Google Map with Terrain, showing our route on the first leg of our trip. I've removed our route inside NJ. Click for full version, 609x950px.

So I'm trying to train my vision to be *not* sloppy, to see what's out there beyond the shoulders of the highway. These are my notes.

Movies and TV are much worse. Literature may fail to describe landscape, but movies and TV show you a landscape that doesn't correspond to the stated setting, and which moves around capriciously. I think that by watching movies and TV, we get used to landscape not meaning anything, they train our vision to be sloppy.

Being primed by Tolkien to look at landscape, I’m constantly disappointed because most books don’t give me that sense of physical setting at a more-than-human scale. The only exception I found in a haphazard walk through the literary canon was Thomas Hardy

It’s been years since I’ve been on an American Road Trip to places I haven’t been before, and I found myself paying a lot of attention to the landscape: the shape of the terrain, the vegetation, the types of houses and farms. This is something I learned from reading and re-reading Tolkien in my youth, so it soaked into my brain (I once calculated that I’d read the trilogy around 30 times by the time I was 20). The Lord of the Rings has many passages like this one:

Sprog the Younger is a junior in high school, which means Spring Break was for the two of us to do The College Tour, New England Division.





Very large Google Satellite view of the first leg. Click for full version, 1176x1965 (1.7Mb).

The first leg was from NJ up to Cornell, which I’d never visited before. We crossed the Delaware River on I-78, then up US-33 through Wind Gap to the Poconos. Spring is much less advanced than down in NJ, where we’re starting to see daffodils, and we were surprised to see how *dry* everything looked. There was no greenish haze starting in the grass, everything was sere, brown or yellow. Kind of creepy, considering how green and wet things are in NJ right now.

I hadn’t realized that the Poconos are a Plateau as well as hills. The landscape actually reminded me a good deal of the Pine Barrens, with stunted or half-grown trees. Aha, I see we drove in the Tannersville Bog region, that’s why it was reminding me of the Pines. Further on, we saw several ponds with beaver lodges in them, and one with an Osprey.

Schematic picture of the Northeast Appalachians, showing the mountains where we travelled. Created by a Wikipedia user

We continued up onto the Allegheny Plateau, and Sprog was shocked by the depth of rural poverty visible from the road. Almost every farm made me think of the word “hardscrabble”, unlike our part of NJ where farms are packed full of corn, vegetables, and smug-looking livestock or even horses.

We discussed it, and I said that I thought the difference is that the land in central NJ is so valuable -- for houses, industry, or commerce– that rural poverty is almost impossible: if you have land, you can’t be too poor. We have to have a substantial Farmland Preservation Program for there to be farms *at all* in central NJ, so the farms we do see are rich (in the sense of fecund), if not wealthy. NJ poverty is in the cities; "mobile homes" and other manufactured housing are uncommon, but we saw a *lot* of them as we drove through the Poconos and even more on the Allegheny Plateau. And, in the US as it is today, as soon as you hit areas of white rural poverty, there are big military recruitment billboards. Sprog even noticed a Romney yard sign, which is either *real* determination or bitter despair.

We had started to see birch groves and spruce trees mixed in with hardwoods almost as soon as we left NJ, signs of a more northern habitat. Now I saw occasional hemlock trees – including some that had clearly been killed by adelgid bug infestation, which is devastating American Hemlocks.

In due course we turned west on NY 79 to Ithaca. We passed through Lisle and noticed the high dike protecting the village, and the wide, unbuilt floodplain. The ground still seemed pretty dry for the season, but it’s clear that the stream is no respecter of human interests. But driving up the valley was very beautiful, and the narrow valley, steep hills, and rushing stream reminded me of traveling in eastern France and Switzerland when I was young. Except the Swiss don’t tolerate the kind of run-down poverty we were seeing.

Being off the Interstate, we saw a *lot* of signs for churches, and historical markers for The Burned-Over District . I’ve never been to Ithaca before, and I had been expecting a larger, more built-up metropolitan area. Instead, the rural poverty of the region laps up to the base of East Hill, where Cornell is located. I had heard that Cornell campus has gorges and bridges, but I guess I was sort of visualizing Rivendell:

Tolkien’s own picture of Rivendell.

I hadn’t realized that Cornell is on top of a hill high above the town:

Cornell on the hill, by Duyi Han

reminding me of Edinburgh Old Town:

Edinburgh Castle, enveloped by an early morning haar , as seen from the Princes Mall. From Wikimedia Commons

Of Cornell, I’ll only say that students must get used to going uphill both ways for *everything*. Sprog found it kind of cold and gray, which no-one can deny is a fair cop. It’s also awfully exposed to wind on the hill there, but damn, the views are magnificent. And when we saw “Library Slope” we both immediately thought of snagging a cardboard box or a cafeteria tray and going for a slide. Oddly, I can't find any online pictures of such activity, so I guess Campus Security frowns on it remarkably effectively.