Keep in mind that cicadas & crickets keep rasping summer counsel on shadowed twigs in the trees lining on-ramps & business-park lakes. Also, here's an observation from the Northwest: It is possible--perhaps likely--to have a fistfight at certain bars situated in the Sprawl, that are mainly 'sports bars' but in the most sterile, modern, remote, lonely, manufactured sense. And, thus, the fistfight is the best thing to do: so do it up quick & don't regret it.
What does all this mean? This talk of exoskeletons & brawling in these particular landscapes? I guess that authentic experience becomes anonymous & especially powerful here.
I remember years ago being shown by someone dear to me the special vantage on an upper floor of the technically awful Van Hise building in Madison--you know, the fortress of language. The night view cast southwestward: There were the chaotic streets, the ugliness of the buildings illuminated in the cold yellow lights--not, on one level, the prettiest aspect of what can be an immensely pretty town. (Is it true? Better than 300,000 now?) But a real, hard, cold view. From that height--hundreds of feet off the ground--you could imagine what this mosaic of University, business district, municipal & county buildings, residences, lakes, isthmus, greenspace, withered swamp, strip-mall, industrial zone looks like to a nighttime thunderstorm (at the center of which is the Eye of God).
I am convinced that these spaces need their mega-transects. They need long-distance, intrepid walkers with canteens strapped to their belts & maps in their back-pockets to scout them. Places of such epic, chaotic development have, in fact, not truly been mapped--not in the 'deep-map' sense that William Least Heat-Moon proposes. The walker in these ravaged zones can surely find the romance in layers of vertical time & history: this once a Ho-Chunk camp, there a homestead child's grave, here where drunk-driven Pontiac spun off road on anonymous 1973 dawn.
But what is equally important is that real-time, veritable exploration on foot: risking life & limb on the road-shoulders & the parking lots, mapping studiously where the sidewalks begin & end, where the swinging traffic-lights denote lonesome commercial intersections...etc.etc. Probably you end up mapping a piece of terrifying human anatomy.
**Note: The picture is of SE Wisconsin Lake Michigan coastal country in winter 2009. A moment in time never to be recaptured again.**
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