by Philip Monte Verde
Landscapes like those of the northeast have a little age on them. They wear the signs of man-made history on their backs. Through creation, we've tried to tame this earth. Towers of oak and pine were replaced by slender stalks of corn, a plant of pure utility.
These ancients forests, shorn and halved in our recent centuries, produced structures unnatural in form. The straight, square lines of barns rose up and cut through the open spaces; cracks piercing the clear air. These wooden structures were an attempt to bring order from chaos, and shelter from the elements. In their creation they were a slap in the face of and Nature, which desires smooth, windswept lines.
We've attempted to carve a foothold on this planet. G.K. Chesterton writes of St. Francis, play-acting the fool, standing on his head to see the great palazzos and villas of Assisi not as solid forts built by superior animals, but more as their true form. To St. Francis they must have looked like bird cages dangling from the ceiling, hung above the drop, and only allowed to avoid tumbling into space by the grace and permission of a merciful God.
Landscapes like those of the northeast have a little age on them. They wear the signs of man-made history on their backs. Through creation, we've tried to tame this earth. Towers of oak and pine were replaced by slender stalks of corn, a plant of pure utility.
These ancients forests, shorn and halved in our recent centuries, produced structures unnatural in form. The straight, square lines of barns rose up and cut through the open spaces; cracks piercing the clear air. These wooden structures were an attempt to bring order from chaos, and shelter from the elements. In their creation they were a slap in the face of and Nature, which desires smooth, windswept lines.
We've attempted to carve a foothold on this planet. G.K. Chesterton writes of St. Francis, play-acting the fool, standing on his head to see the great palazzos and villas of Assisi not as solid forts built by superior animals, but more as their true form. To St. Francis they must have looked like bird cages dangling from the ceiling, hung above the drop, and only allowed to avoid tumbling into space by the grace and permission of a merciful God.
Life is temporary, and nowhere is that more clearly seen than in the country. These solid barn structures lean as symbols of human ingenuity along every gravel road. They were built with considered care, in the most modern methods known to the clever craftsmen of their age. Yet there they lean and crack, blown on their sides by years of prevailing wind, caved in above from the weight of winter upon winter, or sunk down in the earth from the freeze and the thaw.
Around them are the slender saplings reemerging, perhaps descendants of the barn materials themselves. They are like the guards of a chain gang, ensuring the barn goes about its labor of dying, and hastening the decline by boring their roots through foundations.
The wood is splintered and jagged. Once examples of an ideal form of human creation, beams and planks now jut out like hay from a bale. The barn no longer has its utility, our delicate order has returned to chaos. But this is not the truth. The truth is in the earth swallowing up and reconstituting that which it loaned out decades before. That which we considered order was really chaos on the smooth landscape.
The eroding structures we drive past are the swan songs of the beautiful and the ugly. They are last gasps of moments in time, fading shadows before the dawn of a more eternal state of nature.