“
We are doing 55 on Indiana 65.
Jasper County.
Flooded fields.
Iroquois River spread way out, wide and brown as a Hershey bar.
Distances in this glacier-flattened planed-down ground-level ground
aren't blue, but whitish, and the sky is whitish-blue.
It's in the eighties at 9:30 in the morning, the air is soft and humid,
and the wind darkens the flooded fields between rows of oaks.
Watch Your Speed - We Are.
Severely clean white farmhouses inside square white fences painted by
Tom Sawyer yesterday produce
a smell of dung. A rich and heavy smell of dung on the southwest wind.
Can shit be heady?
La merde majestueuse.
This is the "Old Northwest."
Not very old, not very north, not very west. And in Indiana
there are no Indians.
Wabash River
right up to the road and the oaks are standing ten feet out in the brown shadowmottled flood, but the man at the diesel station just says:
You should of seen her yesterday.
The essence is motion being in motion moving on not resting at a point:
and so by catching at points and letting them go again without recurrence
or rhyme or rhythm I attempt to suggest or imitate that essence
the essence of which is that you cannot catch it.
Of course there are other continuities:
the other aspect of the essence of moving on.
The county courthouses.
Kids on bikes.
White frame houses with high sashed windows.
Dipping telephone wires, telephone poles.
The names of the dispossessed.
The redwing blackbird singing to you from fencepost to fencepost.
Dave and Shelley singing "You're the Reason God Made Oklahoma" on the radio.
The yellow weedy clover by the road.
The flowering grasses.
And the crow, not the Indian, the bird, you seen one crow you seen 'em all,
kronk kronk.
CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO
TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST
on an old plank barn, the letters half worn off, and that's a continuity, not only in space but time: my California in the thirties, & I at six years old would read the sign and imagine a Pony Express rider at full gallop eating a candy cigarette.
Lafayette
Greencastle
And the roadsign points: Left to Indianapolis
Right to Brazil.
Now there's some choice.
”
”
Ursula K. Le Guin (Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places)