I was asked to speak to a local church on Easter Sunday concerning the joys of living on the Great Plains. There are a couple problems with this request: first, I have never been a big celebrator of Easter and second, putting one's finger on the joys of living on the Great Plains is a difficult job. I can deal with the first problem by looking back about fifty years to the time when I did celebrate Easter, forgetting some of what I have learned about other religions and ideas over those years, and recalling that one interpretation of Easter is a day of renewal, optimism, and belief in a fresh start. Who among us does not want to believe we have a chance at getting life right?

Okay, so Easter gives us an opportunity to re-think it all and maybe that is what we should do with our search for the joy of living on the Great Plains. It would be easy to launch into a litany of wonder about the unique and burgeoning life on the Great Plains in this month of April. There are certainly thousands of examples of joyous and astounding marvels, from migrating birds to the tremendously diversity of fauna responding to the precious moisture that always blesses us with not quite enough. I could apply T.S Eliot's generalizations about April with descriptions lilacs breeding out of a dead land and stirring dull roots with rain. In fact, Eliot's description seems particularly apt to our situation here on the Great Plains when you consider that he forever stigmatized this Easter season of April with the moniker of The Cruelest Month and that the name of the poems from which I am quoting is The Wasteland.

Perhaps before we re-think our quest for joy on the Great Plains we should first consider the nature of our attraction for this place where we live. While there are a great number of people who were born out here in this mixed grass prairie who left it with little more than a "good riddance" mumbled over their shoulder, there are many others who profess their love for this place with the intensity of the most furious biblical zealots. There are also hordes of people from every continent that are inexplicably attracted to the Great Plains of North American. It is hard to qualify what any of them see in this place. After all, winters are harsh, summers are hot, wages are low, luxuries are rare, racism thrives, some brands of ignorance is epidemic. Books are hard to come by and seldom read. The economy hangs on the twin threads of weather and the economic whims of a distant world. We are short of capital, education, and opportunity. We are long on scenic views, wind, and for some ineffable reason, hope.

I believe that it is some of our chronic shortfalls that contribute to that irrepressible sense of hope. "Next Year Country" they call it. Next year it will rain, next year new industry with move in, next year we will elect more enlightened legislators, next year agricultural prices will raise, next year the kids will move back home from Minneapolis. But, in reality, the record doesn't indicate that much of that will actually take place. In fact, there is not much in the climatic or economic models of the future that could lead us to believe that the Great Plains will find remedies for its perennial problems before catastrophes of much larger scale overtake us. Still, there is hope. Still there is joy.

There is a question that I like to ask people when they talk to me about their love of the Great Plains. "How much time do you spend out IN it?" I have a theory that everyone who professes deep envy for Great Plains people who work outside, have never, themselves worked outside. I am forever amazed at how little time my neighbors and friends actually spend out of doors. I am even more amazed how often I run into non Great Plainsmen, with little or even no experience "out IN it" who insist that there love of the sweep of vista, the wind in their faces, the movements and migrations that are so much a part of the Great Plains are near and dear to their hearts. I meet people who insist this and who have never been west of the Missouri of east of the Rockies. I meet people who feel these things intensely and have never set foot on this continent.

I believe that much of the attraction for the Great Plains is ineffable and cannot be condensed into a list of sights and events, or measured on the popular scale of materialism. On that scale Col. Long was right to label this land the Great American Desert. On almost any contemporary scale the Great Plains are suboptimal. From rain to limousines we barely register. Yet the empirical evidence I collect from admirers, and indeed many who may read this essay, says something different. I can only conclude that there is another scale of measurement on which the Great Plains ranks high indeed. I suspect that scale is internal and scientifically unprovable, like our ability to see in a person's eyes if they are lying, to detect the rays of love or strength that emanates from some people. I suspect that there are some people who understand - sometimes without the need to actually see the Great Plains - that this land is home and that, for all it's inhospitableness, it is where they belong.

It is likely that the breed of humans who can understand such things are the same ones that can find joy on these cruel plains of North America and of the mind. But being one of those people who can look at a windy sage flat, a prairie dog town, a dry riverbed, or a dying town and know that there is something good and necessary in those things is not a guarantee of a life of real joy. What the Great Plains is truly good at is stripping away the finery of place to its essentials and exposing the truth beneath. Perhaps only on the Great Plains of North America can we come to understand that nothing is constant but change. Cities and oceans and the puny accomplishments of humanity obscure the undeniable fact that there is no sweet spot of history that freezes itself for all time. The cycles of decay and re-birth are more constant than the tides, and the Great Plains reveal that fact for all who are brave enough to submit to it. Willa Cather, one of the Great Plain's most prophetic bards, put it like this: "We come and go, but the land is always here, and the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while."



by Gervase Hittle

On March 15th, after a nearly two week absence from the ranch, I returned to the Cheyenne River, where the Badlands meets the Black Hills. I had been in Oklahoma, mostly with family and in somewhat atypical, dry, warm times. By the time the Ides of March had arrived, South Dakota had been blanketed by about a foot of snow, but on that day the roads were dry and clear. For obvious reasons no rural person that I talked with was complaining about the snow. Well, they (that ambiguous and amorphous they) call this “next year’s country,” meaning next year will be better. Next year the crops won’t be hailed out; next year it will rain at all the right times and water will once more fill the stock dams; next year we’ll make some money; grain and cattle prices will soar; nest year all manner of thing will improve. So, if the present snow is any indication, this is the beginning of next year, the year for which the eternal optimist has long been waiting.

I, too, am anxious to see the prairies once again turn to green, accented with the flowers of cactus, yucca, bush morning glory, crested prickly poppy, phlox, sunflower and violet. I also want to see the grasses flourishing, the trees and shrubs budding and leafing out. I want to see the buffalo grass and sideoats grama, the blue grama and western wheat grass, emerging, flowering and maturing. I love seeing what nature does on its own--even when it is not nice or good from a human, nature-using perspective. A drought in itself is interesting to watch, even if the results to the human being are detrimental and difficult. That is what nature can, and sometimes does, throw at us.

What we do to ourselves and to each other frequently has a longer lasting and more devastating effect. We quite readily believe that overt conflict settles issues between contentious parties, even though we remain hard-pressed to see many wars that did so, Perhaps those conflicts that opposed wars of aggression and oppression, for example the Allies resisting the Axis in W.W.II, the American Revolution, the first Gulf war) have done any good at all. In my cynical moments I believe that killing is what human beings have always done, continue to do and will always do, best. We, human beings, spend so much time, energy, money, and more importantly, self in the pursuit of destroying others that we seldom even recognize the damage we do to ourselves; we don’t recognize that our logic, however faulty, our rationalizations, and justifications for that destruction are merely excuses, however feeble, that allow us to continue on our chosen path of destruction. By the way, “human being” here is not just North American; it is a world wide entity.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live in a peaceful world, one in which disputes were resolved in a mutually respected and selected court of international law, a world in which insult is not arbitrarily followed by injury, and in turn followed by vengeance and revenge, a world in which insult and injury can be rectified and resolved by a lawful process that generates forgiveness and humility and achieves a reciprocity of respect based on a conscious acceptance of crime and punishment by both parties and leads toward an enlightened commitment to an ethos that is viable for humanity, that furthers a creative act rather than generates a destructive one.

We build a fence. Neighbors on both sides of that fence use it equally and respect it. We may have disagreements, but the fence remains essentially neutral; it is a creative act, perhaps, that allows us to strive toward a new dimension of humanity. We are optimistic; maybe we just want to be next year’s people.