Apparently before this land was extensively settled, much of it was covered by relatively unruly hardwood forests. The idea of this untamed wilderness appeals to my more nomadic nature. I call it nomadic, but it’s probably just a bad case of undiagnosed attention deficit disorder.
Order from Chaos - Woodbury County, Iowa
Sometime along the way, pioneers set out from areas in the east to make their fortune beyond the Mississippi. Some of these pioneers got to Iowa, and, their drive for nomadism expended, they settled the land and started to bring the wildness under control.
Fields were cleared, stumps blasted out with dynamite or pulled out by draft horses, and small scale cultivation commenced. Settlement continued, the resistance to the entropy of the forests continued, and now over a century later, the order and the neatness of the land that these herculean efforts produced is widely evident.
The hills have been shaped by cultivation and time. The rows of corn run straight and true to maximize the capability and yield of the harvest machinery, section lines delineate the labors of one farmer from the next, and hay is stacked in anticipation of winter in neat and orderly rows and columns.
There is a real beauty in this order and neatness, and imagining the sweat and toil it has taken to achieve this result boggles the imagination.
Still….as a nomad, I have a tickle of longing for a bit of untamed disorder, and so we continue west.
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