American landscape.is... meaningful.

Well, I just got back from a week's vacation in the states, and it gave me so much to think about. Rather than going to a holiday resort or anything particularly commercial, we drove from Chicago to Nashville, Tennessee (sticking to the country roads) and then we drove east of the city into the mountains, where we hired a beautiful big cabin looking out on its own 150ft waterfall. From here we based our activities and went canoeing down a river for four miles and spent a day walking through the mountains on a trail named the Fiery Gizzard, where legend holds that Davy Crockett burnt his tongue on the gizzard of a lizard he was cooking! This was all marvellously beautiful, wild and rugged, but in terms of an understanding of landscape it was the four days spent driving, that really opened my eyes. The country through which we drove was mainly agricultural, with small run down townships and the occasional small city. But what was interesting, was how much one place could change from another just down the road. Two petrol stations next door to each other show differences of half a dollar per gallon in price; a successful city shares none of its prosperity with a small town just five miles away; the farming communities who grow their produce sell it all to the food giants; and rather than cooking at home, whole communities eat every meal they have at the local restaurants. While this all seems very negative, there are a number of positives that can be drawn from it: Because farmers sell all their produce to large companies, there is no local competition and no angst between them. Because their produce is largely crops, there is a set time for everything and apart from weather, this form of work allows for a gentle slower pace of life and lower stress levels. Because people eat all their meals at local restaurants they all know each other well and there is a real sense of community spirit, with generations of people living in the same town because that's where their friends are. And all of this community spirit spills over into how they situate their houses: In the cities everyone has a fence up and all boundaries are clearly marked, but here in the country, the property deeds are the only thing that shows where one garden ends and another begins and neighbours share each other's porches watching the sun go down over fields of golden corn at the end of every day. Seeing all of this and experiencing it, touched my heart deeply. If only things were kept this simple and meaningful in England, if only our society was this tightly knitted.