Friday, July 30, 2004

Remembering the Prairies

I’ve just got back from our annual trip to northern Minnesota, driving the interstate along the edge of what were once the great tallgrass prairies which stretched from South Bend to Central Kansas and Nebraska. It’s hard to imagine the landscape that confronted the early European settlers as they pushed their wagons west into the prairies. Most of this land is now under cultivation with soy beans and corn, and dotted with red barns and silver-topped silos, until you reach the endless suburbs fanning out from Chicago and the strip malls that lead into South Bend.

This repetitive scenery of K-Mart plazas, Taco Bells and gas stations seems at the same time inevitable and yet weirdly ephemeral, like a nasty rash on the back of the land. As another Office Depot or Lowe’s goes up, you can see how insubstantial the construction is: a thin skin of plywood cast over a leggy steel frame. But it seems as if it has always been this way: a cycle of commerce and asphalt, light industry and Kentucky Fried Chicken. It’s hard to evoke the grasslands that once stretched to the horizon from beneath the mid Western blacktop.

I’m only now learning to read the landscape as having a history. Like many Englishwomen, I was raised to like flowers and gardening, but I thought of plants as blocks of colour to be massed around the canvas of a garden. Now I’m learning to see plants as vehicles and victims of history, measured in evolutionary, and on human timescales. Where once I admired the vivid hue of purple loosestrife running along the roadsides, I now also see a ruthless invader choking out native species, a fugitive from garden centers which sell it just because of that admirable purple. I’ve only just learned that the ubiquitous dandelion wasn’t always here: like me, it’s a recent European immigrant to America, a canny stowaway in a bag of seeds from the Old Country.

Now that I live in the Midwest, I’m re-reading Laura Ingalls Wilder with a different interest. As a child in England, I enjoyed her descriptions of the daily round of chores and games in the Little House on the Prairie, though Kansas could have been Wonderland for all my geographic knowledge or interest. Now, I pay attention to the landscape Laura’s family traverses: “Kansas was an endless flat plain, covered with tall grass blowing in the wind. Day after day they traveled in Kansas, and saw nothing but the rippling grass and enormous sky. In a perfect circle the sky curved down to the level land and the wagon was in the circle’s exact middle. All day long [the mustangs] Pet and Patty went forward, trotting and walking and trotting again, but they couldn’t get out of the middle of that circle.... Next day the land was the same, the sky was the same, the circle did not change. Laura and Mary were tired of them all. There was nothing new to do and nothing new to look at.” (Little House On The Prairie, 13)

In other settlers’ tales, the endless grasslands are more threatening than boring: to Ole Rolvaag, speaking of South Dakota: “[The settlers’] caravan seemed a miserably frail and Lilliputian thing as it crept over the boundless prairie to the sky line. Of road or trail there lay not a trace ahead: as soon as the grass had straightened up again behind, no one could have told the direction from which it had come or whither it was bound… Poverty-stricken, unspeakably forlorn, the caravan creaked along, advancing at a snail’s pace, deeper and deeper into a bluish-green infinity — on and on, and always further on.... It steered for Sunset Land!” (Giants In the Earth, 6)

It’s hard to conjure this threat of engulfment by looking at the thoroughly domesticated grasses we know as lawns. Even at its most unkempt, our fescue and Kentucky bluegrass lawn has swallowed only an occasional garden trowel, but a wagon train is beyond its wildest digestings.

Still, in northwestern Indiana, you can find a few remnants of original prairie, unbroken by plough or road, such as Spin Prairie in White County, and Biesecker Prairie in Lake County. You may not experience that oceanic feeling of boundless grassland that Ingalls Wilder describes, but you may see something of the diversity of species once found in the prairies.

And, if you fancy the project of restoring a little bit of Hoosier history in your own back yard, several local nurseries now offer a selection of native species. With advice from Purdue Extension and J. F. New, you, too, can plant butterfly weed and purple coneflower, as well as switch grass and Little Bluestem. 

Broadcast by Louise Collins on July 30, 2004
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