Conditioned Looking

When traveling across country by car the eyes have two functions. By day they dart swiftly back and forth, near and far, taking in as much stimuli as possible. As the miles pass by, the terrain changes, and the tiny one-horse towns pop up and then recede in the distance, the eyes check it all out, deciphering each new set of visual information to take in upside-down, turn around in the back of the brain and register- beautiful, unique, interesting, exciting,shocking, frightening, etc. It's like the eyes and brain are running a marathon. By sunset, although one has been seated in a car all day, there's a feeling of a hard day's work. After endless hours of catching things on the fly at seventy miles per hour, its hard for the mind to slow down.
...but then its dark. And so it must. And since its only five o'clock there are plenty more miles to chase after before day's end.
The dark state highway roads of the midwest present the next challenge. After a day of darting,the eyes are now resigned to the tedium of watching the little yellow lines on the road two hundred feet ahead because frankly thats all the further they can see. The scenery on either side might be exquisite, but peering into the darkness presents not even the slightest hint of what it might be. On long straight stretches of road reflectors and road signs whiz by in periphery. After 200 miles or so the task becomes very hallucinatory. Pools of purple start appearing on the road along side those hateful yellow dotted lines. Dark shadows in the roads' edge start looking convincingly like free-range cattle. The monotony resorts the eyes to habituation; conditioned looking where reaction disappears.
I imagine that residents of podunk mountain towns across the U.S. suffer from a sort of habituation themselves. Their eyes no longer dart back and forth in bewilderment and awe of the scenery on the 20-or-so-mile mountain drive into "town" for necessities. Instead the route becomes utilitarian, goal-oriented, ordinary.
There's something to be said then for the intention of the contemporary nomad: avoiding the disappointment of inevitable conditioned-looking.