Heading to Ohio

October 15, 2010

Day 37

Day 37

October 15, 2010.

Maumee, OH to Chicago, IL

With the exception of our walk at Oberlin College yesterday, Ohio is mainly a state we’re passing through.  The landscape gradually evolves from rolling hills to flat fields of farmland.  The countryside of the New York Amish was a patchwork of small farms quilted together with cornfields, open pastures of cattle and horses, and distant hills covered in the fading colors of autumn.

As we move through Ohio the small fields and farms give way to open acres of dried corn and larger cattle pastures.  Gone is the bent worker cutting neat rows of dried corn and loading them in a horse drawn wagon.  Here manual harvest of crops is replaced by today’s shiny green John Deere tractors plowing cleared fields and red harvesters cutting corn.  Assorted pickup trucks of silver, grey and blue replace the black leather horse drawn carts.  It’s all farming, just a question of scale and sweat.  Small islands of trees interrupt the fields and we can clearly see that the hills are behind us; flat fields and farmlands stretch before us.