Stories From Under The Sky

A Wilderness of Light

a wilderness of light NOT so LONG AGO, between the eastern forests and the buffalo plains, there was a sea of grass and flowers. The midland of the continent was open, rolling, longgrass prairie and settlers emerging from the woods and snug fields of the east were stunned by a blaze of sunlight and an immense sweep of sky. The old settlers said it was like a sea with long, heavy groundswells. It was neither angular and abrupt nor flat and monotonous, but a vast reach of grassland broken with stately groves and dissected by timbered stream valleys. One man wrote that where the groves crowded into the prairie the effect was like that of a rugged shoreline, with the surrounding forest indented to form bays and headlands in the grass and sometimes - when regarded across leagues of prairie - the distant forest was like "a dim shore beheld at a great distance from the ocean." It was a unique, unliterary wilderness without pestilential swamps or black walls of forest. This was an open wilderness of birds, flowers, grass and sun. In the groves and timbered valleys were elk, deer, bear and turkey. On the open prairie were grouse beyond number and the eastern fringes of the great bison herds that blanketed the short-grass plains beyond the Platte. I75 A large land, whose breathtaking immensity of sky disturbed many travelers. It was this pitiless quality of openness , a relentless intimidation of wind and distance - even more than the marauding Sioux - that drove some settlers back to the east. It dwarfed them beyond their endurance and they fell back from this new land's largeness and its jarring excesses of light and space. There was, and is, no other region in North America with such climatic extremes. With no large water bodies to temper the weather and no forests or mountains to check the wind, the prairie summers and winters were elemental entities, neither possessing any of the attributes of the other. The first storms of autumn might leave snow three feet deep on the level prairie and fill some sheltered ravines with drifts that lingered until early June. After the blizzards came weeks of bright, bone-cracking cold with seventy degrees of frost, only to be followed by a summer with blazing afternoons of a hundred and fifteen degrees and incessant winds that desiccated the prairies and their people and drove the great fires that consumed them both. Even if the settler survived winter, wildfire, sick oxen, renegade Wahpekutes, diphtheria and tetanus, there was still the aching loneliness and the prison of empty, illimitable horizons. But it was worth it, and people crowded into the open land. For never has there been such a place of incredible richness . This land had not invested its strength in trees, but had renewed and rebuilt itself annually as the lush prairie grasses and forbs had died and enriched the earth. There evolved a soil that was light, black and fluffy with organic matter. Even after the hardest rain and hottest sun, a man could walk over prairie loam and scuff his boots in it, and the soil was soft and flocky. It was much later, after the soil had been mined by decades of cash-grain farming, that it became as heavy and solid as the men who worked it. Today the long-grass prairie is nearly gone, although some scraps of it linger on a few farms, along old railroads, and in neglected country cemeteries. I know of only a few hundred-acre prairies in Iowa today, and these anachronisms are invariably ringed by farmers who eye them as wistfully and hungrily as orphans regard a jar of peppermints. Such men have fine farms and all the good land that they can comfortably manage, but they know that the keen edge of that land has been blunted by a century of cultivation. They ache to drill their modern seed into an ancient earth that has been storing up richness for ten thousand years. The primeval soils of these prairies are also coveted by scientists. A few years ago a botanist with the Atomic Energy Commission told me that only virgin prairie areas can give chemists the patterns of our best original northern soilspatterns that will serve as reference indices in the event of atomic contamination of croplands. This could be vital, they say, in assaying the effects of atomic reactors...