Prairie Landscapes

By Faith A. Colburn

A mash-up of Ted Kooser's Local Wonders, Roger Welch's Shingling the Fog and Ms. Colburn's lifetime as an environmental journalist. Prairie Landscapes represents the ramblings of one mind prowling the Great Plains. With its focus on families and landed communities, it brings you face to face with the prairie and its creatures, including the two-legged ones.

Prairie Landscapes includes 130 essays and reviews of about 500 words on a broad range of topics sometimes poetic, sometimes comic, and sometimes factual--written by a plainswoman out of a lifetime of intimacy with the prairie.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Faith A. Colburn
• Release date: Jun 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311304230

Faith A. Colburn

Faith Colburn is a sixth-generation Nebraskan with a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her book, THRESHOLD: A MEMOIR, took the outstanding thesis in the College of Fine Arts and Humanities award at UNK for 2012 and she received UNK’s Outstanding Work in Fiction Award during its 2009 student conference and several awards from the Nebraska Federation of Press Women.Her short fiction has appeared in Kinesis magazine and The Platte Valley Review and her poetry has been published in The Reynolds Review. As a public information officer for the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, she wrote numerous articles for NEBRASKAland magazine, including copy for photo essays and historical articles. She also gained intimate knowledge of the landscape that often appears as a character/catalyst in her work.Ms. Colburn has spent several years gathering oral family histories and biographies, including a 100-year memoir of the Lincoln newspaper publishing family, with an emphasis on their use of production technology. During a stint with the University of Nebraska’s Research and Extension Center as a communication specialist, she focused some of her research efforts on the history of a farm family in western Nebraska that amassed 10,000 acres of land over several generations in drought-prone high plains region. As a communications specialist for a Lutheran social ministry organization, she spent five years telling the stories of people with developmental disabilities. Those efforts helped her learn about the glue that holds families and communities together and the wedges that drive them apart. She has drafted a fiction collection that mirrors the true experiences of people she’s known.

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PRAIRIE LANDSCAPES

FAITH A. COLBURN

Published by Prairie Wind Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2015 by Faith A. Colburn

Discover other titles by Faith A. Colburn at Smashwords.com:

Threshold: A Memoir

From Picas to Bytes: Four Generations of Seacrest Newspaper Service to Nebraska

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Table of Contents

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

My Prairie Landscapes

Creatures

Our Humanity

Truth or Consequences

Extended Families

Our Neighborhoods

Our Future

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DISCOVER MORE

DEDICATION

To the prairie that embraced my first breath at the beginning of my life and will cradle my ashes at the end.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank my family for the awareness that led to most of the essays in this book. My dad, Cecil William Colburn (also known in some circles as C. Willie C.), whose reverence for land and everything that creeps and crawls on its surface—or flies above it—gave me a start when he took my hand and introduced me to all of his trees. His crooked sense of humor helped get me through some of the days when I really did not want to write anything. My grandfather, George Albert Colburn, whose reverence for the land became a family myth, passed on that reverence through his genes. My grandmother, Hazel Izetta Carpenter Colburn, walked with me, up and down crop rows, cutting weeds with a machete, all the while telling tales. My mother, Ella Mae Bowen Colburn Copley, born and bred a city girl who never stopped singing, gave me an entirely different perspective of the empty skies and (to her at first) wild land where you can die a thousand deaths of loneliness. And finally, my little sister, Jo Ann Colburn Klein, played horse-and-rider with me on hot summer afternoons.

FOREWORD

As I write, I find that I come back to the things that arouse my passions. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise. So what are those passions?

I'm passionate about the good earth. Some of the times I remember best are times I lay in the grass somewhere, chewing on a grass stem and listening to little creepy crawly things chirping and peeping, whispering and sawing away with tiny legs trying to find love. Or lying on a picnic table staring up into the velvet of a night sky sprinkled with stars.

I'm passionate about families. By that I don't mean just mom and pop and the kids. I'm talking about families like prairies with all their diversity. A prairie couldn't sustain itself with just a crop of bluestem, Even a prairie with four or five grasses wouldn't last long. But a prairie with grasses and forbs, maybe a few rodents and birds, some ungulates, some carnivores. Now there's a living system. Like a prairie, a family needs support to sustain itself. Mom and Pop are wonderful, but they're better when there are grandmas and grandpas to read you stories or take you by the hand and show you off to the neighbors. Who wouldn't love aunts and uncles to take you dancing or fishing or listen when you tell them what you think? How about sisters and brothers to play games with you and tease you and take you for rides on their bikes or in their wagons. A person can spend a lifetime getting to know a sister–or a brother.

I'm passionate about communities, not just the people and the businesses and the buildings, but also the places where those communities exist. Communities can get together and take care of their places, protecting those places against harm. As Margaret Mead said: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. That's the kind of community I'm talking about–groups of people who take care of each other and the place where they live. I can remember my annoyance when I was a kid, knowing that everyone knew my business. Couldn't wait to get away from all those nosy people. But it was great knowing that all those people had my back, wasn’t it?

I'm passionate about anything that stirs my imagination—photographs from Voyager, quirky science, strange creatures, new connections. All of those things show up in almost everything I write. Maybe they're not enough, but they supply me with enough questions to keep me seeking answers for the rest of my life.

I hope you'll prowl around with me as I walk the prairies. Maybe we can find some answers in the sweep of grasslands.

My Prairie Landscapes

First comes the land—a pretty blue planet. Without Mother Earth and her resources, the rest cannot exist. Please try to imagine this stretch of unbroken prairie in soft, spring greens or reddish bronze with a vault of intense blue sky.

Everything’s Gotta Be Someplace

My place is mid-grass prairie. That is, it is usually mid-grass prairie. Sometimes my particular spot tends more toward short-grass. If we have a series of drought years, short-grass species subvert the taller grasses—until the rains come again.

Home was always more than the land, though. I remember piles of magazines at my grandparents' house. Grandpa read a lot of farming journals, but he waited to subscribe until the high school kids came around. He wanted to make sure they had the money for their band uniforms and magazine subscriptions helped them raise it. After he built the dams to capture run-off, he stocked the resulting ponds with fish and invited townspeople to take their kids fishing. Some of those kids remembered those fishing trips many years later and visited the dams by themselves.

But don't mistake Grandpa's concern for local kids or our connection to a particular place for provincialism. Grandpa kept track of all the latest research that applied to his farming practices and he helped his neighbors adopt some of the best, partly by his example. He wrote letters to the editor and our Congressional delegation promoting and discouraging national policies. And he kept an eye on world happenings, spurred in part, I suppose, by the way his son got vacuumed up and spit out by the Second World War.

Time after time, the concerns we find in our local communities lead us outward for solutions or for the ways our concerns connect with those of other places, like Sandra Steingraber who started her resistance against toxic chemicals with a lake in her own home community. (I will introduce her later.)

As I completed my degree in journalism, I held an email conversation with Brazilian journalist, Gustavo Said, about our families and places and the nature of time in our very different settings. He gave me many ideas about how to approach my family's relationship to our specific place and how that relationship might differ from his connection to his place. Parts of our conversation show up later in the chapter on neighborhoods.

I've visited places like New York City and Los Angeles—and I'm drawn by the excitement and colors and simple weirdness—but I need to smell wild sweet clover and wild plum thickets. I need to see an occasional jackrabbit, zigzagging down the road in front of my car, ears turning like antennae to see if he's outrun me yet. I need to hear a Great Horned Owl's cry coming from the windbreak as I fall asleep in the summer when the wind rustles through the screens.

I think often of how we've become divorced from our special places and wonder how people survive untethered from a particular piece of the planet. Can our families thrive without a strong sense of place, of neighborhood? Can our communities thrive without families that feel a connection to their place?

As for me, the wild sweet clover is blooming now and I need to be out on the prairie.

The Prairie

I once knew a man who said, over and over, everything has to be somewhere. I didn't think much about it at the time, but he was right. Since we do not live in a quantum world, if we exist, we have to exist in a place. We can choose our places and change our places, but we have to be somewhere. Like it or not, we live in relationship with a place, although most of us are probably not aware of it until our place comes to knock us about, as in a flood or tornado or when we dump our waste on it until it sickens us.

My family chose a place in Nebraska when the territory opened for settlement back in 1854. We've been here ever since, although my grandparents moved a few counties west. I often think about my great-great-great-grandparents, Hiram and Sicily Hendricks, and their children, coming across the Big Muddy by ferry and walking out onto tall-grass prairie not much different from the tall-grass prairie they left in Iowa. It was just about three hundred miles farther west—a fur piece back in those days.

I try to imagine what it would be like to select any place you fancy on greening prairies, where last year's reddish-gold plumes of big bluestem, golden Indian grass, needle and thread, and switchgrass grew chest high. Sometimes the way would be bald and level as a floor. Then it would dip and dive through gullies and swales. When the skies cut loose, torrents of water would pour down the hills into draws lined with tangled grasses and creeping vines.

During those first days in the new territory, amid millions of buzzing and chirping insects, waking and whispering their spring love songs in the long grass, they ambled west, looking for the perfect spot. They crossed the Little Nemaha and settled about thirty miles into Nebraska Territory on the divide between rivers.

When my family stepped off the ferry, the prairie was an orgy of wild things—wildflowers and grasses as tall as a horse’s withers. They undoubtedly came in the spring when migrating waterfowl darkened the skies and filled the air with their gabbling and quacking. Wild plum thickets filled the air with their sweet scent and the drone of bees harvesting pollen—if the exuberance of red-winged blackbirds, weighing down the branches of stream-side trees, didn’t drown out their sound. There were deer and antelope and elk, bunnies and jacks and the big white-tailed jackrabbits, grouse and prairie chickens and quail. Sometimes I think my search for my forebears is as much a search for that abundance of place as a search for people.

I worked in the field for the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission and I remember a spring on Massie Lagoon. More than a century after Hiram's and Sicily's arrival, I saw flocks of waterfowl for the first time—before fowl cholera broke out in the Rainwater Basin reducing already-depleted numbers. It seemed to me then that the marsh was full of ducks, chattering and clamoring. I saw strings of pintails wavering over the muskrat domes and mallards settling in among them. By then I'd learned to identify ducks, the streamlined silhouette of pintails, the high forehead of redheads, and the big bills of shovelers. I remember the speckle-bellies, the white-fronted geese, too. I haven't seen any white-fronts or heard their squeaky gabble for decades.

So this is my place. It can be harsh when the big sky opens up and beats down on people and crops in drought years, or spawns a tornado or a hail storm. But it's my home and I won't apologize for it. It's a mere shadow of the country Hiram and Sicily encountered, but I see remnants here and there and hope they can hang on long enough for other people to understand and appreciate them.

This is prairie.

Our 480 Acres

Primary to me, even before family–or maybe part of family–is land: 480 acres in the middle of the Great Plains. I can close my eyes and go to a clearing in daddy's trees, a break between the ash trees and the volunteer cottonwoods, where thousands of red-winged blackbirds gather in spring and shout their joy to one another.

And that's how it's part of family.

My grandparents, and my parents, my Aunt Nina, my sister, and I are soaked into the soil of that 480 acres. We shed millions of molecules on that land. We dropped DNA in our sweat as we chopped weeds by hand, armed with machetes. We shed blood from our myriad accidents, like when the horse pulled a disk over my dad's toe or when my mom slipped with a screwdriver and skewered her hand.

We observed that 480 acres. I learned to whistle-call quail from the front porch in the spring—just to make sure the covey was still there in the windbreak with a breeding male.

********

I've been hearing all my life about the economies of scale. They're supposed to make farming more efficient by industrializing it. But land is not a machine. It has its soft spots and its dry spots, its contours and its moods. I read recently that the most efficient parcel of agricultural land is that size one man can know intimately and I think that's my grandpa's 480 acres. By today's standards, that's tiny. But Grandpa was able to manage every acre. He treated the land like he treated his wife, with care and respect, with attention to every square inch.

He knew that the bottomlands flooded every spring, so he put in dams to save the water. There were three of them. He stocked fish in them and invited the townsfolk to bring their kids out fishing. He built a little dock on one of the ponds and got a rowboat.

Then he realized that the few acres below the dams stayed damp from spillway overflow, so he planted trees and shrubs below the big dam. Those trees and shrubs invited a variety of wild creatures to visit, pheasants, quail, and all kinds of songbirds. I could nestle in behind the multi-flora roses and watch a whole soap opera of goings on, right close to home. In fall, Grandpa invited hunters from among his neighbors in town.

At my thirtieth-fifth class reunion, one of my classmates told me he'd spent a lot of time at night, standing on the big dam, breeze blowing through his clothes—thinking, worrying about his future, and decisions he would have to make soon, mistakes he'd already made. I wonder if he was ever there during one of those evenings when restlessness overtook me, sending me out to walk the section line (a square, one mile on a side, for those who don't know).

I would walk around the section by starlight, listening to the coyotes or an occasional Great Horned owl's spooky Whooo Whooo hoo-hoo, and watching my star-shadow.

We don't own this, Grandpa used to say, we're just give it to take care of.

That's neighborhood–the land, the stars, the silence, the critters, the boy, and me–all part of one man's vision. Four hundred eighty acres.

A Grass-Frozen Sand Sea

Even today, driving a dependable vehicle, some people become uneasy as they penetrate into the heart of the Sandhills. Lyn Messersmith in her book My Sister Mariah comments on her motivation for the things she does on her home place in the hills. It comes down to the illusion that I have some control.

And that's the crux of the matter, isn't it? When we get into those wide open spaces that seem so vast, so much bigger than we can comprehend, we're faced with our insignificance. How can we even pretend to have control over anything? As Messersmith describes her daily activities, though, the hills become alive and familiar—and we're not nearly so frightened of what we know.

Frightened or not, the hills inspire awe.

Sculpted some 5,000 to 8,000 years ago by the ever-present winds of the Great Plains, the Sandhills cover a vast area encompassing more than 19,000 square miles. Comprised of fine, quartz sand, a dune can extend as much as 20 miles and reach 400 feet in height. The climate ranges from semi-arid to sub-humid and is continuously windy. No wonder Messersmith describes herself as a wind walker. But that's enough for the encyclopedia definition.

Instead of focusing on vast, impersonal distance, just think of topping a line of dunes and looking down the other side. Surprises lurk between those ridges—sparkling gems of little lakes that reflect the brilliant cobalt of a prairie sky filled with puffy white clouds. In low areas, the water table rises over the level of the land, watering cattails and bulrushes and all manner of creatures.

Stop next to one of those lakes in the spring and be quiet. Crescent Lake National Wildlife Refuge offers a wealth of opportunities. You'll see white pelicans and all kinds of ducks dabbling the shallows for food. Or maybe the avocets will put on a show for you, stretching their wings up into the shape of little feather headdresses. Maybe you'll get to see phalaropes dance, spinning around and stirring up grubs. Focusing on manageable bits, the waterfowl perhaps, takes some of the intimidation out of vast landscapes. Imagine lying on your back watching the clouds and listening to water lap the edge of such a little lake. Maybe you hear grasshoppers fiddling sweet, sad songs, maybe an occasional startled quack. The sun shines soft upon your face. Go ahead, stay a while.

When you're ready, drive over the next roll of dunes and coast down to a clear-running prairie stream—the Dismal, one of the Loup Rivers, or the Calamus. Perhaps a deer will come down to drink, or maybe it will only be a herd of cows. You never know what will pass beneath the bridge. A canoe perhaps or a kayak—or maybe you'll arrive just in time for a tank race. (More on tank races later.)

Don't neglect the highlands. Watch for flashes of white. The fastest land animal on the North American continent is the pronghorned antelope, so you have to look fast. An antelope going is a bouncing circle of white—that's his rump. Curious creatures, you can sometimes persuade them to hang around a while by waving a bandana at them. Antelope can be amusing, curious critters attracted by any kind of movement.

Mule deer can't compete very well with whitetails, so they've all but disappeared from large parts of the plains, but they do well in the Sandhills. They, too, are fun to watch. Most four-footed creatures run, but not mulies. Spooked, they take off bouncing as if they're riding pogo sticks.

Taking some time with the hills whittles them down to size. Instead of breeding contempt, familiarity brings comfort, a sense that the surprises won't be so fearsome.

Review: Journal of a Windwalker

In her journal, My Sister Mariah, Lyn Messersmith grabs her readers and takes them to the middle of the Great Plains where she confronts them with wind that never stops. Starting with her book cover, made of wind, grass, and sun, she introduces us to the plains in terms of her calendar, each month beginning with a start-of-the-month picture. These are black-and-white shots probably taken on the ranch.

As promised, she tells us something of each day's thoughts and activities—366 entries. (It's a leap year.) Throughout, Messersmith uses ranch chores as metaphors for our emotional/spiritual/interpersonal chores. Writing down the negative stuff gets it out of your head, she advises, and that's what she does. It seems to work for her. By the end of each negative entry, she has found another perspective to consider.

Messersmith focuses on fences and water and wind. She thinks about her backwoods feminism. I wonder whether one reason most feminists seem so angry is because their tongues are bleeding from being bitten so often in childhood, she writes. Like other western writers, she recognizes the stoicism that allowed women to survive harsh weather and loneliness, while always nurturing and supporting their families. But, she writes, It's just that you're so tired of always being strong, of nurturing and caring for others.

She concerns herself with a western culture of ownership that just doesn't fit. You may have a deed in the safe deposit box . . . but you don't own it, she writes.

In May, she remarks, . . . lilacs symbolize faith, and hope, and homecoming, and that's what much of this book is about. Faith and homecoming, for Messersmith, centers a lot on her relationships with the land and its creatures.

Month after month, we get a sense of the season, as well as a feeling that Messersmith's forebears are looking over our shoulders. We're also aware, she writes, that the combination of a sunny June morning, a basket of wet clothes, and mourning dove calls, is as good as a letter from home. In September, she comments on the jackrabbit wind that changes direction and velocity throughout the day. Nothing steady about a jackrabbit.

She writes about the things her mother taught her. As she goes back to evaluate those sayings, she tries to decide which of them