Oley Valley, near Oley, Pennsylvania, August 14, 2006.

I've been enjoying my summer tour around Pennsylvania so far, and I've made a number of on-site drawings. I've also taken lots of photographs for later reference. The corn is mature, and the land is wrapped in golden August haze and light. The fields and forests resound with the buzzing of cicadas and the chirping and zipping of crickets. Twittering swallows and goldfinches fly above the fields. Today I visited Oley, a historic town near Reading, which is the place that Wallace Stevens mentioned in his poem "Credences of Summer." Stevens was born in Reading, but he would have been disappointed to see how poorly it is doing nowadays.

I am avoiding the cities as much as possible, because I want to spend time in the countryside taking in pastoral images. This part of Pennsylvania is a very orderly place. There seems to be no wildness at all; every farm is neatly maintained, the cornfields sharply bordered. The soyfields are all weedless and green, the vegetables grow in neat rows. I see very few buildings in disrepair.

My current stopover is in Amish country. I have seen them in their farms and on their porches, and have passed their horse-drawn buggies and carts on the roads. I have never seen real Amish before. It is forbidden to photograph the people, but things, buildings and animals are OK to photograph. Their farms are the most orderly of all.

According to the (web) sources I consulted, the Amish live by an unwritten set of social and moral rules called the "Ordnung," not easily translated from the German to English. It's the "order" of how things are if you are Amish. To me, and probably to most other visitors and tourists, they are like humanoid aliens, or perhaps refugees who have passed through a time machine to set their colonies in our modern world. I am trying not to pay too much attention to them, as it is landscape and buildings which concern me. But they are part of the land; this is their home, not mine. And they built many of these buildings. All of it is created by people who value order, and the idea of order, just as the poet did as he contemplated the geometric straightness of Pennsylvania farmlands.

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