Enter the Prairie
Places, shapes, relationships
I have been thinking about place, what it means to be “from” somewhere, how a place shapes and changes us - the street layout and what the high school kids do for fun and also the landscape, the specific plants that grow, the comings and goings of the birds, the habits of clouds, what you can see on the literal horizon.
I’ve felt place-less for many years, uprooted by my own choices. A decade ago I would have been quick to tell you I was from Portland, Oregon, where I lived for only four actual years but which felt like the first place I really chose. I grew up in the ‘burbs of New York in a house at the end of a dirt road. A lot of my “tomboy” childhood was running around amongst the trees, digging in the dirt, obsessed with wilderness survival books like Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain. Like all children I took that natural backdrop for granted - it didn’t feel like anything special to me because it was just what the world was made of. It is very beautiful to me now. When I moved to Oregon in my early twenties it felt important to get to the other side of the country, to go somewhere completely different from where I’d been.
A few other places have shaped me too. The game lands and slow rivers of rural central Pennsylvania, mostly observed while very stoned in the backseat of a friend’s ancient Volvo. Rolling golden fields and forests in Iowa. The kudzu-eaten and granite-topped hills in and around Atlanta. And now east-central Illinois, where to be honest I have struggled the most to place myself; the place where I’ve had the fewest human distractions. I arrived in the midst an incredible amount of inner turmoil, the kind of suffering that comes ultimately from not knowing yourself and from not knowing what you don’t know. Consistent with a lifelong penchant for extremes and on top of this pre-existing emotional upheaval, I had decided to toss over a decade of administrative work experience and start from scratch as a field hand on an organic vegetable farm in this brand-new-to-me place.
Covid lockdown began a few months after we arrived. Suddenly “essential,” I touched dirt every day during the pandemic and that was a gift that weighted me down, held me to the skin of the earth, kept my head from floating off into outer space. Huge parts of my life changed and I don’t know how I would have gotten through any of it if I hadn’t begun to feel the landscape on a cellular level. No way to run away, uproot myself, travel somewhere else, escape - had to sit with it, had to stay and keep staying.
This part of Illinois is a famously flat part of the country and at first I had an unnerved feeling of exposure that the endlessly spreading horizon inspired, an animal panic from the ever-gusting wind with nothing to stop it. But then I started allowing the fear to move through me, I realized how far my body extends beyond the limits of skin, and how vulnerable I felt under a full 180 degrees of sky.
I started learning about the prairie, a landscape significantly more subtle in its beauty than the mountains and piedmonts and ravines I was used to, but certainly no less intricate or fascinating. The prairie taught me how to zoom in in real life, to put my face so so so close to the textured remnants of a wild bergamot flower, or to gently touch the impossibly fine fur growing on an early milkweed seedpod and let my mind go blank. To take two hours to walk a mile and be amazed by all of it.
The prairie is an ecology that has co-evolved with fire, both accidental and intentionally set by people shaping the natural world around them for centuries upon centuries. I started learning about the Myaamia, the Kiikaapooi, the Peoria, the Kaskaskia, the Očéthi Šakówin tribes who stewarded the land. I started learning the names of the plants and stopped feeling like a stranger walking through a world of strangers (Robin Wall Kimmerer calls this disaffected condition “species loneliness”). And I grew a relationship with the sky that I’ve never had anywhere else, that I think I wouldn’t be able to begin anywhere else. Out here we get views of the sky uninterrupted by trees or hills or houses - we get the vivid, full-spectrum color saturation sunsets, impossible to photograph, we get cloud soap operas in novel theatrics every day, we are almost made of air.
Further Reading:
This past week I’ve been heartbroken by the news coming out of Atlanta, one of my adopted and beloved homes, about the police murder of Tortuguita, a protester for the forest defense movement. For the past few years the Atlanta police have been trying to build a “cop city” on land that is currently a huge forest and public park. This sprawling complex would include a miniature city for the police to practice street tactics to repress popular protests like the ones that happened all over the country in 2020 after George Floyd was murdered by police. The movement to protect the forest is so important and touches many complex and intersecting issues like environmental racism, gentrification, Land Back, and climate justice, to name a couple big ones. Tortuguita’s murder and the “domestic terrorism” charges that protesters are being hit with are dangerous and horrifying precedents for environmental justice movements all across the country.
You can read more basics about the fight against cop city here:
and if you have the means, please consider donating to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which is paying the bail for arrested protesters and funding an independent investigation into Tortuguita’s death: https://atlsolidarity.org/
Thanks for being here. See ya next Wednesday.
-Mere