by Doctor Science
Sprog the Younger is a junior in high school, which means Spring Break was for the two of us to do The College Tour, New England Division.
It’s been years since I’ve been on an American Road Trip to places I haven’t been before, and I found myself paying a lot of attention to the landscape: the shape of the terrain, the vegetation, the types of houses and farms. This is something I learned from reading and re-reading Tolkien in my youth, so it soaked into my brain (I once calculated that I’d read the trilogy around 30 times by the time I was 20). The Lord of the Rings has many passages like this one:
Mist lay behind them among the trees below, and brooded on the pale margins of the Anduin, but the sky was clear. The waxing moon was riding in the West, and the shadows of the rocks were black. They had come to the feet of stony hills, and their pace was slower, for the trail was no longer easy to follow. Here the highlands of the Emyn Muil ran from North to South in two long tumbled ridges. The western side of each ridge was steep and difficult, but the eastward slopes were gentler, furrowed with many gullies and narrow ravines. [TT p13]
Being primed by Tolkien to look at landscape, I’m constantly disappointed because most books don’t give me that sense of physical setting at a more-than-human scale. The only exception I found in a haphazard walk through the literary canon was Thomas Hardy.
Movies and TV are much worse. Literature may fail to describe landscape, but movies and TV show you a landscape that doesn’t correspond to the stated setting, and which moves around capriciously. I think that by watching movies and TV, we get used to landscape not meaning anything, they train our vision to be sloppy.
So I’m trying to train my vision to be *not* sloppy, to see what’s out there beyond the shoulders of the highway. These are my notes.
Google Map with Terrain, showing our route on the first leg of our trip. I’ve removed our route inside NJ. Click for full version, 609x950px.
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