August 22: A challenging place

Written earlier today, with links added later...

I'm sitting in the outdoor cafe area of a McDonald's. It's hot outside, but not too hot because there's cloud cover and a breeze. Inside the restaurant, the tables are dirty, the air conditioning doesn't seem to work well, there are flies, and there's a cacophony of high-pitched beeping from the machines that help make food preparation mindless and identical from item to item. Outside, there's none of that, though I did bring wet wipes with me to clean the table and bench before sitting down. I also have a few sparrows keeping me company.

I quite dislike fast food restaurants, so it should say something that this was my most pleasant option for places to sit down and pass an hour or so while waiting to pick up a family member in a strange town. According to the population sign at the town limits, this incorporated community is about 30% larger than my rural, middle-of-nowhere hometown, but it seems infinitely more sad and economically depressed. Any direction you drive, more than half of the buildings seem to be empty and boarded up, and the ones that are still in use look like they haven't seen proper maintenance in thirty years. It's an agricultural community, surrounded by huge plantations of melons, rice, soybeans, sorghum, and cotton. I suspect most of this is owned by one or two giant companies, and everyone's employment is either directly or indirectly related to the existence of those companies.

It's dirty and depressing. One of my core beliefs is that you should try to find the bits of beauty and fascination in every place, and it's possible here, but if I pull back and look at the whole scene, take a general impression, it's a challenge. So when I turned on my mp3 player, and a podcast came on featuring a man walking over the moors of Dartmoor, describing his experience hunting for hidden birds... I got an unexpected feeling of pleasure and relief, imagining this other place, wild, quiet, beautiful.

A bit later, I ended up waiting in a small gravel parking lot at the edge of a rice field. It wasn't exactly peaceful—deep summer afternoon glare, shimmering heat and the buzz of insects tend to create more of a prehistoric, dreamlike state than what I think of as "peaceful." But dragonflies by the dozens were swooping over the field and right up to my car's windshield, an occasional redwing blackbird flew over, and these darlings claimed a struggling young oak tree very near me.



Then there was the homeward sky.