Individual houses distinctly dot the sculpted land like spilled cubes of silver and white arranged in childish swirls. The streets that dominate his earthbound life are lines demarcating the plots of light brown, light green and deep tree green.
Water stands out from above the clouds: along lazy river seeping like an elongated puddle in the grass, angular casement ponds, the two fingered lake—obviously once a quarry, below—and off to the east as the bent wing outside his window banks—the Chesapeake, the Kent Narrows barely rising dirtily above its waters, waters so shallow as to be a lighter blue than the summer sky.
By the time this is written the cube-like houses have dwindled to a scattering of clusters along thin shimmering strips of pavement cutting like rivers through the thickening green of the gathering woods. The highways now dominate the scene as the plane takes turbulence above the rising earth—the rolling foothills that bank upward, westward, toward their younger, taller, less weary siblings.
Rivers begin to wind more deeply into the try-colored cube-strewn land. Shockingly, the observer recalls them being dwarfed near the bay, were wide lazy rivers seeped and bright green paths manifold wider made way for the marching towers of metal that carry power to the crowded shores of the bay.
The flying machine, far louder inside than any whining city bus, rocks, barely above the haze of cloud which has risen. The wings still wobble as the observer sees cotton balls in the distance thousands of feet down—the land over which the plane flies rising imperceptibly, greens more deeply and the craft reduces its angle as the viewport is hazed in cloud.
The Allegheny Range, named for the dead tribe once called beautiful by their enemies, make the metal bird moan as it rocks and rattles above a deep cutting river that must be the Wild Goose. The machine wing beyond the viewport give the appearance of a gentle flapping bird seemingly made of no better stuff than the skateboard the young man to the viewer’s left is taking too the city on Great Salt Lake.
The wings cut cloud above the Appalachian Mountains as the machine rocks, rattles and shakes. From the cloud bank they do not appear as mountains but as lonelier lands in deep green relief. With only 40% of their former mantle of deep green, the beaten down mountains called hills have had their fangs drawn. The lands that were travelled only by warriors in a forested age seem tamely inviting as the world bends in the distance.
A great many-fingered lake gapes below like a fallen branch of a wizened tree and the plane banks as if on cue exposing the Allegheny Ridge, piled, eroded, carved and lately pecked at and pocked, the bedrock of its banked tiers unclothed between intervening ridges of carven green. From this height as with the vantage from the life afoot, mountains, in this bypassed land mean green.
Under the God of Things
