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13 AWall of Old Trees “This looks promising,” Gerry says. I put the airplane, a little Cessna 172, tail number One Two Whiskey, into a hard right turn, following his hand pointing out the window, and lower the nose toward the earth of the Red River Valley. For just a moment, we are both a bit lighter in our seats. I am aiming for a stand of trees, five or six rows deep, what looks like oak and evergreens bordering a gravel county road. The airspeed indicator climbs past 110 knots. “You just can’t tell, can you?” he asks. One thousand feet above the prairie, I pull back on the yoke, and we pass another row of trees as I bank the airplane to the left, heading a bit more south. Gerry scans the prairie landscape to the horizon. All I see is farmland below us, divided into neat and orderly sections. A week or so past harvest, the land looks dry and empty. Desert, almost. Flatland. A few rows of trees protect farmsteads, but the overall image is almost frighteningly open and exposed. Some distance in front of us, the North Dakota sand hills rise to break the grid. The southern end of Pleistocene glacial Lake Agassiz. The Sheyenne National Grasslands now. The Sheyenne River. Riparian ecosystems. Riverbank forests. South of the town of Leonard, the trees get thick, and my hopes begin to rise until Gerry says, “You know, most of this was just recently taken out of production. CRP lands. It’s all very young.” Damn, I think. Gerry and I are on a mission. We are looking for a wall. A huge wall. An old wall. A wall big enough to stop the wind. —————————————————— 14 Prairie Sky Imagine what must have been a very strange conversation. “Build a wall,” someone said. The room went silent. “They’ll just go around it” came the practical reply. It could have been in the eighth century BCE. It could have been much later, somewhere between 403 and 331 BCE. It could have been during the Spring and Autumn period. It was certainly somewhere in the seven states that now make up China. “Then build a really big wall,” the first person said. “Not tall,” he continued, “just really, really long. Connect what we already have.” He might have stood in the middle of the room, arms outstretched, a smile on his face. Perhaps there was silence, or laughter, or outrageous argument. Perhaps the guy was tossed out of the room and into the muck of the street. But at least one other person sat back in his chair, his mind already whirring with the math. —————————————————— We climb. One thousand five hundred feet above the North Dakota prairie , Gerry and I are looking for a wall. Huge, I tell him. Magnificent and enormous , I say. It was supposed to be a hundred miles wide, stretching all the way from Canada to Mexico. Not a hundred miles thick, but an interlaced system of rows of trees evenly spaced that would stop nothing less than the wind itself . Dust Bowl days. The whole of the farmland Midwest in drought, the soil turned and baked, then lifted by the wind and carried off in great walls of silt and suffering. The evidence should be everywhere. When a story gets big enough, it leaves its marks on the earth. Glaciers dig out the Great Lakes and fill in the Manson Crater, leave marks on Dakota fields. Long Island is a terminal moraine. Ancient riverbed rocks betray the old course of the Yukon River, south to the Pacific Ocean. A rock from heaven makes Lake Manicouagan. Old trails in the desert and forest and grasslands still nearly glow in evening light. Or maybe it’s the other way around—marks on the earth are the syllables of words of stories, dreamtime songlines for all of us. It doesn’t matter . Sometimes you hear a story and you want to touch the earth. Sometimes you touch the earth and want to hear a story. I don’t remember when I first heard this story. A living wall right down the middle. A wall to stop the wind. The evidence should be everywhere. But I know from the ground I will never see the whole hope. What I need is altitude. “You want to go flying?” I asked. “We should be able to see it everywhere.” We can’t find any trace at all. Clear late...

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