The Platte, a Dry Place, and the Plains

Our paradoxical era has brought preoccupation with attachment to place in the face of a highly mobile, decreasingly place-based society, along with environmental concerns in the face of continued and increasing environmental exploitation. It is, in part, the place and nature of literature to attend to and wrestle with such paradoxes, as do the three books reviewed here. The focus of Doreen Pfost’s This River Beneath the Sky: A Year on the Platte is apparent from her book’s title. Within her story of the Platte, offering particular, but not exclusive, attention to migrating sandhill cranes, she also offers stories of families who have lived on the river for generations, and some of her own story. That narrative is one of gradual attachment after initial aversion, following her family’s move to Kearney, Nebraska. A vital part of this attachment developed from her work as a volunteer guide at the National Audubon Society’s Lillian Annette Rowe Sanctuary.

It is with the annual spring return of sandhill cranes to the Platte that Pfost’s book begins, while she watches bugling flocks glide into a meadow, as “the pale undersides of their wings flash golden in the late-afternoon light” (2). Here the cranes rest and eat before continuing their flight north to breed. The story of wildlife biologist Charles Frith is interwoven with that of the Platte, its wildlife, and of Pfost herself.

As a US Fish and Wildlife Service employee in 1970, Frith became convinced that a Bureau of Reclamation plan to divert water from the Platte for irrigation would mean extinction for sandhill cranes. He went about the hard work of proving his claim, determined to prevent the project, alter it to minimize the threat to habitat, or at least to resist. After opponents armed themselves with the results of his research, a 1975 public vote defeated the reclamation plan. Without Frith’s efforts, there would probably be no sandhill cranes to observe on today’s Platte or anywhere. But as Pfost knows, “a pact, project, or legal victory is never the end of the story; it’s just the end of a chapter … and sometimes not even that” (25). Those who carry on Frith’s work understand the need for continued vigilance against danger to this much-dammed river, the cranes, and other life dependent on the Platte, where annual flows diminish, lost to dams, reservoirs, and evaporation.

Pfost notes that threat of extinction is not limited to birds or even to nonhumans, as illustrated by the intertwined fates of bison and the Pawnees, who, among other Plains Indians, depended on them. Bluebirds, snow geese, wild turkeys, eagles, and whooping cranes are among many oft-threatened birds she observes and details. She contemplates, in lovely language, how near we came also to “a world without whooping cranes,” where we would never see “that incandescent white against the sky, the seven-foot sweep of black-tipped wings” (105). While interorganizational coordination on projects such as habitat restoration and conservation easements protect some areas along the river, climate change threatens not just the Platte but all water sources in the Great Plains. Awaiting return of the sandhill cranes, a fellow volunteer tells her, “Seeing them makes me feel we haven’t destroyed everything,” adding, “They give me hope” (156). Likewise, her book offers readers a bit of hope and even joy.

In contrast, Richard Edwards’s Natives of a Dry Place does not begin terribly hopefully, for good reason, as his introduction, which contextualizes the book and introduces the recent Bakken oil boom’s effects on his hometown of Stanley, North Dakota, makes clear. Like...