The dying mountains are set in relief by a cutting river, etched with tan and gray roads. If not for this artistic river, making islands of trees pop out for the tired eye above, the weary mountains still bearing their trees at their top would pass unnoticed.

The roads widen, the valleys flatten, a baseball diamond behind a screen of roadside strip malls shimmering in the sun heralds the return of man’s domestic cubing—and then the deep-rent mountain cut through the middle by a deep blue line of water announces that the Appalachians are not entirely done. Another broader, lower, sprawling prominence cloaked entirely in green announces a river of greatness, a river wider than the lake in the mountains, streaked by a speeding boat below, a river dammed perhaps—yes, a river dammed, for the viewer flies over its western gate of concrete, this narrow river spilling into a greater one bridged as a hive-like point of human habitation, boarded by low wooded hills which give onto a vast garden plain, a patchwork two parts light green, one part deep forest green and one part the scratched tan of man’s mark; farmland with metallic barns and white houses dotting the garden lands that must be watered by the Ohio—the Good-River—a land that from a pagan god’s vantage well-worth taking and understandably, grudgingly forsaken.

As far as the eye can see and the the world curves in the distant haze, all that can be seen is the mostly empty work of man’s hand, with houses less common than the decreasing stands of tree, the tan fields now out-massing the grass greens and a new color of cultivation or extraction meets the eye, a pinkish clay now riven with railways—where much of the surviving green clings—as the swirl of human habitat cubes spread once again as they did an hour ago above a different, more crowded and less worked land.

Above a winding, mist-covered watercourse greater than any yet seen, wide enough to seem shallow, its banks hosting building and even beaches, hang cottony clouds a mere goose flight above the flattening land.

The land is now of three distinct colors, predominantly the pink clay earth, secondarily grass green, with dark green serving to boarder rather than cover the land, and the tan so common in the easterly lands still present but uncommon.

The viewer gazes down upon a large crescent island in the river bend, followed by another bend in the clay sluice river exposing a thin forested crescent of an island that appears like a tadpole swimming upstream—and the patchwork of flat farmland promises that a larger, muddier river waits in the absence of forested hills but just beyond this geometric pancake of a land. The Mississippi must be viewed at the viewer’s fingertips on the return home, for the Rockies –still as distant as the mind’s eye—beg a first time description and for this the eyes will rest.