And then Europeans, desperate for food and clothing-and, later in the nineteenth century, for sport as well as in a systematic attempt to starve Native Americans-began a multispecies slaughter. Cougars hunted the plentiful pronghorn antelope. Elk, grizzly bear, and gray and red wolves lived as far east as the Missouri River. Throngs of bison ambled across the prairie. The prairie, for millennia, was not perceived as empty it was a riot of life. A community of microbes, miles of roots twisting and wrapping, field mice and badger burrows. By looking down, instead of up, an entire universe reveals itself. But so often, at least to our way of seeing, we fail to notice what’s right at our feet. Since the prairie spreads, instead of builds, we view it as no great wonder, as something we have no control over, as something that’s around and beneath us, as something we cannot conquer. What we cannot recognize we oftentimes will not protect.
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But when the prairie is overturned, we fail to mourn because, to most of us, the prairie is dirt, a patch of grass, nothing remotely remarkable. When a forest is clear cut, we see the stumps like fibrous tombstones.
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When a mountaintop is removed, we see its rubble cast into the valley. In a culture where we spend, lose, save, and buy our time-where time is an economic transaction-the prairie teaches us that to flourish, we need patience. The prairie I know is not like the forests of New England it does not regenerate quickly. The empire of fossil fuels moves swiftly. To some, what feels harsh and open is, upon closer examination, delicate and sensitive. To be of the prairie is to recognize its fragility. Sometimes bull snakes fell from the ceiling onto dining tables.īut the prairie is fragile. Like a fishnet, the grass’s roots held the sod bricks together yet were still permeable.
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The chalky soil of western North Dakota was, in the early days of European immigration, cut into bricks to build sod houses-brick by brick, layer by layer, crude houses rose across the ocean of sage, milkvetch, and little bluestem. I felt unmoored, floating across the sea of sky. The earth below me seemed to move, but maybe it was because of the wheeling of a hawk or the whirling of a turkey vulture high above me. The sky washed with clouds that slowly shifted like a trail of smoke. The ocean of the prairie is too large to be captured in any one image.įor hours in childhood I would lie down on a hilltop beyond the wheat field behind our house. Vertiginous, my father pulled over and we enjoyed the silent fireworks sweeping across the sky-it felt like I was inside the birthing of a nebula. Lime ribbons began to swirl higher and higher until the ionosphere pulsed. Once, when I was in elementary school, while my family drove home in winter on a cold, clear night, the aurora borealis leaked into my periphery. It is as if fireflies are lodged into a large black sheet. It is as if you are within the brushstrokes of a fiery painting.Īs the ferocity of the crepuscular light fades and darkness seeps across the vault of sky, stars shroud the edges of the wide world. Shadows lengthen and the world rushes toward the close of day, the golden light lasting a mere hour. In late afternoon, as the sun slides lower in the western sky, the buttes blaze copper the harvested fields of wheat turn tawny. In a land where light-its length, its clarity-is abundant, it is only in fall when its sheer intensity, its radiant glory, is felt. There are three churches but not even a motel. There are two bars, a bank, a courthouse, and the small Coal Country Community Health Center on Center’s main street. I went to the one school in the county with the same twenty-two other students in my grade-a lopsided division of six girls and sixteen other boys.
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When I was small, growing up in a trailer house on the south side of Center, it took me all of ten minutes to pedal my bicycle across town to Grandpa and Grandma Brorby’s. Such necessities as milk, Hot Stuff pizza, and two-liter bottles of Coke are purchased at the Corner Stop, the one gas station in the county. There is no stoplight in Center, no grocery store. As the town motto reminds visitors, “It’s better in Center.” Center is an ecotone, a transitory region of change. Fields flow into mines it is where dust kicks up. Center is where farmers begin to get supplanted by ranchers. It’s the small county seat and the only incorporated town. My hometown is where great trapeziums of buttes begin to break against the wash of sky. Socked in south-central North Dakota, located in the middle of Oliver County, Center is a stone’s throw from the 100th meridian, the rod of aridity that cleaves America between the luscious greens of the East and the mottled browns of the West. Center is a place where people only end up.