The friend on travels in the Midwest who sent the glowing pictures I used
here on New Year's Eve, sent me another set, taken on another day, looking across small bodies of water, frozen-over and snow-blown. These are the
Skokie Lagoons, the sort of embryonic Earth Art undertaken almost at random up and down the land by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression as busy-work for unemployed males with bold shovels.
"Between 1933 and 1940, several thousand
workers moved four million yards of earth to recontour the land,
creating the artificial lagoons of today." (Those would be cubic yards, I am thinking, and I wonder who came up with the number.)
