truck carrying a massive white cylinder, much wider than the flatbed - a tank? a silo? a missile part?   A few miles down the road, and the mystery was solved.    Lying prostrate on a truck headed in the opposite direction, slightly longer than the full length of the flat bed was a long slender blade for a windmill.   Much larger and longer than I imagined.  When I saw the scale of that thing, I realized that the cylinder was but a short section of the tall windmill's tower.


On the western end of Iowa, you run into the Missouri River.   We turned right and headed north, to avoid getting wet.   Flooding was evident and low portions of our road were sandwiched by giant plastic sandbags.  To the west we saw islands with sheds and silos, streets signs and traffic signal poles poking out of the water.  Northward to South Dakota, and then we turned left to continue west.



Parts of South Dakota make you feel lost in the prairie lands.   Less agricultured or, maybe, more cattled, the flats and rolling hills are more grass than cornfield, and the greens begin to brown a bit. 
The Badlands are desolate in appearance, but were given their name by French trappers who found them troublesome and didn't understand the Native Americans' appreciation of them as prime hunting grounds.  At the site of those cliffs and canyons, my inner geologist drooled.  In fact, I'm having to wipe off the keyboard as I type these thoughts.  I would continue to drool through Wyoming, Yellowstone and the many parts of Montana we passed through.  The landforms out here lack the puritanical modesty of the Green Mountains of Vermont, which keep all their nether parts covered with forest.  


The adolescent geologist from the East could only dream of the centerfold that opens up as you leave the plains of the central United States.


And you will have to wait until the next installment before I paint the Rockies in all their lovely nakedness.