Aboard my flight from RDU to Detroit was none other than Rev. Barber, a prominent figure in NC politics, as I later discovered. As we left Raleigh, I couldn't help but notice how many trees there were. Though the Triangle seems highly-developed, a bird's-eye-view offers a much more pleasant perspective: everywhere I looked, I saw dense and unending trees, spanning as far as the eye could see. As we ascended, streets and cars vanished, and soon the only anthropogenic features visible were man-made lakes and the cooling tower of the Shearon Harris nuclear power plant.
After a futile attempt to reclaim an hour or two of sleep, I found myself above Michigan. What I saw contrasted starkly with my final views of North Carolina. The cold hand of development had certainly left its mark here, not as sprawling metropolitan areas, but rather as endless farmland. As far as I could see, even from cruising altitude, there stood sparse pockets of no more than 4 or 5 trees. I suppose farmland is generally viewed as rural and natural, since the ground is green and brown as opposed to urban grays and blacks; yet, the eery absence of trees was unsettling, to say the least. As the farmland gave way to lightly-wooded suburbs, I found myself wondering how my first glimpses of Korea and Japan would appear.
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