Click to enlarge.

 
This is the view south from our backyard Saturday evening. Specifically, it is the view from atop the retaining wall border between our backyard and the former cornfield behind it.

Notice the distance to the nearest large trees (lower right corner), and the lack of dimension in the landscape. As someone who grew up in and lived most of his adult life in the Ozark foothills (where the altitude never pokes above the tree line), I can both appreciate and loathe the wide open spaces prevalent in what is, in effect, our son’s hometown.

I like that I can see a thunderstorm coming from miles away, and that the sunset is not occluded by hillsides or treetops. I never will tire of the variations on Nature’s colorful, cloudy theme. When we lived at the end of a street surrounded by mountains, I often wondered whether there was a pretty sunset out there somewhere.

I’m reminded of something a friend said while we tried to find the best spot to enjoy a mountaintop vista. “The view would be a lot better if Dubya would come out here and cut down some of these trees.”

Our area, I’m sure, is a dream for satellite dish installers. No matter what direction the dish needs to point, it is guaranteed a signal barring very heavy cloud cover (a rarity in these parts).

When driving through an older section of town, I admire the large trees, but not the work that goes into clearing the leaves from the lawn and the gutters. I also wonder, however, whether the seemingly disposable houses popping up these days will still be around when the planted saplings are large enough to be a benefit/nuisance.

I suspect that if I spoke to those living both with and without large trees in their yard, they would respond similarly to those with and without natural curl in their hair: those other people don’t know how good they have it.

The hilly terrain vs. flat plains discussion probably would elicit similar responses.

When folks ask me how I like living in Texas, I invariably tell them that what I miss most are the mountains. The main gripe, I suppose, is that even if we drive the distance it takes to get to a scenic hiking destination, the number of people from our huge metro area doing the same robs us of some of the benefit.

On a drive back to my hometown over the holidays, on a section of I-30 surrounded by the Oauchita National Forest, our six-year-old son surveyed the scene through his window. “Look at all the trees. Aren’t all those trees cool?” he said.

“Yes, son, they sure are,” I said.

Nevertheless, I try to see the good in the nearly unlimited visibility around here.

(Note: the panoramic shot is a stitch of several pictures, created using the Hugin plug-in for Gimp)

Technical:
Nikon D50
Nikon 18-35mm f/3.5 – 4.5D ED IF
f/11
1/6 sec (steadied against the fence)
Aperture Priority
Spot Metering