The rows crops, too, follow the grid; driving the country roads in late summer is like speeding through eye-level corduroy. The smaller country cemetery, located on a rise, never succumbed to the curvilinear cemetery planning fashion; its plots and marker stones are lined up so that even the dead are settled on the grid system. With the disappearance of windmills and trees, a new set of verticals, the phone and the power poles, provide a regular, repetitive subdivision to that grid. The hedgerows that are left are now simple lines of trees; they read not as low, wide, rounded masses but as thin lacy walls, tracing field patterns and reinforcing further subdivision of the grid. Seen inscribed against a winter sunset, they seem to symbolize nature not only receiving the grid but becoming the grid. (79)
"Square to the Road, Hogs to the East" (1985)
Robert Riley