Along The Road

Factory America

Driving through southwestern Wisconsin and southeastern Minnesota, in a good rain, clusters of silos appearing out of the grey, over gently rolling hills covered with young corn plants, the occasional whif (or more) of cattle... (do they call dairy cows cattle? Or is that only for future hamburgers?) I don't know if one can realize the vast industry that is the Great Plains without driving through it. Imagine the biggest factory you can, a huge complex of buildings sectioned off into countless operational units, each stuffed with equipment, making uncounted widgets (well, they are counting, but you know what I mean). Then imagine that each section is a dairy farm (or a hog farm, or a cattle ranch), a hundred acres of corn/alfalfa/soy beans surrounding a milking barn, silos, piles of silage...a vast enterprise, processing uncounted cows, endless streams of tanker trucks arriving and departing continuously from packing plants, untold cartons fanning out across the nation...and all this only a small portion of the total.

I am overwhelmed by the numbers of us, by the machinery necessary to support us. In the United States there is truly no square inch of ground that is not dedicated to the support of our great population. Oh, sure, there are "wilderness" areas, if tiny islands of undeveloped land surrounded by ArcherDanielsMidland can be called wilderness. Even the wilderness is there for our benefit, sequestered so that it may be "enjoyed" by everyone from the solitary backpacker to the fully loaded Winnebago driver.

There is really no reason why this should not be so, no imperative that some part of the world should be untouched by the human. Morality is, at its root, a very personal thing...one person's moral imperative is another's foolish notion...something that's "right" if you agree with it, and "wrong" if you don't...there is no absolute where people and ideas are concerned. This is simply my own...what...feeling? reaction? failing?...this sense of danger, this feeling of sadness, this awe at the magnitude of us. I can look at each individual lifting stalk, I can follow the line of its brothers and sisters in their gently curving row, and the next row, and the next...and the next field, and the next farm, and the next state...and I can imagine the ears of corn, and the piles of grains, and the endless rolling motion of the jaws...and, somehow, I can't imagine the world this represents.