AMERICA - Love of Our Country

"Restoration Row" by Timothy Egan, New York Times

PAWHUSKA, Okla. – It is hard to love a land you don’t understand, and for most of my life I had no idea why anyone would ever live in the Great Plains – let alone love the place.

Flat, featureless, boring. Those were the words I heard growing up whenever someone would mention the plains. My view was informed by Dorothy’s Kansas, which looked scary and Gothic even before the twister took her house and Toto, too.

But then I spent some time here, mostly listening to people in the twilight of their lives tell about the land when it turned on them, during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. At the end of a long day of hearing stories, I would go for a run in the wind, and sometimes get a glimpse of the magic of the place — a pronghorn antelope in a sprint, a sky blushing pink, the quiet when the air finally settles.

There are people with us still who remember the Great Plains in its birthday suit, grass as far as the eye could see, what Walt Whitman called, “that delicate miracle, the ever-recurring grass.”

That land is gone to us, now. Once, the grassland in our midsection spanned at least 14 states, from Minnesota to Texas, the second biggest ecosystem in North America. It’s gone because the grass was overturned and the bison were chased off the land and the riot of biodiversity that evolved over 10,000 years was replaced by a few commodity crops to feed us.

It’s not worth arguing over whether this was a good or a bad thing, because most of the intentions were good, even if the excesses were bad. But it’s always worthwhile to wonder whether humans can fix what they screwed up.

And here, just north of this little town in Osage Indian country, I saw some evidence that the land can be healed. I saw shaggy-headed bison and their calves, several thousand of them, in a setting that was neither park nor zoo. I saw grass stretching almost to the horizon, flowering in parts, combed by the wind. I saw the sun dip behind the lilt of the Flint Hills, closing out a day with a burst of color.

This miracle of restoration is the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, nearly 40,000 acres run by the Nature Conservancy. It is the largest protected remnant of tallgrass prairie left on earth, according the stewards of this land – cowboys with advanced botany degrees.

The conservancy bought this land in 1989 and then set out to bring it back. The two biggest missing elements – fire and bison – were returned. Both renew the grass, distribute seeds, and keep the carpet of big bluestem, wild rye and other species healthy.

The result is somewhat astonishing. Over 300 species of forbs, grasses and flowers are here. And while this preserve is just a patch, an anchored Noah’s Ark of what used to cover much of the continent, it says something about restoration. Bit by bit, maybe some of what we lost can be brought back.

I say this at a time when nearly all commercial salmon fishing has been halted on the West Coast. What used to be a rite of the season – a taste of the wild, spring Chinook returning to the Columbia River, the richest salmon on earth – is almost a memory this year.

But look also at bald eagles that fly in all 50 states, a byproduct of strong laws and far-sighted bird lovers. From my house in a metro area of nearly 3 million people, I can see a pair of nesting bald eagles.

We restore things to the wild, and in time, they return the favor. Think of Nick Adams, the psychically wounded veteran coming home to the nurturing water in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.”

So even with the sky here in Oklahoma rumbling and clacking, menaced by twisters rolling down Tornado Alley, there is just enough of the original plains at the Tallgrass Preserve to make flatland believers out of skeptics.

You can see in the remains of a day the reason why people who came here a hundred years ago were so lonely — and, also, why they fell in love with the place.