Stability in the broken places: Prompt Post No. 2

Hay Springs was settled in the 1800s, a burgeoning village of tents and shanties set up along a line of railroad track snaking through Northwest Nebraska. Saloons and ladies-of-the-night were as plentiful as the hay shocks and pools of water for which the town was named, according to tales told about the area. A couple of centuries later, we are a one-bar and five-church town; the one-night-stands of which we are all guilty are without monetary cost, and as removed as a church bell or last night's tab at the bar. I wish I could say that I never wanted to be a part of this culture, but even as a child I wanted action, excitement, something other than the farm. In junior high I started hanging out with the town kids (I was a country-school girl), and I knew that I would someday fit in with them, because their lives were the apex of exciting at that point in time.

Eventually I made it through high school, and thinking college would be different, I went to South Dakota and found myself in the same situations, with similar people (with no cops in town, we often spent Friday and Saturday nights in the bar during high school). The only things that had changed were our names, my location, and the bars. But in surrounded as I was by the friends and co-workers I had in Sioux Falls, I knew the loneliness and emptiness that all people out here seem to know. Small towns and rural lifestyles cut off from what the rest of the world seems to know; some people are as bitter and sharp as the wild grasses that grow along our quiet ditches and dirt roads. These lands are good places to exist if you want to get away from it all, but that seclusion catches up to you if you aren’t careful.
In her book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris writes that the Dakotas are not a place of emptiness, but openness.

“More Americans than ever, well over 70 percent, live in urban areas and tend to see the Plains as empty. What they really mean is devoid of human presence. [But] the Plains seem bountiful in their emptiness, offering solitude and room to grow.”
Norris moved to South Dakota as an adult, without the luxury of growing up in this part of the country and feeling the crush of that solitude and emptiness every day, she didn’t realize that the limits of the land really made it impossible to grow. For her, coming to this place with a career path in mind, and by choice, made South Dakota feel like home. Not a horizon of forever stretching out and doubling back again into nothing.

South Dakota for me too, felt like home, in a way I'd never known before, and I did go there by choice. I stayed there for five years by choice also. But in the time I lived there I felt a part of something, but a part of something that had its own ugliness. Norris found peace in the solitude of the openness in Dakota, but in the places I’ve called home, that openness is an empty longing, one filled with the bottle. My people--whether they are in South Dakota or Nebraska, the two places I can think of as home--are all looking for something. We tell ourselves to buck up and be strong, that another person cannot provide us what we need, that we are independent individuals; we are of the plains. We are feisty, we are as strong as the wind that blows over trees. We tell ourselves we don't need the rest of the world, or outside influences (all the while wanting them) and I wonder... are we wrong?

One of my friends drove her car into a stop sign two weeks ago, waking up only when another car approached. Last week she was in the ditch again, passed out a quarter-mile from home. She was asked to leave her fiancé’s home in November; now the two of them sit at opposite ends of the bar while a grandparent watches the baby at his or her home. Five of my friends are in the middle of divorces; last night at the bar I wondered how it happened that we are suddenly so "old" and tired. How did we get where we are?

"Rarely does any creature have the luxury of fouling its own next beyond redemption," writes Barbara Kingsolver in her tracing of "The Memory Place." It may be rare for Kingsolver's people, or the animals she so loves to pollute their own surroundings, but increasingly, in a world so choked with the broken refuse of humans, these people and animals may have no choice. I love my homelands of South Dakota and Nebraska, but I cannot help but feel dirty and polluted when I am home, fouled by the inescapable loneliness of my friends and the openness of the land that surrounds them.


I am probably close to the age Norris was when she moved to South Dakota and began to make it her home. Closer to 30 now than the newbies at the bars in either of my homes, I wish for solitude simply because I want to sit down to work that is important. I want to sit down with my writing and find a place for myself between the lines. I know I cannot blame anyone for the way I act when I come home—the vodka tonics that keep on coming, I can send them back and tell the buyers no—but I hate that my writing isn’t enough to keep my occupied while I am at home. That too, is no one’s fault but my own.

As Hay Springs grew and allotments were registered and settled, the men and women of the region learned to work hard as they always had, and play hard in their newfound times of leisure and success. An escape to the saloon or an afternoon hunting rabbits provided relief from the demands of a farmer/rancher life. The sins of the father…have been passed on through the generations, as have the virtues and the patience with the land and its demands. For those who have established farms and families and successes, the lands here are not so hard, their yields much more productive. I wonder what secrets these people learned, how they came to be contented amid the frustration and the sorrow of life out on the prairie.

In “The Memory Place” Kingsolver wants to know "who will love the imperfect lands," the places that might be considered to some "a waste of finite resources to save." I drive home under the full moon, sometimes biting my lip, and sometimes sighing. I would like to be able to stay here, where my people are buried, where my memories are. But for me this is an imperfect land that goes beyond the prairie dog towns ruining pastures (and even that, some would say, is not ruination but nature) or the narrow-mindedness and gossip. This is a land so calm and peaceful and laidback that it only has itself to chew on. A majority of t he people here feel blesed to have it so "easy" but I see them at the bar looking ruined, for whatever reason. It this life any kind of real living? Because it is so simple and easy to live here, when I find myself following in their footsteps I am only moving into inertia. Stagnation. A kind of preservation I want no part of. Even in Sioux Falls, by the time I left it I realized that staying there would only ruin me too. It’s not so much different than being here at this home in Nebraska—no one to blame other than myself for what I do—but so easy to step back into my old habits when visit. I have choices, always, and so I leave these places, as easy as it would be for me to stay and sink into the oblivion and vastness of the nothing that matters here.

“One of the vows Benedictine makes is stability: commitment to a particular community, a particular place,” writes Norris in her chapter on “Beautiful Places.” My people are committed to their communities and their places, their ways of life, why, I wonder? WHY this kind of stability, if it comes only with ruins and heartache?