I’ve not seen a real prairie.
Haven’t stood on a ridge to see grass to the horizon, or been lost up to my
shoulder in bluestem or Indian grass. I’ve put as many plants in my small
garden as I could—coneflowers, clover, liatris, winecup, side oats grama, milkweed,
aster, mountain mint. I have walked the twenty feet to the edge of my parent’s
property line in MN to look over 3 acres of seeded prairie, and in a small
stand of perhaps a hundred square feet the inverted turkey feet of bluestem
seed heads flail against a pale blue sky. I have walked the never-plowed 800
acres of Spring Creek Prairie in Nebraska where my wife and I were married,
where wagon ruts of an Oregon Trail cutoff are almost discernible. I have seen edges
of the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Kansas, the sheltered Wichita Mountains
short grass, and the mixed grass of Black Kettle National Grassland in Oklahoma,
but not even all of them together could give me a clue.
Maybe the closest I’ve come to
prairie is flying over the Plains, a field of clouds beneath, dark blue above,
or on the mossy Irish coast looking west toward Iceland. I feel a gunshot hole
in my chest, see its shadow on the ground in front of me, feel the air chill my
insides, know I’m not just incomplete but desperate—absolutely desperate—to
plug the absence. I think about tearing up my small front lawn, seeding with
buffalo grass, placing clumps of little bluestem here and there like hiccups.
But I don’t have the guts or the faith. There is something about dining on
ashes that comforts me. Is it nostalgia for something I never knew? Is it
solipsism or self pity? Is it just easier to romanticize what we don’t know and
never experienced and create an image only, an interpretation whose personal
experience makes the unknown seem more real? This is what impressionistic
painters must feel—caught between an inner and outer world and unable to
completely express the place in between where we live in fear and hope.
I
remember walking railroad tracks as a boy, balancing on one rail, the sharp
rock between timbers, the faint sound of an invisible train coming fast from
behind; this is what it’s like walking a corn field where prairie once was, and
where it could be again.
4 comments:
Beautiful, Benjamin. Native tall-grass prairie is on of the most endangered natural ecosystems in the world.
Helen--I'm pretty sure tall grass is THE most endangered ecosystem. Yay big ag.
will that passage go into one of your books? At least to a magazine/newspaper?
Diana--Yup, it's part of the 35,000 words I have so far for Turkey Red, the Oklahoma historical memoir I'm so slowly working on.
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