"High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet disclosing whence it comes. At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds. On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of the sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh." – Aldo Leopold, from "Marshland Elegy"
The green underworld is but a few turns of the bike tire from the edges of the city. County Z down into Brices Prairie where the high ground of bluff and concrete gives way to a flickering lushness seen in few other places on earth.
It is a full regard for life here, a bounty, nearly always in flux and growth, what one could almost determine, without the hand of human intervention, something of a harmony between the natural currents of wind and water and the vegetation that has learned to adapt to its contours or has been forced to release onto another path. As bikers, we speed through the variety; farm fields, striving under all conditions, a mere scenery; we slow down long enough for the mosquito to land, the gnats to swarm, the double dragon fly to helicopter by, and we know – for we can see it, feel it – that there is more here than the stiff dimensions of a painted canvas.
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