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Chapter 10. Idiot Out Wandering Around: Few Words About Teaching Place in the Heartland
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c h a p t e r 1 0 Idiot Out Wandering Around A Few Words About Teaching Place in the Heartland j o h n p r i c e The first time I encountered this phrase, about ten years ago, I was visiting the writer Dan O’Brien at his ranch in western South Dakota. Dan had generously offered to drive me around the surrounding acres of mixed-grass prairie that he was restoring and to hunt ducks with his peregrine falcon, Little Bird—one of a native species he had helped save from extinction. Though I’d been born and raised in central Iowa, I knew virtually nothing about prairie ecosystems. I grew up as a townie, surrounded by an ocean of corn and soybeans, in a state where less than one-tenth of one percent of native habitat remains—the worst percentage in the Union. Native grasses and flowers might have been found in the place where I grew up, in the occasional ditch and postagestamp preserve, but I would not have been able to identify them. Even if I could have, I’m not sure I would’ve cared. “Not caring” was just one of the conditions I was hoping to alleviate by traveling to significant prairie sites in the region and talking with writers, like Dan, who were dedicated to preserving and restoring them. Altogether, those journeys would transform my relationship to 1 4 0 m e e t i n g t h e c h a l l e n g e s place, helping, as I later wrote, “to cure a lifetime of ignorance and indifference.” This personal transformation—or more accurately, conversion—would be the subject of my first book and would lead me to become a committed writer of place in the central grasslands. At the time I visited Dan, however, that commitment was tentative, and my lack of any significant outdoor experience didn’t help. During my most recent visit to Dan’s ranch, for example, I’d nearly fallen off a horse while galloping across the open and (for me) surprisingly un-flat prairie. But that was all in the past, I thought, as Dan slowly parked the truck near a pond, pointing to a handful of ducks floating on the water. It was the perfect situation to see Little Bird hunt, to experience at least a faint echo of the once grander cycles of predator and prey in the region. So I lost myself for a moment—as I often did on that grasslands pilgrimage—and after stepping out of the truck, slammed the door behind me, the noise reverberating across the pond like a shotgun blast. Luckily, it didn’t scare the ducks off, but I was still embarrassed when I met up with Dan at the back of the truck. “You know what ‘Iowa’ stands for, don’t you?” he asked me, smiling. “‘Idiots Out Wandering Around.’” L During the intervening years, I have done my best to escape this label, but to no avail. I now teach at the metropolitan University of Nebraska at Omaha, and a few years ago, during the first meeting of an introductory lit class, I casually mentioned that I grew up in Iowa and still lived there. This provoked some snickering. Given that Omaha and Iowa are separated only by the Missouri River, I was curious to know what they saw as the main distinction. “What is an Iowan to you?” I asked. This [54.221.159.188] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:28 GMT) j o h n p r i c e 1 4 1 provoked the Idiot line and another local favorite: In Omaha Without Authorization. Then I asked them what they thought our two states had in common. Most of the positive responses I received can be summarized by the popular term “Heartland Pride”: family values, simple country living, self-reliance, hard workers, agriculture, patriotism, and God. The negative responses can be summarized by what might be called “Heartland Funk”: ignorant, ugly, culturally and environmentally boring , and best left behind. There wasn’t a single reference to a natural featureunrelatedtoagriculture,noteventheMightyMo.Theirresponses were yet another indication of the severity of the situation in the Great Plains and prairie Midwest, where the vast majority of native habitats have been destroyed or are underprotected. The consequence, as writer and ecologist Dan Flores has said, is that “citizens of places like Texas and Kansas are today...