Somehow, the hours in our week are increasingly filled with answering emails and listening in on conference calls with government bureaucrats, hardnosed business types, media people, scientists, and other folks who have become pretty cynical about the world and how it works. I’ve been thinking that all those seemingly pointless emails and conversations might well be a sign of my own cynicism. Where did I get the idea that the attention of those world-weary warriors are the avenue to effecting critical change in attitudes toward the environment, agriculture, food, and human and animal welfare? After all, the people who suck up my time and keep me away from my writing desk are, for the most part, the same cast of characters who have failed, for years, to correct those same faulty and fatal attitudes.
By lucky happenstance, Jill and I decided that for two weekends we’d let those emails build up and quit answering the telephone. We do this periodically but usually our middle-class, Midwestern guilt begins to tingle in our blood after only a few hours and by Saturday afternoon we catch each other tapping open our Inboxes. But for the last couple weekends we stuck to our promise by committing to entertain two sets of old friends with children. What a breakthrough: hold the call on figuring out the carbon footprint of grass-fed buffalo, and instead – take a pair of recent high school graduates to see a prairie falcon Eyre. Leave the report on the relationship between grazing and grass fires in its envelope and swing a two-year-old up on horse. Watch the smooth-cheeked jaws go slack as the mother falcon begins her 200 MPH stoop. Look hard at the unaffected joy in eyes of the toddler. Wonder if you’ve spent most of your life talking to the wrong audience!
The two groups we hosted were different. The first was a father with two older teenagers. The father is probably my best friend, though we see each other only once a year. And his children, though no strangers to country life, are just beginning to explore the world. It was fun to watch them mentally compare what they know of New Mexico with what they were discovering about the Northern Plains. The girl, who knows flatland horses well, couldn’t stop giggling when we rode up and down steep badland cuts. The boy, long and lean, handled his fly rod with no sign of pretense – a quality I haven’t seen since I was his age.
The second group was an extended family: the intrepid equestrian toddler, his grade-school cousins, two sets of parents, and our friends, the grand parents. With one exception the adults were South Dakotans who had seen before most of what we showed the children that day. It took me a while to understand that at least part of the reason for the foray into the countryside was to be sure that the kids got at least a taste of what had been so important in the adult’s lives. I’ll bet I answered a thousand questions concerning things like rattlesnakes, coyote poop, prairie dogs, horses, toads, buffalo, and blue skies. For the first time in many months it felt to me like the questioners were truly interested in my answers. It felt like, if I phrased my answer just right, something might break loose and bloom. That is a feeling that I almost never get on the telephone or in a meeting of “interested parties”. It dawns on me that perhaps the people I usually talk with just aren’t that interested.
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KEEP THE FAITH/YOUR DOING WHAT WE ALL SHOULD
BE INVOLVED IN….HOPE IT WILL ALL WORK OUT.
Hello Dan- I read with great interest the column you had on your website-talking to people who just aren’t interested. I find the animals I have had the pleasure of possessing for a short time, listened with much interest, far better than those humans around me. But I don’t want to take up much of your time. I work for Richmark Label and came across your website-don’t mean to bother you, but I was looking at websites for wild meat processors as my husband and I don’t eat much of the beef products out on the market. Anyway- if you are using a pressure sensitive label to package your meats, I would like to send you a brochure and label samples if you are even considering looking at other vendors pricing-we offer fast service, with quick turnaround -FREE quotes and our minimum is only 1000 labels. If you would like to see our information, please call or email if you like and I will get it out to you ASAP. I apologize for bothering you. And did not mean to disturb you.
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What a great essay. Yes and again yes to reaching out to children. They’ll never forget that time spent. You are doing a good thing redeeming the prairie.
What a great essay. Yes and again yes to reaching out to children. They’ll never forget that time spent. You are doing a good thing redeeming the prairie.
Dan,
Your statement about phrasing answwers to questions in such a way to get “something to break lose and bloom” is the essence of “Coyote teaching”. A really great book about this teaching method is “Coyote’s Guide” by authors Jon Young, Ellen Haas abd Evan McGown.
I know that you probably have a long list of books to get to, but this one is very good for anyone wanting to bring connections with Nature to folks young and old.
Dan, if you don’t already, maybe you should offer tour/field trips to all school age kids, watching my own grandchildren, I know that they are the future of our environment/preservation/conservation movements.I believe it is the most important thing we can pass onto them
Dan:
If you get there, say hello to Kenya for me. I once rode a wonderful horse from the Kitungela Plain outside Nairobi, through the Rift Valley and on to the Mara River, through Maasi country. Kenya is a small country, so if you are there you might hear of or meet Tomy Church, owner of the safari company that took our Sierra Club wilderness outing group on this wonderful ride. He’s be about 72 now. Grew up there as son of English missionaries and knows everything about the plains, birds, animals, people.
Dan — Just discovered this site and your blog. It’s been awhile! I hope you’re well and that you and Jill are taking great care of each other. My husband and I have just started the “fulltime RV” lifestyle and are heading in your direction.
Something I have noticed, in asking locals about things like trees we’ve seen or birds I’ve noticed, or animals that are new to me but common to the area, is that people — in general — are pretty uninformed about their own territory. They don’t know their own neighborhoods or countryside. It seems to me you’re feeling the political ramifications of lives spent distracted from the world around us, and as much as I love the Web (I’ve spent the last ten years developing a specialty profession based on the Web, actually) and all things geeky, I’d be lost lost lost if I didn’t get out on bicycle trails, hike mountains, roam the shore.
Sadly, I realize how much I don’t know, too. We all could use a local lesson on trees and birds and the animals under our feet.
Thanks for fighting the good fight!! Nothing every truly worth it was easy (and all that), you know.
All best,
Ellen
BSGU MFA ’90
This winter, I was driving back home, after a long day of work. I had to go trought a very bad road, i was drivng slowly also because of my four year old daughter, sitting in the back. Suddenly, the shape of a bird fastly crossed the ray of my lightnings. I’ve got quite a bad view at night so I didn’t reconize the bird but my daugther just said “woodcock”. In those short moments, I know that you, I, and everyone that have the same “vista” are wright.
Vanessa, DVM, writer, firefighter (simple is too easy…)
I just came across Buffalo for the Broken Heart while I was on vacation and had some time on my hands. I couldn’t put it down. Funny thing is, when I finished it, the next book on the shelf was Bad Land by Jonathan Raban, which told me the rest of the story.
I am impressed with what you are doing and what you have done.
Sincerely,
Marya
Hi there,
So you know, we certainly did appreciate your taking the time to get us out to experience the Great Plains in the class you taught at Carleton this spring. The bits of education I most prize that I’ve received here have all been the ones where someone has taken me outside in land they know well and love, and helped me see what they see in it. Of course, we’re spoiled here, with our Arb that we can enjoy any time, but there’s something special about sharing it. My job this summer, as a park ranger near home in southeastern Virginia, got me thinking about that sort of learning. I only had that job because many others fell through; I thought I lacked the knowledge and knack for communicating it to be effective as any kind of teacher face-to-face. It didn’t turn out that way. I loved being a park ranger, and it was really rewarding to witness enthusiasm for the nature at hand appear in people’s faces for things they hadn’t really considered before. I’m not sure what the overall effect of moments like that are on the population as a whole; by nature, they only affect very few people at a time, and people like me or my park visitors clearly had enough interest already to be there in the first place. For me, though, being able to connect to individual people, and being able to see that I had helped them enjoy adding some little piece to their world, was what I guess I needed to be sure I had actually accomplished something. Certainly it was fun. So, I appreciate this writing of yours. One of my park ranger coworkers prompted me to read a book, Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, about children’s relationship with nature in America today, that you might like to read, if you haven’t yet. I was not entirely satisfied with some of the author’s reasoning, but I have to agree with him that the topic merits more consideration than it gets, and he made a worthy effort to explore it; it made me think.
Thanks again,
Chelsea