Night Lights

During my visit to Jan's I gave you lots of impressions of Iowa. The flat, gravel roads. The sounds. The fields. It is so different from Pittsburgh that I always enjoy going there as much for the view as for the family. I'm going to share one more view that really fascinated me the first time I noticed it. It is the lights at night.

When Jan met Mike she took him to see the ocean. He said he had never seen water for as far as the eye could see, but he had seen corn for as far as the eye could see. In daytime in Iowa, it doesn't seem as if there is much else. It is corn and soybean fields, distant horizons, occassional outcroppings of trees, a house and barn every mile or so.

But walk outside at night and look around. There are lights everywhere. Stand in the road and do a 360 degree turn. The lights don't seem to be in a row, but they are all around you. Where do they come from? None of them look close, like the ones in your neighborhood. But they don't look far away either. They are 'across the field'. Some are red blinking ones. You can assume they are attached to a tower somewhere. But where?

I've learned that light travels great distances. I knew that from my science classes, and from looking at the stars. In Iowa it becomes more evident. Those red blinking lights are on windmills 30 miles away. They sit just above the horizon and look as if they could be on the main road. The white lights are the dusk to dawn lights on farms I can't even see during the day. I don't see big lights, small lights, near lights, far lights, (excuse me Dr. Seuss). I see LIGHTS!

It is an amazing sight to me. Just another intriguing aspect of a part of the country very different from Pittsburgh.