Broken Kettle Retro

I'm not sure what old camera I was toting back then, but it wasn't anything close to the new phone in my hands last night. You can see the mushiness here. It takes great glass to make this kind of wide world come alive. A few significant megapixels doesn't hurt either.

All I knew was at my feet and as far as the eye could see, what lay before me was astonishing beauty. We were there at dawn, about an hour north and west, because I couldn't help but believe that dawn would be the hour to be there. And it was--October 19, 2002.

Sometime later, this is how I described it.

We were standing atop a miniature mountain, looking out over the Big Sioux River from a statuesque bluff not all that far from the confluence of the Missouri and the Big Sioux, over the prairie land of Broken Kettle Nature Preserve, 3000 acres of sheer beauty. No one else was there.

Then came the dawn.

And then, suddenly, in a magician’s flick of a wand, all around us the prairie grass was sheathed in bronze, as if taken from the fire. Down at our feet, the world turned to Oz, the big bluestem, golden rod, and blazing stars burnished as if sacred. We forgot the sprawling open miles to the west because the show right there beneath our feet made us feel, honestly, that we were standing on holy ground.

Then, a year later--a better camera, same place, same time: August 10, 2003.



And then last night, dusk, just a little farther down Butcher Road. Same landscape, better camera (a new phone).



Different light, different space, but same awesome subject. Somewhere out there about 200 buffalo roam on "3000 acres of sheer beauty." No one feeds 'em. They take care of themselves. Just gorgeous.

Broken Kettle Preserve is astonishingly beautiful. Storms arrived about the same time people did last night, but then, quite kindly, kept moving east but stayed an immensely visible presence until dark.






When finally night arrived, I read stories about cottonwoods, big blue stem, buffalo, and Broken Kettle itself, part of that old essay from 16 years ago. I've read to larger audiences, but never a bunch more well-suited to what they heard. We'd just stood hip-deep in prairie grass, looking over all that gorgeous, natural land--and we were still there.

It was a Frank Lloyd Wright kind of thing--whatever art was in those essays was rising right there from the earth beneath us, Lewis and Clark just down the road a bit.

Don't think ill of me for saying it was as sweet a reading as I've ever had or could imagine--out in this magnificent country with the Sierra Club, slack-jawed men and women, thrilled to be right there where we were.

The stuff I read wasn't another world at all. It was right there where we stood and sat. Right there where we were blessed.