We see the backs of houses, mostly. Barbed wire fences to keep people from walking onto the rails and getting splattered. Frozen streams and ponds, bare trees. Once in a while, there's a crumpled wooden shed, a rotting Airstream, a discarded blue kiddie pool.
We come up on towns through lines of concrete retaining walls covered in graffiti, mostly for our benefit. A sign sticks up above the back of the line of warehouses---'REDEMPTION CENTER', it claims. Redemption from what?
Back into the tree. Back to the little ponds with paddle boats trapped in the ice. Back to the line of boulders along a ridge that we can't see over. The sun is at the level of my window, and it flashes through stands of bare birch trunks. Sometimes, this gives me a headache; not today.