For example, in that desert country, whenever you were on a road that went over a bridge, even a tiny one, you’d look down to see if any water happened to be under whatever bridge it was. Growing up in West Texas, you learned to do certain things. It’s a mailbox (in the form of a house), with a tree stump for a stand. It might not be too easy to understand what the below image actually is. Logging is quite common in southeastern Ohio and its traces are frequently found. The result has been a near-miraculous recovery of Ohio’s forests, though the Great Midwestern Forest will never reappear. Meanwhile, logging became less destructive and more sustainable. A combination of rural populations moving to cities and better agricultural techniques meant that low-quality farmland could be abandoned to reforestation. However, around mid-century, the situation began to improve. In fact, by the 1920s, most of southeastern Ohio, the region for my third excursion, was largely deforested, between logging and farming. Ohio no longer has any great contiguous forests. Those days are long gone for most of the Midwest, which has been farm country for many years. As the saying went, a squirrel could travel tree to tree for hundreds of miles without ever having to touch the ground. At one time, most of the midwest was covered by a single mighty forest, a woods as black and dense as it was broad.

One of the mightiest things in the Midwest that no longer exists, at least as it was, is the Great Midwestern Forest. The lone and level sands stretch far away

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,Īnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Percy Bysshe Shelley had it dead-on with his sonnet “Ozymandias”: These sorts of things have always resonated very deeply with me-this notion of things that once were strong or great but are so no longer. This is why I exult in the glorious truck-hulks that appear in the much underrated 1977 film Sorceror, for example, and one of the reasons I like movies that depict slums, ghettoes, or old buildings. There is something about things that are old, ungainly and decaying that fascinate me. In which our intrepid hero encounters a triumphantly twisted ruin…

I am ozymandias king of kings