Yellow Fields: part i
Today I drove from Seattle, Washington to Missoula, Montana. I've two weeks until I start a new job, and I'm taking a roadtrip.
As I pulled out of Bellevue on Seattle's east side, I joined the i90 highway heading east. Upon joining the highway, I was relieved to see that my directions were straight-forward. Continue on my current bearing for 470 miles. A departure from the UK where only on the M1 might you continue for such a distance, following signs for "THE NORTH", or "THE SOUTH" depending on your direction of travel.
The journey started with the familiar climate of the Pacific North West. An honour guard of coniferous tress lined the highway, and plump grey rain clouds hung low in the sky. I made quick progress east past Mount Rainier, and on through Ellensburg, before crossing the Columbia river at the town of Vantage.
Driving across the Columbia, still thousands of miles from it's eventual departure into the Pacific, the lush forests fell away, and in their place a vast expanse of burnished yellow fields appeared. Enormous pens of grasses rolling over hills and straining for moisture after a long, hot summer.
I had just entered the western boundary of America's Breadbasket. The contiguous stretch of fertile farmland running from northern Texas, up through the Midwest and tipping into Idaho.
My little red Jeep hooned along through hundreds of kilometers of uninterrupted farmland. Occasionally I would pass a truck loaded to the brim with green vegetal matter, or a freight train stacked with grain containers, a quarter mile long at a time.
Each field was marked with a signpost for it's contents. Soy, Potatoes, Wheat, Barley, Carrots, Onions. These were the fields that produced the wheat that feeds the cows, the chickens, the pigs, which in turn produces the meat, the eggs, the milk that fill our restaurants and supermarkets.
For company I was listening to Dan Carlin's tour de force on the history of nuclear weapons. With my mind perhaps already elucidated to grand ideas, I became accutely aware of my tiny little place in the world, just a single cog in the leviathan machine that humans have built.
We live in a time of unparalleled abundance, where generation after generation has layered abstraction upon abstraction. And with each day, beneath our apps, and likes and swipes to supply our dopamine hits, there is a mighty foundation that provides us with food, and shelter, and a freedom to pursue our higher desires.
As dusk settled and the heat of day cooled, stratus clouds clotted on the horizon and filtered the setting sun. The blues and yellows faded to deep reds and purples, before the black of night set. I drove on under moonlight for another 3 hours, at some point unknown crossing into Montana. Weary eyed I reached my stay for the night, the Econolodge hotel, in Missoula. I hit the pillow, and quickly drifted into a deep sleep.