Humility

I have a fair bit of familiarity with the Great Plains of the United States.  This is something that I didn’t think would ever be the case for me.  I have spent the last 5 years in southeastern South Dakota on the plover project, and I have seen many young men and women scratch their heads at the idea of someone living in this environment.  Before I go on, I want to make one thing clear – I do not subscribe to the idea that the Plains are impossible to live in – to the contrary, I can clearly see how someone might choose to live here…maybe not me though. 

What I have learned is that the plains teach one humility.  Jokingly, I told someone yesterday that many have fought with the plains, none have won.  The landscape here is so massive, fields of wheat, corn, pasture, and sometimes, if you are lucky, native prairie.  As far as the eye can see, nearly unbroken expanses dotted intermittently with barns and homes.  Life here is hard-scrabble, a tooth and nail fight against overwhelming odds.  Drought, wind, ice, heat, all conspire against you.  Ask any of my technicians from years past how I feel about the wind.  Few would be short of an answer I suspect. 

Here I have gone and started out so negatively when I said that I wouldn’t do it.  The point is, if you stand long enough somewhere, you will begin to sprout roots, whether you like it or not.  And when you have rooted yourself in the soil of some region, it’s hard to remove to somewhere else.  For example, the first full day in Kansas we met a very nice man on the side of the road that proceeded to tell us about how his great-great-etc. grandfather had homesteaded the land behind us.  For those of you that do not know what that means – look up the Homestead Act (or ask your child that just finished American History).  Here is the secret, when you and your fore-fathers have poured your heart and soul into the land, it is hard to divest yourself of it.  Those of us from other parts of the country have a similar story, but the human cost per acre is just greater here, thus how someone could stay in the face of what we may perceive as insurmountable odds. 

So many of us speed our way through here, as if this were a place to be avoided, not a destination.  Indiana’s welcome signs say “The Crossroads of America.”  Someone should tell them that announcing that all roads go through here, none of them stop is not the best advertisement.  These are the states that the rest of us roll up our windows, turn on the cruise control at 80 mph, and crank through them to our destinations.  A friend of mine has this as her email signature "Anyone can love a mountain, but it takes a soul to love the prairie."  In some ways I think this is true, but perhaps it is just a matter of settling down and seeing the beauty.  You have to search for it out here.  There is no massive mountain, forever sea, these are not the accoutrements of the prairie.  Stand in the middle of a vast field (preferably of native prairie grasses but, as I said before, that is a tall order) where the vegetation is not above eye level, and look around.  Be swallowed whole by the intensity of space.  The prairie is awesome for other reasons than we are used to.  Usually we love things that consume space.  For my money, I find a naked prairie much more impressive than Times Square, but it takes all kinds. 

Now I am sitting in a town park, hiding from gusts of wind that are reaching 45 mph, watching trees bend under the intolerable weight of that wind, snapping back into place as it relents if only for a second.  We have fought with Kansas, the wind of the prairie, and we have lost, like so many others have done before us, and so many will do after us.  This is the way of the prairie and it is not for the weak of heart and constitution. 

I am listening to some on the team asking that same question that I myself once asked, that my technicians have asked, that many of us ask when we pass through this part of the country – why would anyone live here.  The answer is easy if you take the slow route through here, take the time to explore, to notice the clouds (best I have ever seen), the silence before a massive summer storm rolls through, the nicest people I have ever encountered, the history of struggle, the oceans of wheat blowing in the wind, the silence of the night, like no other silence – not just quiet, but the absence of sound, the side of ranch dressing with EVERYTHING, the family roots in this soil, so thick that they are emerging from underneath, pushing through here and there.  And these are just some of the reasons that people stay here, some of them I will keep to myself, my own private prairie poetry.

As we pass through this landscape that miraculously has become a part of my patchwork home, I will be content to know that at least part of me is home – the humble part.