Heart Stays Country: Meditations from the Southern Flint Hills by Gary Lantz (review)

This collection of thirty-nine tightly focused and crafted essays draws its title from the Osage historian John Joseph Mathews, who identifies “a division of the [Osage] tribe . . . [who] got their name from their allegiance to the earth beneath their feet—they were a group who liked to stay close to home” (1). Lantz re-counts the natural history of prairie land in Osage County, Oklahoma, where his Anglo childhood was seemingly rooted in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When his father landed a job in the oilfields in 1947, the family received “a three-room wood frame house with a tin roof, no insulation, no electricity, and no running water.” The garden was plowed by a horse team. Yet the initial oil boom that scarred the landscape had already peaked. The prairie has continued, as Lantz explains it, to rewild and heal.

Lantz is a nature writer in the tradition of Joseph Wood Krutch and Henry Beston; as a stylist, he’s closest to Aldo Leopold in his Sand County Almanac sketches. What interests Lantz most is the specificity and beauty of the intact ecosystem (in this, he takes his cue from Leopold’s famous Land Ethic). The sketches, often framed around a day’s ramble, admire Great Plains species such as eastern gamagrass, greater prairie-chicken, brown-headed cowbird, and dung beetle (known colloquially as tumblebug), extolling their ecological fitness with humor and delight. He explores the driving forces of grasslands, photosynthesis, and fire. And as with many such collections, he rolls through the seasons, opening the book in early spring, lingering through the hot summer of the Southern Plains, and rounding out with winter.

Nostalgia and regret frame these meditations, and Lantz often expresses a sense of having just missed the full richness of the living prairie world. On the Nature Conservancy’s Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, he watches a bison mother torn between two ancient urges: keep up with the moving herd or stay close to her still-wobbly newborn calf. “I felt as if I was witnessing a scene straight out of pre-European America, with a few key players [i.e., wolves] missing” (82). Elsewhere, he wonders whether his own living memory intersects with the final years of a now-gone species. Did he, as a young man, see a small group of Eskimo curlews? “[T]he birds we watched as they circled overhead resembled a painting in a book I borrowed from the library, enough so that I dared to dream the impossible, and I continue to do so to this day” (45).

The book frequently laments the ravages of past environmental destruction—impact of the oil fields, extinction of species—but climate change receives scant mention (I counted only three occurrences). And although Lantz frequently draws on the work of prairie ecologists, no such research informs his comments on the changing climate. “My hope,” he writes, “is that hundreds of years from now [the southern prairie] will still be much the same as when I left it and that the grass will still grow tall, cattle or buffalo will still grow fat, the springs will still flow fresh and clean” (6). I find his hope unlikely, but the essays exemplify the love on which it’s founded.