OBSERVATIONS:
The wild open spaces
By Joan Zwagerman
Special to The Progressive Populist
During college years, some of the states I traveled to or through included
Colorado, Washington, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. In each, the natives declared:
"This is God's country," implying, of course, that the state down
the road did not enjoy the Almighty's beneficence. Hearing this while in
Minnesota and hailing from Iowa, the message was clear: "You live in
God-forsaken land."
I used to believe it, too. I used to want to live in one of those wildly
attractive places. While traveling through the Colorado Rockies, I envisioned
it as a future home. The profusion of trees abutted by sheer mountain cliffs
overlooking clear streams made me thirst to put down roots.
I never made it to the Rockies, but I did live between Seattle and the Canadian
border for a time. The old TV tune from Here Come the Brides was true:
"The bluest skies you've ever seen are in Seattle,
And the hills the greenest green in Seattle."
All the while I lived there, though, I'd sigh at the sight of an open field.
Encountering Puget Sound made me homesick, although such large bodies of
water were foreign to me. When I realized the mountains, the focus of my
longing, were responsible for causing emotional claustrophobia, I took the
first train of opportunity home. (Who cared if "the train" was
a U-haul truck!)
Returning to Iowa confirmed an inescapable fact: I was marked. I was forever
a child of the prairie. And I was glad. Now when I drive through the Iowa
countryside, I see beauty and bounty, not blandness and desolation. I try
to see the land as the sea of grass it once was. Some historical accounts
tell how the vast stretches of grass and ceaseless wind drove settlers mad.
But others, as though drawn by Sirens, fell under its spell.
In his book Grassland [Viking, 1996], author Richard Manning discovers this
lure: "The solitude of the prairie is like none other, the feeling
of being hidden and alone in a grassland as open as the sea." Which,
it was, long ago. Before it was prairie, this land was covered by shallow
seas. The grass was merely the water's grandchild.
Thus accounts for the inexplicable draw to Puget Sound. Primeval memory
was at work in me, as in the grass.
Although the water is long gone, the sailing here is fine. Those early settlers
in their "prairie schooners" tasted the salt and spray in the
wind. They knew. The lilt of the land summons sea chanties from all kindred
souls.
Still, it isn't always easy to imagine this land as pristine tallgrass prairie.
Imagine what it must have looked like before corn and soybeans became king,
before fences and telephone poles accentuated the divisions that parceled
the sea into neat section acres.
Imagine grass taller than corn, grasses reaching twelve-foot heights. Imagine
such a sea of grass, a sea of thick, impenetrable canes, a sea so dense
it could drench any horse and rider. It could swallow any four-wheel-drive
vehicle whole without so much as a belch of appreciation.
Which brings to mind the whole notion of appreciation. What is valued and
by whom?
Iowa prides itself as the "tall corn state." The great irony is
that European settlers mowed and plowed the grass under only to plant corn
which is, itself, a grass. Nature's cycle doesn't continue so much as shift
when humans impose their will on it. The elk and bison once native to tallgrass
prairie were driven west to the shorter grasslands of the plains states
until that, too, was plowed under and put to someone's idea of "good
use." The Dust Bowl was no freak of nature; it was Man's hit-and-run
accident. In the end, the bison were decimated and the elk fled to the mountains.
Was all this plowing and planting done as divine directive to subdue the
earth? To make something of what appeared to be nothing? To prove we could?
Which we did.
But when springtime storms kick up the wind and the sky turns gray-green
with silt and broken promises, I wonder at what cost comes our proving ground.
Perhaps change is blowing in the wind. Richard Manning visited Walnut Creek
Preserve, an 8,000-acre stretch of land south of Des Moines that is being
converted to prairie. Surely this goes against the grain of many a farmer.
(Pun intended, sorry.) Farmers are the most pragmatic of people. They have
to be, and I imagine genuine disbelief and disgust might greet such a decision.
Land, after all, is their livelihood. Unplowed ground is untapped potential.
And yet, if we use the land beyond productivity, into meaninglessness, we
are reduced to lifelessness. The land is a trust, the land is legacy as
well as livelihood. The land holds secrets, too, in trust, secrets we may
have brushed aside for the sake of expediency.
So places like Walnut Creek are important not because they signal the wave
of the future. Not because they can be used as a finger to point at the
mistakes and excesses of farming. But because as Pauline Drobney, a botanist
hired to work on the preserve, told Manning, "We as a species are lessened
by the loss of unknown places."
The early settlers, hungry for their place in the sun, viewed this flat
and open land as an apple ripe for the picking. Perhaps those first gardeners
forgot that gardens are not simply means of sustenance. They are also places
of wonder and mystery, and these sustain us, too. Those like Pauline Drobney
see prairie preservation as vital to understanding our own place on the
earth, a place that grows increasingly tenuous as we grow increasingly rapacious.
Joan Zwagerman writes from Alta, Iowa.
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