Our Turn At This Earth

“I learned a new shorebird today!” my partner, Al, announced.

“What kind?” I asked.

“Killdeer.”

“You’re kidding? Killdeers aren’t shorebirds.”

The early frontiersman Ricard I. Dodge wrote that “the first experience of the plains, like the first sail … is apt to be sickening. This once overcome” Dodge continued, “the nerves stiffen, the senses expand, and man begins to realise the magnificence of being.”

The first thing I noticed when the power went out was the silence. It seemed deeper than could be explained by the mere absence of the refrigerator’s hum. The house also seemed a little darker than could be accounted for by the loss of one reading lamp, the only light I’d had on at three in the afternoon. I remembered the same sensations from childhood afternoons when thunderstorms caused the power to go out.

“The Magic Mirror.” That’s what Admiral, one of the TV manufacturers of the 1950s, aptly named its top-of-the-line model. My family’s less showy Zenith was housed in a blond wood cabinet that stood on four splayed legs. During the day, its opaque screen reflected only ghost-like images of an empty couch and chairs, arranged around it like seats in a theater. 

“Malaysia to Send 3,000 Tonnes of Plastic Waste Back to Countries of Origin.” So read a recent headline.

Apparently, the Malaysians are tired of being a dumping ground for the world’s trash. They are not alone. China, which used to take 70 percent of the hardest to recycle plastic, is refusing it now too.

What if you discovered that a genius, a visionary thinker who could string thoughts and words together that make you believe in your own potential and that of all humanity, had been living practically in your back yard for decades and you never even knew he existed?

One of the most heartbreaking essays I ever read was by Alice Walker, about a lonely horse named Blue. One joyful day, a mare arrived to share his pasture, and Blue entered a brief period of bliss. A few months later, after a trailer came and carried Blue’s best friend away, he galloped “furiously” around and around his pasture, “whinnied until he couldn’t,” and “tore at the ground with his hooves.” He was so distracted by grief that he wouldn’t even take the apples Walker offered him anymore.

Anyone who’s lived under a Midwestern or Great Plains sky knows that we see lightning before we hear its crack and thunder. But on a vacation last August in Alaska, while paddling in the Kenai Fjords National Park, I still found it very strange to watch giant chunks of a tidal glacier plummet into the sea well before I heard the crash.

When I was sixteen, my family left the farm where I grew up and moved into town. The house, along with all of the outbuildings and the corrals and pastures that used to hold a thousand head of ewes, several horses, a few cows, and some chickens and pigs, were eventually torn down.

But that western Kansas farm still lives within me. It shaped my values. By “values,” I mean not only how I believe I should conduct myself in life, but what I most treasure and wish to preserve.

As a young woman, I met a guy who consulted the I Ching whenever he needed to make a decision. When he consulted that ancient Chinese book of divination about me, the result seemed beyond coincidental. The answer he got fell under a heading that, in English, meant “The Joyous, Lake.”

It thrilled and flattered me that the oracle had made that connection. The greatest joy in my life was swimming in mountain lakes.

Almost all of the watercourses on the High Plains are fed by the Ogallala Aquifer. Each one of them creates its own paradise. Red-winged blackbirds trill from their perches atop tall reeds. Deer, pheasants, wild turkeys, and other wildlife wend through thick meadow grasses. Cottonwood and hackberry trees shade the water, which is usually so clear you can see fish swimming in it.

Until I read the Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s essay “Landscape, History and the Pueblo Imagination,” the word “landscape” had strictly positive connotations for me. Hearing it, I imagined broad vistas of land and sky. I grew up enthralled by such vistas and still am. But Silko’s essay rang so true to me that, ever since reading it, I can’t come across the word “landscape” without questioning the way that my culture looks at the world.

In my mid-thirties, while living back on my family’s Kansas farm after spending many years away, I couldn’t stand the automatic dusk-to-dawn yard light that blinked on each evening. In my childhood, we turned our yard light off some evenings just so we could gaze at the stars, and we always turned it off before we went to bed.

I don’t think I could have been any older than ten. I remember I was crossing our farmyard, in shorts, my legs, bare above my cowboy boots, slicing forward in a purposeful gait. Perhaps I was headed to the barn corral to catch one of my horses.

A friend of mine once wrote an essay recalling an annual visit to a shoe store when she was a little girl. On this particular trip, her mother told her she could buy as many pairs of shoes as she wanted. In previous years, she was allowed to choose just one pair of Sunday shoes and one pair of practical Buster Browns. Choosing the Sunday pair had always been the hardest. But this time she didn’t have to anguish over whether to get the shiny black patent leather shoes with the pink bows, or the shiny white ones, or the sparkly pink Cinderella slippers.

“Are we gonna go ‘splorin’ again?” Indy asked me as he climbed into his car seat.

Thursday afternoons were Grandma time, and he knew he could count on adventuring. I would pick him up from preschool and off we would go.

“Are We the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For?” This was the title of Wes Jackson’s speech at last year’s Prairie Festival, an event held each September at the Land Institute near Salina, Kansas. The question implies that we need to be saved. The irony is that we do -- from ourselves.

What if you discovered that a genius, a visionary thinker who could string thoughts and words together that make you believe in your own potential and that of all humanity, had been living practically in your back yard for decades and you never even knew he existed?

Often at meetings concerning the future of the Ogallala Aquifer, I have questioned the wisdom of using precious groundwater to grow corn. Farmers who make their livings growing that crop understandably take issue with this point of view. One time, a farmer told me point blank that I didn’t know what I was talking about.

This is it, folks! This week at West Texas A&M University, the Center for the Study of the American West (CSAW) will host the Southern Plains Conference 2020 with the theme “Representing, Modeling, and Imagining Water on the Southern Plains.” The event kicks off this Thursday, February 20th and runs through Saturday, February 22nd in Canyon, TX. The conference will take place on campus at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum (2401 4th Ave., Canyon). So today we welcomed back Dr. Alex Hunt to give us some updates and reminders. 

Last year, I bought a 2012 Subaru Forester with only 30,000 miles on it. A great deal – not exactly what I wanted, but I’d been researching cars for months. I’d given up on the notion that a car existed that could tow a hefty wagon, take me far off-road, and get good gas mileage. So I finally caved on the mileage point.

When I was sixteen, my family left the farm where I grew up and moved into town. The house, along with all of the outbuildings and the corrals and pastures that used to hold a thousand head of ewes, several horses, a few cows, and some chickens and pigs, were eventually torn down.

But that western Kansas farm still lives within me. It shaped my values. By “values,” I mean not only how I believe I should conduct myself in life, but what I most treasure and wish to preserve.

As a child, I lived in a big, old two-story farmhouse that my maternal grandfather had built in 1919, the year my mother was born.  It never occurred to me that my family could exist anywhere else. So it came as quite a shock when I was 16 and my parents traded that house and farm for land in another part of the county and we moved to town.

Today we welcomed Dr. Alex Hunt back into the studio to discuss the forthcoming Southern Plains Conference 2020, with the theme “Representing, Modeling, and Imagining Water on the Southern Plains.” Dr. Hunt heads up the Center for the Study of the American West (CSAW) at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, TX.

High Plains Public Radio will be re-airing the past year's episodes of Our Turn At This Earth beginning Nov. 22, 2018.

New episodes will be airing after the new year, so stay tuned!  

My father pastured his sheep on what could loosely be termed the “shores” of Little Beaver Creek, a dry watercourse that flowed only after gully washers – his term for big rainstorms. Today it amazes me that I could have grown up in that place and never wondered how the creek got its name. Nor did I wonder what happened to the water or the trees that beavers could not live without.

Stories about disruptions in the carbon cycle abound in the news these days. But recently, it occurred to me that I didn’t really know what the carbon cycle was.

A few Google searches later, and I will never again see my fall garden in quite the same way.