The Midwest |

The Midwest

Above, from above: aerial pictures

I grew up around these parts. Iowa, mostly: I was born Council Bluffs in the southwestern part of the state, was raised in the north-central town of Clarion, went to school “out east” in Waverly, and worked on the west side of the state in Storm Lake. The Midwest (as David Foster Wallace also describes it in the below quote) is a land of road-grids and planes and plains – at destinations, cities, and intriguingly elaborate artistic attractions. I’ve routinely roamed the highways and interstates between the Twin Cities and Lawrence, Kansas, sometimes getting lost in the oft bizarre backwoods of Wisconsin.

I also do aerial photography.

Below and above: Wright County.

“I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids–and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema.”

– David Foster Wallace, “Derivative Sports in Tornado Alley”