Clouds build through the afternoon, casting shadows that drift across the fields before dissolving somewhere beyond the horizon. At every river crossing, I look for something I haven't seen before: a new sandbar, a rock bar emerging from the water, or another pile of trees that finally surrendered to a river that never quite stops reconsidering its course.
Cultivated fields stretch for miles before giving way to pastures and patches of trees. Corn and soybeans alternate until suddenly a field appears, dotted with rolled hay bales. Cattle gather beneath the shade of a single tree or stand belly-deep in farm ponds to escape the summer heat. Wind turbines churn steadily above the crops. Barges make their slow way along the Mississippi or wait quietly, moored along the bank.
Communication towers punctuate the horizon in ways I never tire of. Water towers stoically announce a nearby town before it comes into view.
Every so often, an overpass reframes the view. For just a few seconds, the landscape beyond it becomes a composition of its own. Then I pass beneath the overpass, and the composition disappears.