Beginning a work trip on Sunday sucks. My wife was driving me in to get a company car when we passed a local marina. “Beautiful new boat on the lot…” I said. And it was - graceful liquid lines, crisp detailing, a sensual serpentine masterpiece rendered in gleaming fiberglass and polished chrome. I saw it on the way home the other day. A child of the Great Lakes, I have a weakness for boats. She smiled a wan smile. We both knew it was idle conversation. The boat likely costs well more than our combined annual earnings and I’ve long since given up fantasies that I might one day own such a beautiful boat. I’m OK with that.
“Where do you want to retire?” I asked trying for a little conversation before I spent the rest of the day alone with the car radio. “I don’t know…maybe up north somewhere. What are you thinking?” she asked. “Up north….maybe near Superior. I’d like to find a neglected sailboat to fix up and then sail around the Great Lakes.” She smiled again. That same smile.
We kissed good bye and I headed off to the southeast. By afternoon I finished running the gauntlet around Chicago and the color was returning to my knuckles. I glimpsed some wetland vegetation over the cement banking of the interstate and took my mind to my beloved Lake Michigan lying just beyond the horizon over my left shoulder. I started out in the upper Mississippi watershed and briefly wandered here into the Laurentian. I would shortly cross an imperceptible subcontinental divide and turn my back on the Great Lakes basin for the massive Mississippi watershed to the south – this time into the Ohio river sub-basin. My destination was a great gray Midwestern city. It’s a quirk, but in my travels I habitually orient myself to where the water is flowing. I feel a little lost otherwise.
Here the rust belt grades into the corn belt. I am traversing the eastern terminus of the prairie peninsula, an incursion of what once was tallgrass prairie into the oak-hickory forests west of the Appalachians. Soils here originated as glacial till and fine wind-deposited sediments called loess. Enormous glacial lobes melted in place uniformly over very long periods gently setting their sediments down in broad flat plains – so flat that rain water had nowhere to go and hence the water table stabilized just below the surface. But whatever the origin of the mineral components, the signature formative agents of these soils were the prairie plants that pioneered and claimed the plains. Prairie plants hold their perennial tissues below ground, investing in elaborate root systems that aerate the soils and convey symbiotic micro-organisms deep below the surface even as they convey water and nutrients to photosynthetic tissues above. Above-ground tissues senesce with the onset of winter and cycles of growth and decomposition over the millennia pumped organic nutrients back into the soil turning it a rich dark brown color that can extend as deep as seven feet. These cycles were periodically interrupted by cleansing and insistent prairie fires that returned needed ash minerals to the soil and held the encroaching forests at bay.
Prior to settlement by Europeans, my ancestors among them, the mesic tallgrass prairie was likely the continent’s fullest expression of grassland – at least in terms of raw biomass and the broad-shouldered packing of sunlight energy into plant tissues . The dominant grass was big bluestem (Andropogon gerardi) and it is said that a mounted rider could tie the ends of the blue stems together over the top of a saddle horn such that it must have felt like the horse was swimming in the wind-driven waves of a grassy sea. It’s little wonder also that the wagons that plied these oceans of grass, with billowing canvass covers, came to be called prairie schooners. Big bluestem was chief among a community of rowdy prairie plants whose roots held the soil and held the water. The tallgrass prairie acted as the watershed’s giant sponge, soaking up the rain and then releasing it slowly into meandering little creeks and eventually to the big rivers of the Midwest thereby moderating the tendency for flooding with every storm. The pristine prairie held the rain so well that I’ve been told it was possible at times to pole a canoe from Champaign-Urbana to Rantoul (14 miles).
It’s a grey scale day on the prairie this afternoon. The air is heavy with a blanketing ice fog making the horizon indistinct. The roads are wet and all the cars and trucks are covered with dried salt-spray. Even the bits of color in a winter prairie, mostly road signs and billboards, cannot penetrate. From time to time great hulking forms emerge from the fog at various distances from the interstate. Yard lights and hip-roofs betray these to be farmsteads but they look for all the world like Great Lakes ore boats emerging from the mist. They remind me of the Great Lakers I occasionally dodged while messing about in small boats in the entry to a Lake Michigan port city near where I grew up. The landscape rises and falls at highway speeds like gentle swells and for a moment, I imagine myself a mariner, dead reckoning a small boat southward through the gaining darkness of a setting sun that I cannot see.
Almost. The traffic is relentless even late on a Sunday afternoon and I see ribbons of headlights ahead of me and in my rear-view mirror fading into a foggy void. Glancing over the ditches I see soybean and corn stubble sticking up through the snow and darker patches where the wind scoured bare the soil surface. Native expanses of tallgrass prairie are among the rarest of plant communities nowadays because we’ve turned nearly all of it to row-cropped corn and soy. We’ve tiled the prairie and incised it with steep-sided drainage ditches running in business-like straight lines to the rivers. We’ve re-engineered the prairie so that the water rushes away quickly and reliably making the prairie reliably dry enough to support planting equipment in the spring and combines in the fall. On the plus side, we’ve turned the tallgrass prairie into one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions. But to do so, we’ve laid out that beautiful soil naked to the elements during much of the year and have stripped it of the prairie plants that nurtured and protected it. Consequently we’ve also paid the price in terms of wind and water erosion, flashier and more frequent flooding downstream, silted in waterways, and a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. The dead zone is dead of concentrated prairie wealth, by the way. Flushing the ag- and prairie-derived nutrients out of the watershed so quickly causes an over-growth of marine micro-organisms that consumes the oxygen needed for larger plants and animals. There’s a parable in that. I crest a small rise and in the single frame of my windshield I see expanses of stubble, a “borrow-pit” where dirt was dug up to create enough relief to construct an overpass, a drainage ditch stretching to the horizon, and a battery of windmills emerging from the fog. My God, can we make this landscape work any harder for us?
Indiana calls itself the “Cross-roads of America.” I find that a little sad. It sounds like her boosters realized in resignation that Indiana is not a land for post card superlatives. Indiana has only a small toe-hold on the Great Lakes and it has no mountains and only modest lakes or forests. It’s a crossroads, a place we rush through on our way to somewhere else on interstates running in business-like straight lines between port cities in a sea of agriculture. And the landscape looks tired. Wrung out. My road-warrior view is biased of course, but the corridor of reality surrounding the interstate looks worn and thread-bare from the blown-over road signs, to the grungy truck stops, to the crumbling pavement itself – and not the least of it, the bare fallow croplands. I was not long into the Ohio river watershed when I saw a black bill-board with a simple message in stark white block-lettering: Hell is Real. Sheesh.
But Indiana is a part of us. Quite literally. We should respect that. Given the near ubiquity of corn and soy in the North American diet, it’s a near certainty that anyone who reads this is likely carrying around in their bodies a disproportionate number of molecules that entered the human food chain thanks to the actions of tallgrass prairie plants building that beautiful beautiful soil. If it were a humid summer night and I was driving with the windows open, I would smell it. That nutty, musty, slightly sweet smell – it smells of life. I know people here. Good people, resilient people, creative people. As a refugee from another Midwestern state suffering from the effects of another miserly and severe state government, I have sat with my Indiana friends and commiserated (great word, that) over the sucker punches we’ve absorbed. It can feel as bleak as the winters. But when we’re done we’ll stand up and get back to work. We’re here. We’re likely to stay here. We’re stubborn that way. We’re like those prairie soils during winter. Vibrancy isn’t always showy and may lie dormant for a season. We tell ourselves that spring is right around the corner – and we’re usually right.
Every road trip, whatever the distance, is a half an hour too long and I am grateful when I am moored for the night. A perk of travel for this meeting is this is a business-class hotel. I more commonly stay in economy class or even steerage. I know how it’ll play out. I’ll read for a bit or monkey around on the internet simultaneously thinking about the meeting tomorrow where I’ll put my game face on and be the person my employers pay me to be. I used to burn through my downtime in hotels watching TV but I find that I no longer have room for it in my head. When it’s late enough, I will stand in the window with a glass of blended whisky and think of my family as I study the lights and contours of the city at night. Then I’ll climb into my berth and battle the insomnia that lately has been my constant traveling companion.
And with the lights off and the shade drawn, I'll try for sleep using my mother's advice – to lie still and think of pleasant thoughts. So I’ll access a worn-in little fantasy: one where I am anchored with the hatches open in a lovely little natural harbor protected from the westerlies by the Sibley Peninsula’s sleeping giant, one where the moonlight dapples Superior’s surface and casts shadows on the beach, one where I can hear the night waves lapping against the hull and the gentle summer breeze playing in the rigging and the occasional crane fly buzzing by,… one where the air smells of balsam fir, ……fresh water……. and damp soil…
Photo credits
Barn: by Sharon Drummond, Source, License
Map: Illinois State Museum, Source
Big bluestem: by:Friends of the Prairie Learning Center and Neal Smith NWR, Source , License
Addendum: Thank you to the Rescue Rangers!