An opportunity arose to spend a couple of days in Rochelle, Illinois. I figured it would be fun to get away from humanity (i.e. the city) and enjoy nature (the country).

It was the first week of August. Crops are doing well this year in the Midwest. The fields were lush and green and full.

At times, farming and railroading seem to converge. Railroaders start with a couple hundred acres of jumbled, piled up containers. They sort them by number, stack them on railcars, and blast the trains out of town. Farmers clear away fields of random, scrubby bushes and replant in straight, tidy rows. They too number everything. Those numbers matter when the crop is collected, sorted, and dispatched to the elevators.

You can tell which foliage is nature’s and which is the farmer’s. Natures’ foliage is our enemy, we curse it for ruining our photography by being unkempt and badly placed. Whereas the farmers’ foliage is our friend. We thank them for the clear tidy sightlines and interesting details which their hard-worked fields provide us.

We drove by one field of soybeans. Here and there, a stalk of corn stuck up like stubble after yesterday’s too-hasty shave. Aha, I thought, that’s an old cornfield that has been rebuilt into something else.

I wonder, do farmers ever go out as we do: checking out each others’ numbers, recording them in little notebooks, peering through binoculars, straining to know the farthest-most ones so we have a complete record?  Do they examine old fields at odd angles, hoping the light will give away signs of what the previous seed mill might have been?

This was a quick trip, so I am back in the city again. Nothing here is organized as railroaders/farmers would want it. Each house has a deliberately different growth of plants and trees, planted with an eye to being distinct and diverse. Even the Rogers and Bell wires that hang from the pole at our fenceline are tangled and disorderly. And the train tracks? Nature has overgrown the rights of way.

It turns out that the country is full of manmade squares and rows, while the city is overgrown with nature…..and often all that nature just clutters up a good shot.

It’s the humanity that makes the country so worthwhile. Go figure.