Had an interesting experience flying back. We were angling west northwest from Ft. Worth/Dallas. The land was farmed as huge north-south oriented squares (a legacy of the Homestead Act) so I always knew what direction I was flying. Some squares were early green, most still fallow brown. Our route carried us towards an area where less of the land was arable. Some of the squares were gray – untouched native vegetation. The frequency of these squares increased. There came this fascinating time when there were enough of these squares that I could glimpse, through the checkerboard, the shape of the terrain beneath me. Enough of the patterns within each untouched square connected with others so that I could “see” the pattern of subtle watersheds.
It was as if the land was a vast stained-glass checkerboard window and each uncultivated square was a broken pane in the window. If only a few panes are broken, the mind sees the pattern of the stained-glass window. But as more of the windows are “broken out,” more of the window is filled with the image of what lies beyond the window. When enough of the windows are broken out, there comes a point where the world beyond the window is easier to see than the pattern in the window itself.
Then we moved over an area where land cultivation increased and I watched fascinated as my eye/brain gradually lost touch with the primordial pattern and saw only the checkerboard of cultivation. Then the plane moved out into the arid west and again the cultivated squares diminished, the carvings of latitude and longitude lines dwindled, and the ancient shapes asserted their primacy until finally, over eastern New Mexico, one saw just the bedrock shape of the land and so it continued until one reached the Central Valley of California.
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