[A few nights ago, I took some people out to Highland, a ghost town, just a couple miles east of the Big Sioux River. That little trip reminded me of this quarter-century-old essay that once upon a time was my all-time favorite. Originally, it appeared in The Banner and was reprinted in Fifty-Five and Counting, a collection of essays.]
Playwright William Inge, a native of Kansas, refused to call his homeland prairies flat, because flat suggests, well, lifeless wine and archless feet. He much preferred level.
Inge was right, topographically at least. There's nothing at all flat about the plains, but they are, relatively, level. Out here where I live we have no Pikes Peak, no Niagara escarpment, no Grand Canyon. To some, the prairies may appear featureless, but they aren't–not really. Their nearly boundless expanse tends, almost shamelessly, to feature any last thing that sits or stands upon it, like old windmills.
The adjective of choice may well be undulating--a sweet word that begins in a hum, rolls through soft vowels no less gentle than its consonants, and ends in a song. But then, I may be romanticizing because, really, there's nothing cushy about the prairie. While a sunset can spread a masterful palette of colors out over what seems half the earth, not to mention more open sky than you can imagine, the plains are not for aesthetes. Look sometime at its cottonwoods, no matter how huge. Often, they huddle in clumps, like homesteads and towns, clinging to endless, rolling land as if it were trying to shake them. Every big tree here has been battered by the march of windy seasons; they are themselves monuments to survival.
In the small town out here where I live, vast horizons surround us. When I walk home from school, I walk west up a street that rises so slightly toward the middle of town that the pavement seems to disappear into eternal farmland. Sometimes I fantasize about "the west" I can see before me. I dream of just continuing to walk, taking off, leaving behind every last thing, like Huck Finn does at the end of the novel, or Gatsby's Nick Carroway, or any of a hundred characters from American stories. The horizon looks so free, so open, that it offers dreams. "Possibility," William Kittridge says, "is the oldest American story."
If you can see for miles in almost every direction, you can't help but dream. Sheer space out here is so mighty it's almost biblical. The vast prairie space feeds the psyche of our two great nations—Canada and the United States. How else do you explain suburbanites' madness for four-wheel-drive vehicles?
But not everyone sees the prairie. Most simply fly over and, if they take the time, look down to see a huge garden, drawn and quartered in a million right angles. Others work hard at napping to get the plains out of the way while they cruise through on an interstate and wait for the first breathtaking view of the Rockies. That's forgivable, I guess. One quickly loses patience with an endless succession of promises—after all, you climb one slowly aspiring hill, only to come on another exactly like it on the other side, and so on and so on and so on and so on. Seen one summer cornfield, you've seen them all.
What people don't see is the fact that the region feeds much of the world. What's more, few travelers ever notice the undeniable force of the place, the sheer power of its vast openness. Last January we were El-Ninoed into believing that winter was no big deal; but a year before, a succession of appendage-numbing blizzards blew out of the Great White North on winds that could peel back your skin. In their wake, drifts the height and breadth of small barns piled around farms, alabaster fortress walls. I was holed up in Sioux Falls for two days, only an hour from home. When finally I drove back, stalled cars were everywhere, driven off the side of the road during the storm. You could tell when they were abandoned by the depth of the snow beneath their wheels. Snow doesn't fall gently on the plains; it gets laid into industrial-strength carpet by massive winds.
In every season of the year, there's too much of something—wind, rain, snow, heat, frigid cold--and every last weather feature comes in spades: bone-chilling winters and torturous summers. Always, there's wind. Even though people think there’s not much to see out here, what’s here is an eternal presence that those of us who live here know very well. Few places in the world are as rough-hewn as the prairies; maybe that’s why so few of us choose to live here. This nothingness is really something.
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Tomorrow: Highland, Iowa--what's left at least.
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