© 2021
In touch with the world ... at home on the High Plains
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Is there a High Plains Sense of Place?

Cindee Talley

Hello, Radio Readers! You know, when HPPR wanted to explore a High Plains sense of place, I was a little skeptical. That our terrain and lives are different from, say the East and West coasts, seems fairly obvious, but are the High Plains all that different from the Midwest? The Southwest? I wondered what ideas about life on the High Plains a novel about eastern Colorado, a social  history of the Comanche, and a memoir about growing up in the ‘60’s and 70’s in Amarillo and Austin could share.

True enough, Haruf, Gwynne, and Caldwell remind us of the extremes of  High Plains weather and the hardiness required of plants, animals, and people to live through it. We’re reminded that no one can go it alone on the High Plains – we need families, communities, to endure climate and terrain. The landscape is panoramic. Any description of it necessarily includes its vast and isolating dimensions, demonstrated by a dearth of buildings and byways and the distances between our communities and cities. It’s hours from Holt to Denver, from Amarillo to Austin, from Palo Duro to Lipan to Cache to Santa Fe, but, as we know, the distance between our own hometowns  and cultural centers, like Denver, Lawrence, and Austin is measured in more ways  than mere miles. And sometimes there are great distances – emotional or political, say – within our own local communities and within our own families. All three books, I think, show that, as well.

These distances – physical and spiritual—are maybe a source of restlessness. I notice that Haruf, Gwynne, and Caldwell all portray a tension between staying or going, between planting our roots or roaming.  In Empire of the Summer Moon, this tension plays out between the Texas settlers, who themselves having migrated from afar, aimed to cultivate crop and cattle, while the Comanche traveled millions of miles, to trade, hunt buffalo, and stay ahead of weather. In Haruf’sPlainsong and Caldwell’s Strong West Wind, we experience this tension as youthful restlessness.  The young, teenagers and college students, yearn for whatever it is they don’t find in their High Plains hometowns, so--- very much like our pioneer and tribal ancestors-- head out for elsewhere. In Denver or Austin, the young, in our books, are unbound, free to experiment socially, chemically, intellectually, politically, for variety, for options. Yet, these, too, as we read in Plainsong and in A Strong West Wind, return, for a time, to families and traditional communities they’d once fled, for a sense of belonging, some fixity of purpose, and strength.

From Haruf’s and Caldwell’s accounts (and my own experiences) Denver and Austin are meccas of art and commerce, employment and education, offering myriads of ways to invent, or re-invent, one’s self.  Yet, it seems most High Plains folk prefer not to live in a cultural mecca. What cultural meccas have to offer doesn’t seem to be what most High Plains folk desire. What would it mean to our way of life if more of us did? What if our High Plains communities were less conventional, more pluralistic? Would returning High Plains expatriates like what they found, or would they, like the Comanche to Palo Duro, despair to find nothing, except the wind, as it used to be?

I know I’ll continue to think –and I hope you will, too--about Haruf’s novel Plainsong, Gwynne’s social history of the Comanche, Empire of the Summer Moon, and Caldwell’s memoir A Strong West Wind. Thanks for being a Radio Reader!