I have spent a lifetime observing the landscape intimately. For most of my childhood we moved every year travelling back and forth between California and Washington State by car. From this fundamental experience, I picked up the habit of long daydreams, counting electric poles, calling out “slugbug,” then planting a fist into one of my brothers’ sides, lest I catch one first.

As a young adult, my social station left only domestic travel by car as an option for “vacationing.” I spent a lot of time, again, noticing the landscape, but this time I noted the injustices applied to it. Clearcut forests, oil spills, intrusive infrastructure: the spoils of corporate culture upon shared terrain.

For about a decade, I bicycled as my primary method of transportation. Finally, I removed the glass between the environment and me. The slowness of moving by bicycle through an exploited, urban landscape offered a fresh view.

Today, I find myself often daydreaming on long highway travel, just as I had as a child. I spy small families of trees and bushes in reserves at offramps and between routes. Like old friends, in spring I might see the drooping wild black cherry blossoms; in summer the umbrella elderberry; all year, the silverberry, juniper, cedar, pine. Despite running highways through their habitat, these creatures thrive and provide shelter and food for an entire living system. These resilient patches are the focus of this series.

As a starting point in this series, I have chosen to deliberately “erase” any man-made features within the landscape as both a wish and a way to emphasize the color and composition of the natural world. I hope to explore how natural bodies thrive when bound involuntarily to a system only interested in their subjugation for profit.