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  • Zen of the Plains: Experiencing Wild Western Places by Tyra A. Olstad
  • Francis Moul
Tyra A. Olstad, Zen of the Plains: Experiencing Wild Western Places. Denton: U of North Texas P, 2014. 288pp. Cloth, $24.95.

An exuberance of joy. An overture of love. The touch of an old dead juniper tree. The crunch of snow under a boot.

These expressions and impressions of the American Great Plains and the West fill this book with a need to understand that land and [End Page 97] to live with it. It is a search for love of place that takes over the life of a young woman who travels from the Painted Desert Wilderness Area and Petrified Forest of Arizona to the Badlands National Park and Buffalo Gap National Grasslands in South Dakota, to the Tongass National Forest of Alaska, to the Red Desert of Wyoming, and to the Konza Prairie Preserve of Kansas.

Tyra Olstad spent years as a seasonal park ranger, cave guide, and paleontology technician with the National Park Service and US Forest Service, flitting about the Plains, mostly. An alumna of three universities and now a college teacher, she sought the Enlightenment of Zen, which encompasses “clarity, lightness, and bliss.” She sought it with daily walks into the wildness of wherever she was: desert, badlands, tallgrass prairie, forests. There were hundreds of miles of walks, often over the same trails to the same points, but each day learning something new from the changing land.

Along with those walks, she read. Her book is brimming with references to writings about the land and life of the Plains and the West, including quotes from my own book on the National Grasslands. She explores Eastern philosophies and the impressions of western environmentalists and environmental historians, quoting authors who have lifelong experience of living on the Plains. All this is done in an attempt to bring readers into a sympathetic understanding of what makes up our natural treasures, the often stark, semiarid landscapes that tourists forsake for the scenery of ocean beaches or towering mountains. Come! she writes, and smell the sage, hear the tweet of songbirds, the haunting bugle of elk, the tracks in snow of a coyote, and so much more.

And yes, Tyra Olstad is exuberant. She expends hundreds of exclamation points and one-word sentences to make her points. She quotes at length from noted writers, and then quotes more and more. She brings her readers deep into her world, down to the feel of her boots crunching a snow-strewn path and a life-threatening rescue walk through a maze of gullies.

Very few will experience the wilderness as Olstad has. It would take years of stamina, endurance, patience, and a willingness to seek enlightenment in any weather, day and night. But through her knowledge readers will surely gain a better understanding of what our natural wilderness can be. [End Page 98]

And perhaps more than a few people will emulate her joy and explore the land. As she writes, may you walk in beauty.

Francis Moul
Independent Environmental Historian, Lincoln, ne
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