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?

Sunset before the full moon

5:02 p.m., Jan. 30.

Full Moon Saturday, and as you can see from the sun's parting shots, our skies hold plenty of mystery and beauty around this time of month. Sunsets are almost always like this out here, and panoramas like this make sunset a truly moving time of day.

A beautiful sunrise is often soft and pastel in color, full of promise, but not as strong. Full sun above can wash out the daytime, infusing all activity with a weird sort of energy. But dusk, when the stability of the ground rushes up to meet the descending sky, well, there's just so much in it. It passes quickly, so you've got to get out and see it before the colors get hazy.

I am facing southwest in these pictures, looking out over the cattle fences and our chicken coop. Slopes and swells of grassland canyons lie beyond the fence posts you can barely see in the top picture.

In the above picture you can see the bar of color in between the black ground and the black sky, this shot was taken at 5:21 p.m. Within minutes the day is swallowed up.

What makes these light shows unfurl as they do? I used to ask my dad about it, and his answer was that we had open skies. It has a little bit more to do with light waves, atmospheric density and the way our eyes work, but in part, he's right. Dust and water help reflect the colors of light, and we've ususally got lots of dust blowing around out here. Smog and pollution have a silencing effect on the light. Reds have the lowest amount of energy, and are shorter in frequency, so that's why we see more of them at night. It's also sort of ironic that I feel more strength in sunsets than sunrises, but I like the ferocity of red and orange.

Full Wolf Moon: Place Post No. 2

9 pm. Saturday, Janaury 30.

Full moon over the lake tonight, and the clouds look like fish bones in the sky. Serrated and fine, they hang with a hollow presence, suspended above me with the weight of a navy blue sky. Quickly, a coyote runs in front of me as I nose my way along the shore; startled eyes are like moonbeams in front of me. Tonight is a Full Wolf Moon, the name bestowed upon the January full moon by the Native Americans who once roamed this land with coyote as a guide. I come to the lake tonight to see its beauty in a new light, and despite its familiarity, the shadows dancing on the ground incite in me an eerie sort of paranoia.

At the main shore a streetlight burns, its fake orange light as appealing as a spray-on tan. Because I'm here trying to see things as they really are, I move away from the main shore, go south and then west, looking for nothing in particular but the spirit of the night.

Night time in Nebraska has always been a sacred time for me. When I was 17 and sneaking back in at first light, the cover of darkness and its activities made me feel most alive. When various boyfriends lived in other places and I told them to look up in the sky, to see the Moon and feel her shared light, despite our distances we were always, in that moment, connected. The fragile quality of moonlight lends a surreal presence to everything it touches, making out world seem something more than normal; making everything a little less comfortable for humans.

No matter where I have been or how old I am while there, or who might offer company, the light that comes from the sky makes me feel like there is something special about this life. The glistening promise of stars, reaching out to us from distant and past galaxies is reassuring smile from a special someone, a reward of some kind. My life in cities has been mostly devoid of this light; light pollution robs me of that feeling and the connection to the sky and all that will be or ever was.

I drive to the edge of the lake-- as close as I can get and still know that what I am seeing is actually land, and not frozen water. It's been cold at night, in the negatives, but I'm not sure how sound the ice is, the Rav is heavy; this is the side of the lake that sometimes bubbles with new water. Because nothing looks as it normally does, I'm not tempting a horror story.

And yet everything looks like a nightmare. Dead trees strain blackened branches to the sky, bony limbs of dark wood laid cold and bare in this winter night. Even with the moon's glow my eyes fight for understanding and adjustment; a barbed-wire fence choked by tumbleweeds seems like something less ordinary until my eyes get their bearing. There are no lights on this side of the lake, and eventually, when my eyes are fully adjusted, I can take in the frost on the ground, sparkling with the only animation I've seen since that 'yote ran through my lights.

I've cut the lights on the Rav, the radio and now the heater. All I can hear and feel now is the quiet of the night. Slowly, a small anxiety warms in my ribcage, and I shake my head at this. I'm in the middle of nowhere, a place I've known forever.

But the way I'm knowing it tonight is all but familiar.

Sitting there in the expanding cold and chocolate pudding of the night, it occurs to me this is probably how many people feel in nature: paranoid, unsure of their surroundings and what lurks behind every twig and crevice and noise. How terrible it must feel to consider oneself a stranger in the natural world.

How terrible to only know domestication false light.

In front of me the lake is a section of slivers and pockets; silver bars reflecting moon light and humped waves of snow that devour it and cast shadows. I am saved by own foolishness: I would love to walk out across it, to the middle of the lake and open myself to that epicenter of rippling light. But because I am human and my eyes aren't made for this dark, I am still apprehensive: I won't risk walking out onto the lake tonight. I know my limits, but I am human, after all, and as much as I like pushing them, I think this is far enough for tonight.

I twist the lights back on and the Rav warms its metal parts with a deep intake of air, it sounds almost like a sigh. The trees spring to life in the glow of my headlight-- I see finer twigs and piles of shed leaves on the ground. Suddenly everything is made familiar. Grasses shoot across the spectrum from black to yellow, and even though it is fake light, it makes me feel better. I crush through a mirror of frozen water in the rutted road (broken bones, broken bones, I think to myself), and soon am back on the main road. It's funny, if something were out here and wanting to get me tonight, it still could, despite the headlights and plastic. How we have duped ourselves into comfort, plastic shells and fake lights.

LIGHT

Dawn breaks though the windows this morning, streaming in through the eastern panes in great hazy shafts of lemon, corn husk, goldenrod and dream. Braided into thick plaits by the charcoal weight of shadows, the grizzly brown of the trees and the faint white shimmer of frosty ground, the sun's rays are captures and made solid, if only for a moment.

A small pheasant pokes his head out from between the grain bins--there's lots of corn spilled on the ground, heaping pyramids of it-- and I watch him bob his ringed neck for-ward, for-ward, for-ward into the sunlight. A pause--is he watching for the dog or eyeing the spilled corn?--
and he goes on. The morning is inching forward, creeping over the slopes of the horizon and warming life across the lawn.

All of a sudden a puff of air and moisture slides in front of the sun; these clouds are like cotton candy, spun loosely and in the same hue as a silvery-blue gun. Now the shafts of light draped across the yard have lost their shimmer, and in an instant, a split-second, the grass before me ages into hues of ashen gray. The landscape resembles a nuclear aftermath. Where once grass was crystallized by the the finest frozen drops of illuminated water now there is only a frigid pockmarked wasteland.

The glowing dew of morning has been replaced with the heavy pallor of a gray day, a lifetime of them, so it seems with this ashen color, and now the innocence of young morning reminds me of an old maid.

The rooster has disappeared, taken the gems of his emerald head and ruby-red chest back into the ethers with him. There are only blue jays in the yard now, the occasional red barn finch and... maybe the flit of a canary yellow? I could be dreaming about that one, my hopes for sunlight confusing the actuality of the drab scene outside the window.

What was only moments ago--literally the time it took my to write this out with pen and paper--a promising day has become dismal, a holocaust. So it is, another day in the January of a Nebraska winter.

I continue to peer through the lower panes of the eastern window, hoping to see an amber sheen of sunlight yet again. This gray reminds me of Seattle, but not even the phosphorescence of neon and streetlights is fooled into believing this is its place. I wonder if all people, even those in Seattle, keep on looking out the window, hoping for the faintest trace of color in the sky, throughout the winter. I woke this morning feeling light and airy, and if I give up on that feeling then it will be more than just the land that washes silently into dismal.

Sunrise is an important time day, even Thoreau told us time and again how much he believed in the mornings, and I learn more about how to act from watching the sky than the animals under it. Seems strange, since I myself am one of these animals... I've always believed that I could get through just about anything as long as the sun is shining.

Resilience: Prompt Post No. 1

Grass swells and sandy hollows, the topography of Hay Springs, Nebraska.
A patterned expression of single mindedness, rows and rows
wheat corn beans sugarbeet potato
chase each other to the horizon.
Here the land is as thirsty for moisture
as the people are for excitement
gossip
firewater
Busch Budweiser Calvert
and an escape from the nothingness,
the never-ending
forever found in the fields.

Full of secrets, this land requires
a keen eye, a sharp mind
and the ability to look and listen,
a desire to learn.
This landscape yields nothing easily,
but in town
the voices whisper behind your back
like sandstorms,
so loud you know what you've said
before you even speak.

Fifty mile-an-hour winds today;
How easily the rich dirt leaves us.
Sometimes I think it should take me too,
up and blow me away.
I hate the wind when it blows like this,
galling rasping breaking
and wearing us down.
Funny
that I should love the weariness of travel,
the dirt-packed roads,
the ache for place the dwells in my soul.

Diagrammed and tangible, like memories at the quilt show,
here the seasons carry on around us.
A cold spell,
brittle and unforgiving
sits like iron atop the county;
underneath we are rusted and cold.
The only people who move now are the ranchers
or the hunters.
There's talk of spring
some years,

a figure of speech we'd like to welcome,
but she reveals a downy swell
curves a gentle finger,
then teases
and is gone.
Black ice invisibility gives way
to paintbrush summers
heat waves
mirages on the road
and a forgetting of the cold.
Then harvest.
Of course there's that one,
a season that stands alone.

Smack in the center of middle America
the melting pot placed here is cold.
homogenized, related, similar
--If you are from here, then you know.
But outsiders, passers-by, the unusual or unfamiliar
--best be just a passin' on down the road.
Stick around and stay a while,
but don't forget your place
must be established slowly
roots riverbeds and cowtrails
among the people that I know.

***

After college, each time I came home for a visit I laid low on the farm, avoided town (unless it was a holiday equalling something exciting) and all public places. I didn't really want people to know I was home, for however short a period it might be. What do you tell people when they ask you how D.C. is, or Chicago? Most of the people I grew up with were born here, stayed here for college, and will be buried along with their relatives in the cemetery outside town. Most of them are of farming/ranching stock, and it is this profession they entered after high school.

Well, things have shaped up differently this time around. I poked my nose out from under my rock by going to basketball games and junior class prom fundraiser dinners my second weekend back, and since then, I've managed to see people from town about once a week. I'm finding it amazingly easy to fall back into the swing of life here--this is both comforting and sad. Nothing ever changes, not really, and when I first thought about how to answer this prompt, I wasn't sure how I'd write about this feeling (what I see as stagnation, others might call a beautiful pattern), so I'm pretty happy with the neutrality of my writing.

I appreciate the ease of life my friends experience (searching for this is after all, part of what prompted me to leave Chicago), and for those who truly have grown into themselves, I am happy. But for my friends and community members who are battered by farm debt, mistrust and insecurities, I feel a deeply reaching hairline of sorrow.

And yet, even though there is no novelty here, for me, I see the ways the land and the weather and the living of life is a challenge, and maybe that's the only kind of challenge some people really want or need. In coming home, maybe I'm beginning to finally understand that; what worries me is that with comfort, comes comes the disinterest in any other kind of challenge.

Welcome To Walgren Lake

Welcome to Walgren Lake! Situated a few miles to the south of Hay Springs, Nebraska, and a few miles to the west of my parents' farm, this lake is the stuff of legends, home to the "Walgren Lake Monster." I like to think of it as a quiet place to enjoy the soft sounds of waves rippling against a narrow, sandy shore, or the louder racket of whatever is going on in my head.

Below you'll see the original rock house built in the late 1800s-early 1900s. Using rocks hauled in from a neighboring slough, this is the small gathering house described by pioneering writers in the old newspaper clippings. A shelter for settlers hiding from Sioux on "the warpath," this house is today a gathering spot for picnics and reunions.

Taken from north of the lake house, this picture hows a bit of the frozen lake and the dock leading to the lake. In the spring, summer and fall (anytime the water is flowing) you can happen upon all sorts of families fishing off this dock. Perch, bluegill, crappie and the very rare walley can be caught in this lake, and sometimes at the mouth of the creek (we say "crick" round here. This is small-time fishing, so bobbers and garden worms do the trick.

A view of the lake taken through the lake house window. Three windows of similar construction allow plenty of light and air to flow into the building, and becuase of the material, it's always nice and cool inside.

The shoreline, frozen and solid. Even in the summer the colors aren't much different; on this end of the lake there is little beachfront, and the reeds and cattails always lend their shades of gold and brown to the vivid contrasts of green and blue water.

A frosting of fog

When fog hangs in the air overnight and temps drop below freezing, one wakes to a soft kind of beauty not normally seen during the day. This tree wears a frosty coat much like the rest of the landscape; however, the tree's branches are weighed down more heavily than the limber grasses that continue to blow and bounce with the gentlest of breezes.

This picture speaks to me of abandonment: the old forgotten drainage ditch pipe, the tangle of broken branches, the gentle dip of the grasses all exude a quiet sort of loneliness. Taken behind my dad's shop, this scene is even tucked away from the regular views of the farm.

Delicate white whiskers frozen along the planks of the corral bring moisture to light in a new form; certainly, everything about the world is viewed in a different light on this morning of enchantment.