For 30 years I have been learning to read the Great Plains. I have lived in Kansas almost all my life, but only when I began to study the region’s literature as an adult did I come to realize that the place in which I live has a rich heritage in scenery and words.
My mother grew up in Lebanon, Kansas, the geographic center of the contiguous forty-eight states. My father’s parents arrive in Kansas from Sweden just before the turn of the century. I grew up in northeastern Kansas, oblivious to the symbolic significance of this ancestry, rooted in the nation’s center and in the long line of immigrants who came to the Great Plains.
I only knew that across the alley that ran along the back of our house was an alfalfa field, and beyond that a wooded hill where we played cowboys and Indians. In the back of a 1948 Nash I rode to my grandfather’s farm at the speed of a good horse, which was my grandfather’s accustomed pace. On Sundays we drove to the small town where my uncle had a bank and the town had a real square.
During my childhood, the landscape I knew was the wooded hills and small towns of Flint Hills prairie. When we traveled outside of Kansas, people would comment, “Oh, it’s flat there, isn’t it?” I assumed they were right. Then, as an adult, I moved to Derby and began teaching in Wichita where a short drive brings one onto the high, curved prairie of the southern Flint Hills and an equally short drive west brings one face to face with the limitless horizon of the plains.
We hunted for a shady picnic spot for half a day and ended up eating in the shadow of our car before we learned where to find shade trees (in city parks). I began to appreciate the true nature of “flatland.”
My childhood perspective and the adjustments I made when we moved to the edge of the arid high plains have made me aware of the effect of landscape upon point of view. How far one can see and what one can see affects more than eyesight.
Shapes, sounds and seasons become more important in a land with little variation along the horizon. Weather and the nature of the land itself impact the quality of life in the region. The great expanses magnify the weather’s natural violence. The drought, the coming storm, the promised crops are the stuff of daily newscasts and journalists’ analyses.
Social calendars, sporting events, conversations and jokes depend upon the weather. The coming death of the last town, the declining number of family farms, the inexorable creep of city boundaries into rural areas, and the public or private control of the last vestiges of true prairie are persistent problems that are grounded in assumptions about the land and the kind of life we imagine we should be living on the Great Plains.
Great Plains literature is a rich source of tales that explore the ways we have learned to live on the open prairies and high plains. An underlying assumption in many Great Plains novels is that the land belongs to those who know best how to use it.
The plots often center on change, usually breaking the prairie sod for cultivation; but the land, in turn, forces adaptation. New arrivals want a defined enclosed place that represents security and identifiable boundaries, but on the plains there may be nothing to hide behind. They must learn to live in houses made of sod, the earth itself, and plant new crops using unfamiliar tools.
Many Great Plains stories focus on the conflicts that arise when settlers — or their descendents — disagree about the kind of new society they will create or when encroaching cultures displace established societies — Natives, Yankees, or earlier immigrants.
Why people were willing to leave the security of their homes and families and travel into unsettled land, why they continue to live in a hostile environment — these familiar contradictions reflect both historical and present-day conflicts that persist in the fiction and the popular imagination.
This summer, when the hammock beckons, pick up a good Great Plains read — something by Willa Cather, O.E. Rolvaag, Mari Sandoz or early Native American writers Zitkala-Sa or Charles Eastman. Read something by the rather quirky Wright Morris.
Look for more recent writers, Louise Erdrich or Linda Hogan, who offer the Native American perspective, and recent works by Kent Haruf or Jonis Agee who help us realize that the old story of the struggle to survive on the Great Plains can still be made new.
