Early Sunday morning I talked on the telephone to a friend whose family owns a house along the Red River. The house is on the Minnesota side but now the river is all around them. Forty two feet above flood stage is a lot of water. After I talked to him I got the topography maps out and sat by the window that overlooks the Cheyenne River a half mile to the east. I figured that if the Cheyenne ever got forty-two feet above its banks it would be lapping at the horse pasture gate. Our house would still be high and dry but the sight would be frightening – lots of drowned trees and ruined fences. The corral would be gone and some prairie dogs would likely be dead. But there would be no great losses like there is when a river floods a populated area like Fargo-Morehead. Noting like New Orleans.
I’ve been paying attention to the Red River flood because the Red River is one of my favorite places. As everyone who lives on the northern Great Plains knows, it is one of the rare rivers that flow north. Most of the northern Great Plains is drained by the Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers which run generally south. The Red River Valley is a different deal. It heads for Hudson’s Bay through hundreds of miles of Canada. That’s one of the reasons it is prone to dramatic flooding. The upper reaches of the river melt before the larger lower reaches and the ice on that northern stretch dams things up. Almost everyone in North Dakota and Minnesota knows all about that. They know which way the water flows, and they know that weather is not kind, and they know that if the Red River floods they’re the ones that have to figure out what to do. The northern Great Plains are filled with people who are used to being prepared.
Like my friend. He lives and works out here in the Black Hills, five hundred miles from his aging parents in Morehead. He knows it’s spring, and that the ice melts in the spring, and that the water flows north, and that he’s responsible for that house up there on the Red River. And of course he knows that he’s also responsible for those aging parents. He’s been watching the weather reports for a month and by the time the water started to come up he’d already made arrangements to get up there and fight. By the time the river began creeping out of its banks he was standing in his parent’s yard wearing a pair of hip waders and filling sandbags with the snow swirling around his head. He said the whole neighborhood pitched in. Of course I knew that. I know those people. Most of them are a generation or less removed from the farms and ranches of the Red River Valley. Of course they pitched in.
I saw it on television: salt-of-the-earth Keilloresque Lutherans and Catholics, big guys with funny hats and mittens, and tough little gals standing right in there filling those sandbags with the best of them. All of them were working like human metronomes, smiling and working with the water rising fast. I watched the TV as busloads of high school and college kids disembarked and rolled up their sleeves, and I was reminded of television pictures of another flood.
It is not fair to compare the Fargo flood with the catastrophe in New Orleans. The situations are very different: a hurricane breaching a levy is not the same as a spring flood, governmental preparedness is much improved, Fargo-Morehead is not a sprawling megacity. But as I watched those northern plains people working, figuring, innovating to meet the challenge that nature had thrown at them, I kept remembering an impromptu TV interview of a New Orleans kid about the same age as the kids filing off the buses and straining to get at those canvas bags and that pile of sand. The New Orleans kid was dry and warm but the interviewer told us that the water was coming. The kid wore hugely baggy pants and had his hat on backwards. He stood at an evacuation depot but there was no transportation. He was angry that there was no bus to take him to safety. The kid waved his arms and swore. When the interviewer mentioned that the wind had blown the ocean inland and that water had met the flow of the Mississippi coming south the kid raised his head and looked thoughtfully at the distance. He turned slowly and looked in all four directions. He had no idea which way was south. The idea that the wind could have anything to do with his predicament baffled him.
The fact that the kid was befuddled was not his fault. The fact that he was not of European descent was immaterial. His religion and the way he chose to wear his hat were beside the point. The fact that he was clearly a city kid may have had something to do with it. But the fact that he was, and probably had been for all his life, insulated from the power of nature was making him look silly. He glazed out at the buildings that had always stopped, or at least softened the wind. The camera-shot was over his shoulder as he shook his head. When he turned back, the camera caught him in a weak moment. He was scared and a little pitiful, but he wiped all that off his face and snarled, “Sposed to be buses right here.” He pointed to the ground in front of him. “Goddamned buses spose to be right here!”
The Red River always makes me think of a group of very early French immigrants to North America called the Métis. In the onslaught of Europeans coming to America before there was such a thing as the United States, the Métis stand out as perhaps the only group that chose to integrate with the natives rather than displace them. The originals were all men who married native women. Their offspring were the Métis, literally “mixed people”. The Métis were so intertwined with the culture and environment that they lived off buffalo and built everything they needed without outside help. They knew about wind, and snow, and cold, and floods, and didn’t spend much time waiting for someone to come to their aid. The spirit of the Métis is still alive in the Red River Valley. Oddly, the heritage of the Red River’s Métis is similar to that of New Orleans’s Cajuns. So, why do one group of kids crowd onto the bus that is going toward the flood and why do other kids wait to be rescued?
I believe it is the Northern Great Plains that makes the difference. In every corner of Earth the power of nature is incalculably immense. In some places nature’s danger is too subtle for busy humans to detect, like the hurricane that hides in the muggy stillness of a lazy afternoon. The conditions on the Northern Great Plains are simply too harsh to ignore. In all cases humans have to have some understanding of the overarching environment and to figure out a way to not only survive, but to thrive. On the Northern Great Plains, the power of nature is forever in your face. Respecting it, paying attention to the idiosyncrasies and its crankiness has become part of the Northern Great Plains culture. A lot of Red River folks take pride in being aware of how the real world works. They even find pleasure in their rocky relationship with nature. They joke that the threat of oblivion brings out the best in people. It is certainly a good idea to not to be surprised by nature, and it’s a good idea to know which way the water flows when it leaves your front yard.
Comments 25
Being a resident of the Fargo Morehead area, as I am. One becomes very aware of mother natures travailes to all of the northern great plains. the subfreezing temperatures, the early spring blizzards, The floods and the ever incessent windsthat are all a part of a lifestyle that we Northern Great Plainersdeal with on a more or less regular bases. Being a native North Dakotian along with seeing and living in every other part of this great country. makes me relish in my scandanavian heritage.
As my old Swede dad used to say, “Minnesota – home of the Swedes and other fur-bearing animals.” Dan, this essay is a wonderful contrast to your other about finding nature even in the grubby rust belt cities many of us grew up in. Thanks.
In today’s odd world, floods. like climate itself, are now man made. Characterizing the Red River floods as awesome forces of nature is now, very likely, an outdated concept; anachronistic thinking. After the last large flood on the Red, a so-called “after action” report was prepared by state and federal agencies, and one conclusion was that a significant part of the flooding is attributable to wetland drainage and plowing of grassland in the river basin. In the prairie, wetlands and grass are nature’s flood control dams and, when they are eliminated, downstream flooding becomes inevitable. Since that flood in the 90s, wetland drainage and plowing of grassland has accelerated sharply, stimulated by aggressively high federal farm payments, ethanol subsidies, and consolidation of land holdings. This flood was entirely predictable, and, like climate, is man-made.
Dan: Thanks for the wonderful essay and all the natural and human history I did not know, even though I’m a native (southern) Minnesotan. An additional way to view the 2 locations you discussed are that one is just plain more populated than the other. Population density creates the urban conditions that insulate people from nature. This same New Orleans kid 100 years ago might have known more about nature because his relatives would have taken him fishing, he would have had trees to climb, would have skipped stones across a pond, might have had farm animals it was his responsibility to care for, would have known you’ve got to hitch up the mule or horse (or catch a ride in a neighbor’s truck) to get very far down the road, and might have known something about directions and weather patterns because of having outdoor chores to help his family put food on the table. In another 100 years will the Red River Valley be diked and dammed to make life safe for more urbanization because our population has quadrupled? If we love our land and nature it is the responsibility of all of us to do what we can about creating a national population policy.
Dan: I eagerly look forward to this monthly newsletter. I enjoy your monthly musings, your fine descriptives of western prairie, the buffalo you raise and the workings of Wild Idea Buffalo. I always enjoyed your trips through Sioux Falls to read passages of your writings at Zandbros back room.
Hey Dan,
Wonderful essay, spot on as usual. Mr. Arvidson’s response is accurate, and was confirmed 2 weeks ago when John Lindstrom, a.k.a “Q”, was here for an evening layover on a flight from Minneapolis to Seattle. He was on the phone with Brenda a number of times as the snow kept coming, the night of March 23, 2009, eventually 40 inches at their place. Anyhow, Q said that from 35 thousand feet, the tiling and draining of the Red River was acutely obvious, and his sympathy for the folks at Fargo/Moorhead City was somewhat muted by the fact that the flood frequency and severity is in large part caused by long standing USDA and FSA policies and subsidies.
We hope you’re doing well and I’d love to share some line caught yellowfin tuna and wahoo I’ve got with you.
Best regards,
Doug
Hey, on Q’s behalf, of course feel free to tone down my ravings.
Doug
This is tangential at best, but somehow I noticed the last “joke that the threat of oblivion brings out the best in people”. When I was a volunteer in on the gulf shortly after Katrina I heard lot of stories that fit this description. Stories of people who took risks to dig elderly neighbors out of their homes or piled supplies onto motor boats to distribute to those in need. There are some counter stories as well, though not as many as the media suggested at the time. Some suburban suburban police forces that turned back fleeing N.O. families out of fear that their communities would looted or defiled by the inner-city mob.
I don’t know if disaster brings out people’s best, or worst, or essence or anything like that. It certainly brings out something different depending on the person though.
Dan – Sure would like to get out and see your place again sometime. You were kind enough to show me around for a while one day back in summer of 2004. The one thing I really like about the Northern Great Plains is that it requires its inhabitants to have a comprehension of nature or else pay the price. It would be great if every physiographic region had climatic conditions that demanded such of folks. If so, perhaps the prevailing ignorance and disconnect from nature I observe as a biologist and educator would be a little less common.
Eric Harrold
Lakefield, MN
“Reflections on Water”
After growing up on the front range of Colorado, wandering with various Carleton classes through the Minnesota prairie, and reading several of Dan’s new essays on the Great Plains, one thing that I cannot take for granted is water. Colorado has been blisteringly dry in recent years, causing it to look even more brown than usual from the air (thanks to withered grasses and to massive stands of trees weakened by drought and finished off by pine beetles). The winter air in Northfield is colder and drier than any I have ever felt, and it seems to tug any and all moisture out of skin, plants, and whatever else it touches. On the topic of water, Dan writes that he is “a sort of specialist in the lack of water,” since he, too, lives in an area where water is irregular and far from abundant; where the tiny streams run like “capillaries” as part of an intricate yet fragile circulatory system.
This is why Kettle Hole Marsh caught me so off-guard. I’ve spent time in the Carleton Arboretum before – lots of it, actually – but had somehow never made it to this low-lying prairie sink. As our group walked along the dirt and gravel path yesterday, I was lost in my own thoughts: thoughts about fire, and bur oaks, and pocket gophers, and how it would feel to see that waving line of grasses day after day after day from the hard perch of a wagon seat. The wind moved lightly through the prairie, sounding like someone distant was releasing handfuls of tiny seashells into a glass jar. The only other sounds were the quiet crunch of our shoes on the gravel, and occasionally the words from my classmates’ conversations that drifted back to me for a moment or so. Everything was dry.
We were almost upon the marsh before I pulled my thoughts back to earth, and the noise of boisterous chorus and wood frogs suddenly swelled up from the reedy water. Water. Here in the middle of this prairie desert is in effect a very large puddle. Mallards paddle slowly near the opposite edge, and bluebirds flit from tree to tree in search of a convenient nest. All that I can think is, Where did this water come from? And what about the frogs?
Dan writes that “when the rains don’t come, the Great Plains simply hunker down and wait.” So it must be with the frogs. I can’t imagine what the tiny creatures with ever-moist skin are doing in the middle of the Arb, where brittle big bluestem and stalks with boat-shaped pods quickly snap if bent. The fact that I was not expecting to find frogs here – to hear them, I mean – made their presence even more special, and I found myself admiring the surprises that this often unremarkable landscape has to offer. I hope that enough people learn to love such places while they still exist, even though greatly altered, throughout the Midwest. The opportunity to walk among the grasses and listen to frogs announce the spring was a much-needed chance to take a deep breath in the midst of this busy school term, and I appreciate the opportunity to feel a little bit lost so close to campus.
***
Thanks for the great class, Dan!
***
Also: thought you should know that when I told one of my friends that we had a buffalo Easter dinner, she looked horrified and said, “Buffalo?! You can’t EAT buffalo! That’s like eating a panda!” I assured her that it was actually ok.
I’m from Maine, and let me tell you, people do not visit Maine to see grass. To go camping in dense forests, yes, to sit on the rocky coast and watch the relentless ocean for hours on end, of course – but definitely not to see grass. I grew up climbing trees, scrambling over rocks, and floating in salty water until my extremities turned blue from the cold. In Maine, grass is boring.
Here, it’s absolutely not. Even without a biology background, I know that a remnant prairie has more types of grass and vegetation than I can count. It’s a stunning example of Earth’s artistry: a patch of what looks to me like a hodgepodge of tall grass is actually a wonderful pointillist collection of vegetation that forms an intelligible picture, a larger story. I appreciate the grass in the Arb, the grass at Belwin, and the grass that, little by little, is being restored in patches in the Great Plains.
My mother, who is from Iowa, told me that when she moved from the wide-open Midwest to the forest-enclosed East Coast she felt claustrophobic. She warned me that, sometimes, East Coast-ers who travel to the Midwest experience the opposite, a type of reverse claustrophobia. I guess I’ve never felt that, because instead of looking up and out, I spend my time looking down and around, and it’s always comforting to know that wherever I walk in the prairie I’m surrounded by a staggering array of grasses. I may always be more at home in forests and by the ocean, but grass has its charms, too.
(thanks Dan for this class! I’ve really appreciated it.)
On the first day of the course Dan is teaching here at Carleton, I found myself reflecting, as we were shown stunning photos of the Great Plains, on what I would call the love affair of the United States, and particularly the outdoors community, with the mountains, and why the plains get little appreciation. As a lifelong resident of Minnesota, I’m frequently on the defensive as my friends, many of whom hail from the Coasts, deplore Minnesota’s lack of topography. I used to reply that we did so have mountains, the Sawtooths on Lake Superior’s North Shore. They would just laugh at me. Lately I’ve changed my response to, “Minnesota doesn’t need mountains,” but they don’t seem to agree.
I started wondering where this obsession with the mountains comes from. Is it a natural human response to be drawn to soaring peaks and rocky summits? Or is it a constructed notion, a product of our culture that sprang up somewhere along the line and has held on through today? Either way, what’s the motivation? And conversely, what is the source of our lack of interest in the Great Plains? There’s no denying that many people, regardless of how they feel about the mountains, even, would declare the plains to be utterly boring. Whether or not it’s been destroyed or just never developed to start with, for some reason few people have the due appreciation, in my opinion, for the plains. Maybe it’s because they’re so easily destructed and converted into farms or cities according to our desires. Dan’s comparison of the Red River and New Orleans made me wonder if it might be that the force of nature is even more undeniable in the mountains and that makes us appreciate them more. Maybe it’s just where you grew up, you think that landscape is the most desirable. But there are plenty of places I don’t think would be improved if they only had 10,000 lakes.
While working on this post, I had a sudden realization that the plains are not universally underappreciated. I spent this past fall studying in Botswana, home of the Kalahari, another desert grassland about two-thirds the size of the Great Plains, and home of the second-largest protected area in the world. If anyone thinks Iowa is flat, in Botswana the horizon is so unbroken the sun doesn’t set, it just disappears into the distance before it can ever sink. Although the Kalahari is equally being destroyed by agriculture and livestock, I think most would agree that “the Great Plains” does not evoke the same sentiments as “the Kalahari”, for one thing that the latter still exists. From what I know, the Serengeti in Kenya and Tanzania is even more revered. Why do these vast grasslands get greater appreciation? Maybe because they’re “exotic”, not our backyards, or maybe because they’re the dominant feature of these countries, although that’s not really true. Or maybe, if this appreciation is something developed, it’s because that didn’t happen until after the destruction of the Great Plains, but it was in time to present the alternative of tourism to the would-be destroyers of the Kalahari.
Obviously I have a lot more questions than answers, but the answers won’t come until the questions have been considered. I just hope the national, and global, consciousness learns, or relearns, to appreciate the Great Plains. In the meantime, I’ll keep defending Minnesota to elitist, unenlightened mountaineers.
P.S. For Jill- here’s the website of the company that made the “Insecurity” t-shirts, but I don’t see them on their “Despairwear” page anymore! You might find other things you like, though, or at least some moderate entertainment. http://despair.com/index.html
I’ll be the first to admit that I like to try to fix things, with a special emphasis on the try; I’m not particularly talented at actually remedying problems, whether I cause them or not. My first inclination when I read about the Red River is to contemplate what went wrong so we can be ready for the next time. Was it a lack of preparedness? Was it a product of land mismanagement and erosion? I never have stopped to consider that maybe the Red River just floods, because it’s what rivers occasionally do. That’s a departure from how I cognitively understand the world, for flooding suggests failure and nature just doesn’t fail. Or it doesn’t according to me.
Perhaps the sentiment that I am most strongly feeling as I leave Dan’s class is one of disenchantment. There may have been nothing we could have done to stop the river from inundating Fargo-Moorhead and the grasslands and farmland on its banks. Maybe nature just had it out for us, but even if the flood were ultimately our society’s fault, would we really adapt our practices to prevent the Red River from spilling over its banks? In the wake of the deluge, will our country actually adopt a more sensible land and farm policy? I am pessimistically inclined to answer the question resoundingly negative; after all, have we taken adequate precautions to prevent or even lessen the impact of hurricane-induced flooding in high-risk areas of New Orleans? Our lives are short, and our horizon of priorities is much shorter.
The same is true for the Great Plains at large. Being surrounded by nerdy scientists and optimists for the past four years, I maintained my grasp on a fleeting glimmer of hope that we would be the ones to herald in a moment of conservation, or hopefully a reversal of the way our region of the country does business. But the Plains are too large, the countryside too populated by skeptics of the anything-but-status-quo, and the government subsidies are too much to fight. There is not only an entrenched historical tradition of planting and grazing as much as possible on as little land as possible which we are up against, but the intrinsically human forces of greed and self-preservation. Despite my default aspiration to strive to right what’s wrong, my first temptation is to avoid expending any of my time or effort on issues such as these. The task isn’t just daunting, it’s Sisyphean. And there are tasks much more ominous than land management on the Great Plains.
My cynicism and dearth of motivation used to be tempered by a blend of anxiety and empathy, but I think my worries are slowly being beat into submission. I feel the dangerous sentiment of indifference filling the void at times. Life is short, and maybe rivers flood just because of nature accords it. And though many of us want, either secretly or openly, to be a source of inspiration, a model, a changemaker, I’m just not sure if our efforts will get us anywhere. Even if they did, would we really be qualified to say that we are changing things for the better?
I don’t intend on wallowing in self-defeat. I intend on purging the indifference, and persevering on some vision of change (thanks for sucking the meaning from this word, Mr. President). However, one can only persevere for himself, not out of the hopes of converting others. Dan O’Brien perseveres with Wild Idea because it gives his own life meaning, just like Carleton’s future scientists endeavor because their research comprises a component of their identity, not because of the noticeable change they have the potential to one day create. A vision of a more sensible future can comprise some of our own personal identities and give us purpose. But I believe we are setting ourselves up for failure if we become drunk on the ambition to change the world.
I’ve experienced the “reverse claustophobia” that Haven mentions. The feeling that comes the first time you stand up and can see to the horizon in all directions, and see only grassland. Having had a wooded, rural-New England upbringing, my first experience of the Great Plains left me bewildered, awe-struck and anxious. And only now, as I’ve come to love and identify with the Plains, do I feel like I can explain that anxiety. It is simply a shock of scope. Growing up surrounded by hills, the world comes in manageable chunks- the size you can easily take on for a day or afternoon of exploring. Setting a goal or destination is simple- you point to an intriguing peak or pass and wonder what lies on the other side. The physical barrier between me and that “other” allows me to choose whether or not to engage my imagination with that “other”. I can decide to consider it, or to just wait and see- because it won’t take that long- and the topography and history I am so familiar with are bound to make the other side different than this side.
But something about the great plains necessitates a different kind of creativity for me. I couldn’t so easily see a manageable bite to take for an hour, an afternoon or a day. The landscape is not so easily divisible. It is intimidating. And the distinctions between here and there are not so surficially apparent to someone who grew up with trees and hills and babbling brooks- the require far more patience and attention that I’m used to. I think that its for this reason that I feel so content with a summer’s work acquainting myself with the prairie at an intimate 1×2 m scale. As much as I was interested in the prairie and the grasslands, I couldn’t figure out how to take the right size bite- how to strike the balance between overwhelming and interesting. But I think that this summer on the Carleton restoration was some sort of initiation- Mark decided the size of my first bite, giving me my own sense for size and scope. And its ok for me to be here, and now that I have a feel, I even like the sometimes daunting horizon of the Great Plains.
~Hannah~
Dan- a sincere thank you for coming (back) to Carleton- your course has been just fantastic, fun and engaging. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to stop by the ranch on my way to Buffalo, WY.
It’s been cool listening to Dan & everybody else articulate an interest in & the value of awareness, and I guess this Red River piece here sort of speaks to the value of that.
Growing up in NE Ohio, I got imprinted in me that a particular combination of temperature, humidity & time of day says “tornado watch” but TV has me distrust my instinct so I’ve got to double check with that even if I know for sure for sure something funky’s about to happen. I don’t have a TV here, but Internet’s the same thing: if I couldn’t access the media source, if it weren’t part of my day-to-day, would I stop craving its input, its telling me what I already know?
One can’t fault people who grow up without a sense for the dynamics of their local environment, those folks who, having adapted to living a certain way, aren’t in touch w/the greater ecosystem-filled world of which they are a part. I liked what was said about the genetic material we’ve got in common w/all these other living creatures, cause even if people get detached in lifestyle, they’re still connected to everybody else on an interior level–even if we’re eating up their resources & polluting their residences meanwhile.
This mental_floss contributor & Boingboing guest blogger Maggie Koerth-Baker posted today this piece [http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/16/our-missing-chromoso.html] that indicates “missing” chromosomes that separate humans from the great ape team just went & relocated in an unexpected spot. Maybe info like this will help folks wake up to our interdependence/interconnectedness with the greater globe. Like how when my mom told me she read birds might be using constellations in migration, it made me feel heavier about my observational astronomy class (and light pollution, but anyway)…
Martha Nussbaum has this idea about adaptive preferences: say you grow up in a particular setting where you’re not aware of your entitlements or options so your preferences adapt to the particular setting, which might well be unjust. It’s like if you live in the food dessert of inner city convenience stores, how are you gonna know you’re entitled to fresh kale? Or if you grow up in American consumer society, how’re you to know you might well be entitled to free imagination time and home grown food? People can overcome this some how, can learn to demand that spiritual high of seeing a whooping crane or eating something unprocessed and clean. Complacency?
On Wednesday after class, the discussion turned to exposure to the natural world–does it matter if you go around learning plant names & how things work or will that curiosity just rise up after you get out there and wander around long enough. I don’t want to be that whiner who’s all, “Well, if we all just got up off our butts and stopped farting around being all, ‘I need to type this essay, I need to eat these Cheetos & read the google news about the pirates again’ then maybe…” But it’s a subtler claim than that. In gothic English lit, prof was reminding class that folks used to say novels were a morally kind of corrupting force like how people today say how video games and rapid fire news intake makes us less morally sensitive and capable of empathy (maybe science agrees though, at least about the news [http://www.mazar.ca/2009/04/14/speak-slowly/] ). Folks can at least read outside, and maybe a butterfly might land on their faces or they might settle under a tree and start noticing the different kinds of green things and how the clouds move, might want to get up and climb around, etc. etc. So… Well, anyway, when my parents visited over the weekend, we watched pairs of buffleheads & hooded mergansers floating around behind the Co-op just because the parents felt like looking there.
I was reading Mike Forsberg’s website: “[Photography] can help communicate to people why something matters,” he writes in a section headed “Why I am a Conservation Photographer”—and that struck a chord. Given that this class is titled “Writing the Great Plains,” I think it’s worth considering the role of the arts in preserving the Plains, as well as in beginning conversations about larger social and ecological issues—two separate functions I think art has the capability to fulfill. In the past two weeks, we’ve gained our sense of the Great Plains through Dan’s readings and Mike’s photographs as much as anything else—and I think that’s particularly true for those of us who didn’t know much about the Plains or conservation coming into the class.
As a musician, I’ve been thinking about my “contribution,” how—or if—my art can ask the relevant questions. Maybe music is less direct in this than other arts; that being said, there are 141 different versions of “Red River Valley” in the itunes music store recorded by everyone from Woody Guthrie to the Cincinnati Pops, classified as everything from country to jazz. Preservation? Absolutely. Larger social issues? Maybe not without some larger banner; but a common, specific repertoire and a shared musical experience can communicate under the right circumstances as much as (or in addition to) the music itself. Clearly it communicates—matters?—enough to warrant 141 different versions of a single iconic Plains song.
When Dan asked us on the first day why we were taking this class, I mentioned that it was in part because I’m interested, and in part simply because I’m done with the requirements of a double major and am finally able to take something that has nothing to do with music or English. Obviously, I haven’t scratched the surface of the larger issues the class brought up—but even this beginning has both forced me to think outside what I “know,” and simultaneously allowed me to connect it back to those same things. I’m walking away with a new set of questions, but also with a sense of at least the possibility of my contribution to the world through music.
On the first day of the course Dan is teaching here at Carleton, I found myself reflecting, as we were shown stunning photos of the Great Plains, on what I would call the love affair of the United States, and particularly the outdoors community, with the mountains, and why the plains get little appreciation. As a lifelong resident of Minnesota, I’m frequently on the defensive as my friends, many of whom hail from the Coasts, deplore Minnesota’s lack of topography. I used to reply that we did so have mountains, the Sawtooths on Lake Superior’s North Shore. They would just laugh at me. Lately I’ve changed my response to, “Minnesota doesn’t need mountains,” but they don’t seem to agree.
I started wondering where this obsession with the mountains comes from. Is it a natural human response to be drawn to soaring peaks and rocky summits? Or is it a constructed notion, a product of our culture that sprang up somewhere along the line and has held on through today? Either way, what’s the motivation? And conversely, what is the source of our lack of interest in the Great Plains? There’s no denying that many people, regardless of how they feel about the mountains, even, would declare the plains to be utterly boring. Whether or not it’s been destroyed or just never developed to start with, for some reason few people have the due appreciation, in my opinion, for the plains. Maybe it’s because they’re so easily destructed and converted into farms or cities according to our desires. Dan’s comparison of the Red River and New Orleans made me wonder if it might be that the force of nature is even more undeniable in the mountains and that makes us appreciate them more. Maybe it’s just where you grew up, you think that landscape is the most desirable. But there are plenty of places I don’t think would be improved if they only had 10,000 lakes.
While working on this post, I had a sudden realization that the plains are not universally underappreciated. I spent this past fall studying in Botswana, home of the Kalahari, another desert grassland about two-thirds the size of the Great Plains, and home of the second-largest protected area in the world. If anyone thinks Iowa is flat, in Botswana the horizon is so unbroken the sun doesn’t set, it just disappears into the distance before it can ever sink. Although the Kalahari is equally being destroyed by agriculture and livestock, I think most would agree that “the Great Plains” does not evoke the same sentiments as “the Kalahari”, for one thing that the latter still exists. From what I know, the Serengeti in Kenya and Tanzania is even more revered. Why do these vast grasslands get greater appreciation? Maybe because they’re “exotic”, not our backyards, or maybe because they’re the dominant feature of these countries, although that’s not really true. Or maybe, if this appreciation is something developed, it’s because that didn’t happen until after the destruction of the Great Plains, but it was in time to present the alternative of tourism to the would-be destroyers of the Kalahari.
Obviously I have a lot more questions than answers, but the answers won’t come until the questions have been considered. I just hope the national, and global, consciousness learns, or relearns, to appreciate the Great Plains. In the meantime, I’ll keep defending Minnesota to elitist, unenlightened mountaineers.
m intrigued by something you said, Dan, to wrap up your blog post: “It is certainly a good idea to not to be surprised by nature.” I agree with you on one level, especially when it comes to the nature that surrounds our daily lives. It’s dangerous and personally unsettling to learn nature’s capacity for action in the places we know when that action steps outside the bounds of the ordinary. We don’t all need to be biologists, but we do need to have a general understanding of the ecosystem drivers in our home area in order to mediate our acts in living. I do most of my thinking about nature from a historical – even sentimental – perspective: I don’t need to know about the specifics, I just have to be convinced of their importance.
I’ve felt this way since childhood, growing up in a wooded and marshy East Coast beach town. My front yard was pond-ed, and my back yard ran up a slope to the boundary of the town’s nature preserve. Even in a modern suburb, I grew up outdoors, something fewer children have the opportunity – or inclination – to do now. I’ve been influenced by Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, a book that posits modern children suffer from “nature-deficit disorder.” Perhaps Louv’s terminology is a bit dire, but he recognizes and puts a name to a serious problem facing childhood today. Louv believes that an exposure to and interaction with nature is essential for healthy childhood development – but I believe it’s important for more than that. Only when we integrate nature into children’s lives can we convince them of its sentimental importance – for sentimental reasons can be as powerful for conservation and preservation as science is.
Growing up in the foothills of the Black Hills, the “threat of oblivion” Dan mentioned in his original post was always at the forefront of the social consciousness. Each month of the year offered its own flavor of destruction in the forms of January blizzards, May floods, July tornadoes, and August droughts. In addition to these physical threats there was also the threat of economic or social oblivion as ranching became a less and less viable way of life. In order to survive the constant flux of the Great Plains or life in general preparedness can only get you so far. This past year for example my family was as prepared as possible for another year of earth-cracking drought when a week of spring downpours flooded acres of pastures and drowned several new-born calves. As prepared as we were based on all of our experiences and expectations, nature outwitted our arrangements and only our resourcefulness and determination could see us through. So maybe preparedness isn’t the characteristic that enables life on the Great Plains as much as an attitude of, as my grandpa puts it, “well would you look at that.”
Ultimately what distinguishes people accustomed to the threat of oblivion is their insistence that, as Rob McKim mentioned in his talk, “the break always comes.” While the break one day may not come in the way it traditionally has, people encamped on the edge of oblivion (or in the heart of it, as is the case with many South Dakotans) have a tenacity and creativity that is not accounted for by preparedness alone. In the face of nature’s lack of temperance, the people of the Great Plains recognize that the break may not always be the opportunity they expected but will do their best to make do in unexpected circumstances. Hopefully these survival techniques will continue to carry prairie life into the future as communities learn to recognize new breaks, because I do believe they always come.
P.S. For Jill- Here’s the website of the company that made the “Insecuritee”- unfortunately, the design was so popular they sold out and had to discontinue it! You might find other things of interest, though, or at least some entertainment! http://despair.com/
I live in flat land Kansas,and respect the people of North Dakota. they have not asked for “Government” assistance. They will take care of themselves!
I thought of this class when I saw a presentation on Thursday about environmental justice in New Orleans. There was particular emphasis on the loss of wetlands habitats in the New Orleans region, and how this human-induced degradation eroded natural barriers to storm surge, that could have reduced the catastrophic effects of hurricane Katrina. There has also been a disparate response to these environmental issues, with more intensified efforts to rehabilitate wetlands in certain areas, while poorer regions of the south, particularly in New Orleans, have been largely ignored.
The link between the environment and the human experience is very important to me, so I’ll share an anecdote from my own environment in New York City. During the 1990s, my father used to lead seminars for youth groups visiting New York. For seminars focusing on the environment, he would take them to a sewage treatment plant. There was an enormous water holding area, and the entire surface of the water was always covered in a layer of tiny pieces of colored plastic. “Do you know what those are?” he would ask. “They are caps for crack vials.” For me that image of thousands upon thousands of crack vial caps floating on top of the water is an example of the deep links that often exist between the poisoning of our environment, and the poisoning of ourselves.
So as not to end on such a pessimistic note, I’ll refer you to an interesting article I read in Smithsonian magazine about a non-profit organization called the Buffalo Trust, which seeks to preserve Native American culture. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/heritage/QA-Scott-Momaday.html
One thing that particularly struck me in the article was what it said about language and oral tradition. “You experience the sound of the language, the gestures of the actors, the inflections and the silences. Like Shakespeare, the Indian has a lot to teach the rest of us about language in its essence.” In the context of writing about the Great Plains I think it is very interesting to consider the role of language in the history of Great Plains culture.
Thanks for a great class.
There are too many people out there. When was the last time you stood, eyes closed, wind on your face and knew you were completely alone? Felt that your thoughts and the grass brushing against your thighs was all the stimulation you would ever need? Without fail, a distant jet engine causes a predictable adrenaline spike—sudden and uncontrollable anger at the screeching airsick babies, busy-body flight attendants and anxious businessmen suspended 39,000 feet above you. People crammed like canned fish, sweating, coughing, and praying that the plane stays in the air long enough to get them to the coast.
What is it to be any of these people? People that value cement and plastic over soil and grass. People that do not ponder your existence while you spend so much time questioning theirs—too busy rocketing across the country, perhaps. People that think pineapples grow on trees, potatoes on bushes, and steak in a cocoon of Styrofoam and plastic wrap. People whose time-debt is bearable only in a world of constant occupation—SUVs, blaring i-pods, cell phones, Blackberries, reality TV. So much petroleum, so little pleasure. There are too many people out there.
Slow down. If only people realized that the best things in life aren’t things. That feelings and interactions—among family, nature and landscape—are the most basic human needs. Relationships capable of being reciprocated unlike interactions with television and cell phones—plastic sucks away all human creativity and joy. There are too many people out there. Moreover, there are too many unhappy people out there—content to breed their unhappiness in every generation until we asphyxiate from petroleum deprivation.
The revolution will start with Wide Open Space. And Grass. And Silence.
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Thanks for a great class!
A few days before the class even began, Dan O’Brien sent out an email asking us to introduce ourselves. Specifically, he asked about twitter, environmental concerns, and interest in creative writing. I chewed the contents over for awhile. Then, wrote a lengthy response, affirming my activity in all three areas. But the question that both surprised me and made me smile was: what is your relationship to the Great Plains? I was born in Oregon and grew up in Virginia, so I call both coasts home. Maybe because of my geographical roots, I’ve always identified rivers, mountains, and coastlines as welcoming land features. But there is a mysterious beauty to the Great Plains. Last summer I drove from Minnesota to Oregon with my mom. We passed through great country. And I don’t just mean Pipestone, the Badlands and Bears Lodge (Devil’s Tower). I also mean the view from the highway; I can still see that great expanse of grasses stretching out under the blue sky. I looked at that harsh landscape and wished more of the world remained in its natural form. So I told Dan O’Brien I considered myself a friend to the Great Plains and waited to hear what he’d say.
Apparently he’s a busy guy. I didn’t hear from him until the first day of class. A few minutes after the eclectic group of students collected in the classroom, this guy in jeans and a rancher hat strolls in with a leather bag and a smile. He sits on the edge of the desk and starts to talk. He doesn’t get very far before he says something funny. We all laugh and the corners of his eyes crinkle. He keeps talking. There’s an ease with words and openness to ideas in his soft voice. Maybe not what you’re trained to expect in a writer. Maybe exactly what you’d want in a writer/buffalo rancher/falconer. He introduces himself and the book project. It’s big. He shows us some amazing photographs, talks about the Great Plains as a biome, and reads to us from one of his books. I leave curious to see what will unfold.
Second class we meet in Headley House, where he and Jill are staying during their visit to Northfield. It’s a nice place and we round up with an assortment of chairs. Dan’s shared two essays with us but we circle around the contents of those to broader questions. The Great Plains lies in danger. What should we do? Do you care? What does an ideal world look like? I’m overwhelmed with these probes but others aren’t and their answers leave me sitting bewildered.
Third class I’m still chewing on all these issues when we meet again with two new essays. I’m beginning to have a hard time marrying the seemingly contradictory concepts of harnessing technology and saving the land that ignorant settlers began to destroy two hundred years ago (arguably in the name of progress?). Part of my heritage lies with the Anishinabe/Ojibwe people of the Great Plains. I didn’t grow up on a reservation or compete in fancy dress dance, but I know my ancestors lived in harmony with the buffalo, roamed the Great Plains with the herds, and respected a balance between human actions and the Great Spirit’s way. The pioneers, settlers, homesteaders, did not. They believed in tilling the earth, ransacking her natural resources for human whims, and raising farms on this turbulent land that seemingly embraces nomads only because they outrun its scorching touch. To some degree, the white man destroyed this land. And now many people will try to come together to bring it back. A historical bitterness – an unproductive bias I know – surfaces as I consider how humanity can coexist with the Great Plains and still preserve that far-reaching land’s outward grasp. This is my weak moment. It’s naïve and I know that. It’s also unrepresentative of the Native community in which I have always been welcomed as are the genuinely interested folk who take the time to attend powwows or simply ask thoughtful questions.
So I imagine what the Indians are doing now to push these new land fights forward and I realize I’ve already experienced that firsthand. My maternal grandfather’s an engineer, recently “retired” and even more recently actually retired from Oregon State University’s Biological and Ecology Engineering program. Yearning to see my birth state and spend some time with family, I spent last summer assisting grad students in restoration projects, thanks to my grandfather’s connections. We drove from Corvallis’ lush valley to the middle of nowhere eastern Oregon where a deserted mill and a roaming herd of cattle marks the abandoned town of Bates. We slept in a camper on reservation land, became intimate friends of the porter john, and spent our days trekking through the Middle Fork of the John Day River, the second largest undammed river and a tributary to the great Colombia River, and a major site for Chinook salmon spawning. The Confederate Tribes of Warm Springs holds the deed to the land although they only trek out east to hunt. It’s mostly a land preserve. But, the tribes had the foresight and monetary incentive to patron a number of restoration projects. When I remember this, I feel restrained hope bubbling up. It’s too early to tell if any of last summer’s field work will shake things up for the dying salmon population, but the flurry of activity out there last summer was charged with a sense of conscientious effort.
These are the disparities clouding my vision before Easter Sunday. Add to that my familial longing for familiar faces and semi-obligatory-mostly-entertaining egg hunts. I long for the sweet aroma of glazed ham and the taste of scalloped potatoes. Last year found me trekking through the arboretum to find some peace in the newly fallen snow. No snow this year. I’ve got something better, an invitation to Nutting House (the college president’s residence) for a buffalo dinner. My only connection to Dan prior to these thought-provoking discussions was his book, Buffalo for the Broken Hearted. I read it a few summers back, when I chose to stay the summer in Minnesota. Buffalo meat has always been a staple at powwows, so I’ve been fortunate to taste it before, but there was no way I was missing a special dinner. The meat was flown in from their ranch and Jill went to work in the kitchen. Dan’s endless praise of her culinary talents left us with mouths watering. The meal was perfect. Conversation rambled from college policy to the infamous “Oregon Trail” computer game first accessible on those now ancient giant floppy disks. That day will stay with me.
Fourth class we meet on the outskirts of campus, at the Arboretum Office. On the way I pass the campus strawbale warehouse, where I spent one summer landscaping and constructing the exterior. Physically composed of straw, soil, sand, water, and some cement mix, it’s holding up well despite the harsh winters. Nancy leads us across the highway into the upper arb. She stops us occasionally to share some history or natural landmark. The Arb is my favorite part of Carleton. Most of my time here is spent running in the quiet mornings, when it’s just me and the birds and the species I don’t see. Walking along the paths makes me appreciate Rob’s important decision to purchase the land but the arb remains for me a private walk in the snow or an early morning run.
Fifth class we’re back at Headley House with a guest speaker, Rob, from the Nature Conservancy. He’s a character. He reminds me of the actor Chris Cooper but with a hell of a lot more intensity. He paces back and forth, shares a few statistics, and then draws on multiple literary accounts of the Great Plains from Lewis and Clark’s journals to his own. It’s a personal moment and I appreciate his honesty. He’s from the east coast but it’s clear he loves the area. He repeatedly begs pardon for reading so much and then does it anyway. Not that I mind. Most of this is familiar to me, but his thread of understanding the landscape through literature is all his own.
Another beautiful day and I find myself following a crowd of white-haired folks to Boliou. They’re going to hear Dan O’Brien. I am, too. And I run into Rob Oden heading the same way. The talk is good. I’ve heard a lot of this before, either from Dan’s storytelling time in class or reading his essays myself. I’ve also seen some of the pictures in the slideshow, also from class. But my familiarity only makes me value them more. And Dan extrapolates, detailing his own experience as a mountain lion. The cat on film’s a beauty and it makes me happy that someone will find it so that they’ll do something to save the worms and insects and amphibians that share the same habitat. Dan shares a pretty personal low moment between Mike and him. It’s heartbreaking. You try so hard to do some good and then someone else washes it all away, or cuts it down. I see a tissue blotting an eye and I know there’s a kindred spirit there. I’m glad I’ve met these people. They care about important issues. They’re working on making the world better.
Last class. I walk in to see camera equipment strewn about the room. Mike Forsberg walks to the front. I try to walk in Dan’s shoes, weighing this “young” kid and his ambition and maybe some naivety but maybe more faith. He shares so many beautiful images. And each one holds a story. I can’t imagine how rich this book must be, coupling Dan’s personal words with Mike’s equally personal images. Mike goes into some of the camera specs and I want nothing more than to become a conservation photographer right then and there. A student asks him about his hope and he answers with tempered optimism, not naivety. I watch his eyes and listen to his voice. This is personal. And, especially with his children, this is important to him. Dan concludes with a final reading.
I introduced myself saying I was a friend of the Great Plains and that’s still true. I love the great expanse of space. I think TNC Rob’s right in saying that some people find it daunting as Mike’s right in saying that you have to spend time there to appreciate it, like developing a friendship. Dan said the Great Plains is the heart of the U.S. and the people there are the salt of the earth. It makes sense. How many of us grew up on the Laura Ingalls Wilder books? We equivocate the Wild West with Americana and, as we discussed in great detail during our buffalo dinner, “Oregon Trail” was another defining aspect of childhood. Dan, Rob, and Mike all alluded to this generation’s ability to make a difference, to change things, to contribute. When we began this class, this conversation, I had my doubts. Mostly, how and where do you begin with such a huge problem? I don’t have the answers to either of those but I believe in their quiet optimism and their naturally rising and falling hope. I have relished in listening to these men. They love this land. This is their home. Friend is a term laced with meaning but in the spirit of the Great Plains, these are my friends and they have shared pieces of their home with me. It is their home. And it’s in danger. So it matters to them. And it matters to me. I can’t say what my generation should do or if we’ll be able to preserve the land for future generations but exciting steps are in motion. I’m still skeptical but I hope a little easier when I hear the ferrets are making a comeback or a forgotten species makes a grand surprise entry. I care.
This reminds me of an old Statler Brothers song, Counting Flowers on the Wall, “I keep hearing you’re concerned about my happiness…” Seems like Dan is the only one who actually rides the Great Plains and how long has he been at it? Ten or fifteen years? As for Forsberg, while he may love the beauty of the Great Plains, after all taking great photos here is about as easy as falling off a log, he was born, raised and remains in the city. If anyone is interested in another point of view, our family’s been here for seven generations since our region of the plains were first settled. The range is in such fantastic shape that there is no “restoration” needed. Such great shape in fact Ted Turner sees a lot value in the area. Hmmm isn’t he the guy who made us pay for TV? Bottled water is already $4 a gallon….and know one bats an eye. Do a little research boys & girls, there is more to it than saving the prairie. Remember, follow the money. Hank Paulson wasn’t CEO of TNC because of his love of nature.