A Bird's Eye View - for real
On Mother's Day, I had the good fortune to be invited on a plane adventure with a pilot friend. He flew two of us on his small plane to Pella, Iowa - home of the famous Tulip Festival. The millions of tulips were long past their prime, but the buffet brunch we had at the Windmill restaurant was unforgettably delicious. After walking around the park and seeing thousands of tulips that were probably breathtaking a month ago, we drove back to the small Pella airport and flew home.
The tulips were no longer breathtaking, but for me, the flights there and back were breathtaking in the extreme. I sat in the front seat beside Dick, the pilot. I wore headphones to block out most of the huge sound of the engine, and I had a literal bird's eye view of miles and miles of Iowa landscape. I've flown in commercial planes many times, but the view on these is from so far up, and blotted out often by clouds, that only in taking off and landing do you get to study the landscape. On Sunday's ride, we were never very high. We had a sunny, cloudless day, and the view was clear and relatively close. We were just high enough so we had no danger of hitting the wind turbines, but close enough to see the houses, barns, ponds and roads in detail.
I was struck immediately by how different my view from the plane was from riding along Iowa landscape in a car. The perspective from above made the view like a map: flat and far-reaching. And I found myself imagining that I was some being from another planet, checking out this one. The most striking thing to my alien eyes were all the straight lines! White roads stretching north/south and east/west. Straight lines everywhere, which my human eyes knew were roads. What would an alien think? The only moving things from the plane's view were what looked like little bugs speeding along the straight lines. An alien would have to go deeper to find a living person!
From the plane, the straight line theme was copied all over the pallet, buildings made of straight lines and right angles, homes in towns lined up straight, fields plowed in straight lines. It has really made me wonder about the concept of "straight". I think in nature, you never find straight lines. Paths made by animals wander around, never straight. Animal homes, like burrows, are round and lumpy. Birds nests are concave. Even ants traveling in long lines wrap around the undergrowth. It is only humans who added straight lines to the planet.
So I wonder how this came about. I don't think the caveman used straight lines for much. Maybe the arrow, pitched by a curved bow. When you live out in the natural world, when you are part of the natural world, there are only occasional examples of straight. A pine tree can grow fairly straight. A rock face on the side of a canyon can have broken off to a fairly smooth straight surface. The stalks of dried herbs can be fairly straight. But mostly in nature, you are among curves, soft growth, and multi-shaped plants and animals.
When did humans begin their preoccupation with making things straight-edged? For centuries there have been roads that followed the natural terrain of the land until we started using bulldozers to carve straight lines through the landscape. Was it the industrial age that made us begin to be preoccupied with making everything straight? Or maybe when you use machines for things, they do straight better than curved? Books have existed for a long time, and they are square-cornered rectangles. Building houses with wood probably is easier if all the wood is cut the same, straight and smooth.
What I wonder is how this abundance of straight surfaces in our modern world has affected our perceptions. We've grown up in rectangle homes with straight walls and ceilings. As I sit here at my desk, I see very very few things that aren't square or rectangles. The desk itself, the printer, the lamp, the bulletin board, the plant shelf, even my massage table. The round pots holding plants are the only exception. I would love to know how this preponderance of straight edges has shaped our perception of the world. Does anyone have some wisdom to share about this?
Good observations, Nan. Here in Cary, NC, the rapidly growing "town" just spent close to 100 million dollars to build a downtown park with nothing square or straight--walks or buildings. All the roofs are pie shaped metal segments and all the walls are curved in a basically pleasing attempt to feel more natural. Some of us would have been happy to actually let nature create the park and save most of that money, tho.
ReplyDeleteJohn and Cathy Thomas
Metes and bounds was historically problematic as the landscape changed over time. Surveys used mountains as monuments and benchmarks because they tended to move less. After the revolutionary war, the assumption of public debts and the settlement of British and American property rights was a long and contentious central issue for Federalists and Republicans. The continued colonial settlement into native lands was also motivation for Thomas Jefferson to define property lines. The 1803 public land survey it was based on a grid system called township and range. Prospective land buyers, squatter or settler, could then purchase their square. Or in the case of speculators, thousands of squares.
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