At 09:30 AM 2/21/2009, John P. Brooks wrote:
....and love to go for a Saturday drive in the "country" on freeways
that trench a horrid scar across our beautiful karst....
As a pilot and geographer I've come to have a different aspect to freeways:
To me the Interstate Highway System and its associated networks are a
large--perhaps the world's largest--artistic sculpture--a sculpture
of plasticly formed grey concrete and shiningly smooth black asphalt,
with colorful lines and stripes painted to accent and highlight the
already flowing curves like a fine statue in marble. It has the long
sinuous lines of planned-randomness, smoothly curving and
interacting, interlacing lines, graceful curves at interchanges
passing through 3-dimensionsal layers like a giant weaving, the green
band of ditches that parallel the roadway and twist and torque as
they transition into overpasses at cross roads that run off like
tangents--winding or straight--connecting beautifully to the
interwoven landscape, following contours or blatently opposing them,
giant roadcuts that show the shapes and colors of the underlying
rocks like panoramic walls painted by nature. ...not a blight but a
great work of art.
And from the practical standpoint, they make getting there a lot easier.
--Ediger
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