In North America, there are really only four major geological areas, and I’ve lived in all four (yes, there’s a lot of diversity below that level, but bear with me). There’s the mountains of the western side of the continent, and while I’ve not lived in the actual mountains, I’ve spent most of my adult life on the western shore, in cities on the Pacific rim, San Francisco and Seattle. I grew up in Maine, which is very close in its geology and its weather and its culture to the vast Canadian shield region of the north, granite and basalt two billion years old peaking through the biomass that covers it, swamp lakes and bogs and mosquitoes and winter winds shooting down from the Arctic. There’s the eastern mountains and their low, rolling moraine hills, spreading out to include New York, and while I’ve spent less time there it’s mostly by design that I’ve avoided it. And then there are the plains, sweeping down from the western mountains and south of the low divide between the rivers that run north and the rivers that run south to the Gulf of Mexico, the climate shifting from deep cold and mild summers in the Alberta and Saskatchewan and Manitoba prairies, to the deep cold and scorching summers of the high plains of Montana and the Dakotas, to the mild winters and soul-sucking heat of Texas and Oklahoma and northern Mexico. Continue reading “Laid back”
