In my travels, I have marveled at mountains and forests, deserts and prairies, glaciers and grasslands. My travels have been by almost every mode of transportation: car, bus, train, motorcycle, bicycle and boat. I have always been an outdoorsman: hiking, camping, fishing, and hunting; so I always thought I had a pretty good feeling for the land.
By learning to feel the land, I do not mean to empathize with all the wonderful vistas through which we move; I do not mean being in awe of mountain meadows, alpine lakes, fields of grass and wildflowers or fields of grain by the miles. I do not mean looking back on blizzards and floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, earthquakes, and all those seemingly capricious acts of nature we all have suffered and survived. I mean something different.
By learning to feel the land I mean acquiring the ability to know how and why things are as they are: the way a thunderstorm sends waves of water in successive sheets down the grass of hillsides. The results appear to the passerby after the fact by recognizing that the grasses have been pushed over and have collected debris as if in a flood, because the water came so hard and voluminous and fast that it had neither the time to soak in nor to run gently into rivulets and streams; the way certain plants thrive in certain terrains and a few yards away may never venture, owing to the conditions for which we may not have a ready and accurate explanation.
Recently I was fortunate enough to spend a couple of days with Pat Murphy, a very highly trained and skilled botanist who serves as a consultant for rangeland management. We set up several new study sites and conducted an annual monitoring of previously established sites. He sees the flora of the land as if his eyes had tactile contact with that on which they focused. For example, with Dan and Jill on horseback and up on Zebell Table (a mesa south of the Cheyenne River) we looked for some large circles that we had seen before and that show on Pat’s aerial photographic maps. We have all heard the local theories about them, but they are too large to be tepee rings, and could perhaps be where haystacks had once been built. Pat looked at them, noticed the mushrooms growing on the rings’ perimeters and immediately explained how the growth cycle of the mushrooms created the rings. At a glance he just about put the local wisdom on this phenomenon to rest.
Elaine Ebbert and Mark Keffler work for The Nature Conservancy. They are friends of ours and are very knowledgeable and well-trained botanists. It is a treat to explore the pastures and river bottomland, and the wooded draws on the hillsides with them. They see the demarcation lines of environmental zones with their eyes in ways most of us would glaze over without a thought. Dan and I and Erney spend time with these three people and that time helps to teach us better how to feel the land.
If we start with the soil types, the plant communities are a natural progression. When we observe birds and mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and insects in these communities, we learn something about the relationships among them all. When we move the buffalo herds from pasture to pasture, we notice what they forage on as they move. That tells us where the herds are likely to be found at any given season, which, if nothing more, saves a lot of time and energy when they are on a big land and we need to locate them.
We learn to feel the land by attending to our horses’ responses to it. They know when they will sink into river sand up to their bellies before they ever step into it. We might ride blithely into it-left to our own devices, or lack thereof. The horses will not fall into a creek cut in a draw even though it may be completely obscured by grasses-not even at night. If we pay attention to the unobtrusive but nevertheless presentations before us, we begin to progress from a feeling for the land to learning to feel the land. It is part of the restoration of the prairie, a reinvigoration of what once was, not of what was lost, but of what was ignored, pushed back, deemed unworthy, useless. In this learning we restore ourselves in reciprocity as we restore the buffalo and the prairie simultaneously—and ain’t it grand!.