Featured Writer: Susan L. Kates

Prairie Ocean

In summer the forests of the headlands grow down to the emerald, wind-rippled prairie sea. . .

John Joseph Mathews, Talking to the Moon

James Fenimore Cooper, The Prairie

Waves of plain seem to roll up, then break like a surf.

Wright Morris, Ceremony in Lone Tree

I sometimes imagine the prairie as a body of water.One gets the impression of the sea in Oklahoma, as the wind moves across the fields, leaving patterns of waves and deep indentations that move like rough surf.The high ceiling of clouds makes me think of time spent at the beach whenever I drive in any direction, confronted by a surround of grass and sky.The prairie wind roars like the force of the ocean is just off in the distance, slapping a roll of water hard against a long stretch of sand.

Numerous individuals, from early explorers to contemporary fiction writers compare the waving grasslands of the Great Plains to the ocean.In 1541, as Coronado advanced toward the plains he wrote, “I traveled five more days as the guides wished to lead me, until I reached some plains, with no more landmarks than as if we had been swallowed up in the sea.”Josiah Gregg, in 1844, in a book called Commerce of the Prairies, offered a similar view three centuries later.“This tract of country,” he wrote, “may be styled the grand ‘prairie ocean’; for not a single landmark is to be seen for more than forty miles—scarcely a visible eminence by which to direct one’s course.All is level as the sea. . .”

Despite the nautical sentiments in these and other portraits of the Great Plains, you would never persuade those who have made their homes near the ocean to consider the prairie a viable substitute.Friends who have lived long periods beside the Atlantic or the Pacific fail to see the comparison and insist adamantly that they could never live in my region of the country.“I’d be landlocked,” they say with a kind of coastal superiority, “absolutely closed in.”These expressions of geographical claustrophobia strike me as odd: A life-long exiter of crowded elevators and overpopulated gatherings, I gain comfort from a wide expanse of land where nothing clouds my vision.No mountain towers over me; no valley shirks below me in this egalitarian topography.

The apparent flat simplicity of plains country, however, is deceiving.At first glance, the prairie is just the prairie.But if one takes the time to notice, moving grasses shape-shift into other forms.Look closer: fantastic patterns—an exquisite swirling and bending of the grasses becomes, as so many writers have noted, a kind of prairie sea.Study the fields on a day when the wind moves with typical force to tattoo parts of the land.Whole circles form, in the middle of nowhere, fanning out the grasses as if a flying saucer had just touched down.

But wind provides much more than visual drama:it offers sounds in different registers.Sometimes the wind squeals in high-pitched mourning.I only heard wind like that in my native Ohio on bad weather days, in a blizzard, for example, or when a spring storm raged outside.In Oklahoma, the wind blows in good weather and bad:Look outside your window on an afternoon when the squealing makes you think the house could come down and it might be a pleasant day indeed, the sun high in the sky and the temperature a comfortable 72 degrees.All the same, huge gusts may be shaking everything in sight:that is Oklahoma for you.

There are stories about the homesteading men and women on the plains and the peace they could not make with the wind.Sometimes, when it gusts forlornly, whistling all around my house like an angry, uninvited guest, I think about settlers across the Dakotas, as well as Kansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska in the nineteenth century, who, alone while the plains wind screamed around their sod houses in winter, are said to have gone crazy.Walter Prescott Webb, historian of the American West, argues that women were the only victims of this phenomenon because men were more suited to rugged prairie life.However, recent studies on mental illness and the frontier experience suggest that men and women alike suffered nervous breakdowns as a result of the harsh life they encountered in plains country.But Webb focuses solely on women and their reaction to a wind and sod house existence:

Imagine a sensitive woman set down on an arid plain to live in a dugout or a pole pen with a dirt floor, without furniture, music or pictures, with the bare necessities of life!No trees or shrubbery or flowers, little water, plenty of sand and high wind.The wind alone drove some to the verge of insanity and caused others to migrate in time to avert the tragedy.

But by the time the Dust Storms of the 1930s had caused a mass exodus out of this region of the country, no one would think of ranking the discomfort of those who suffered on the Great Plains in terms of gender. I think of the Dust Bowl refugees that Woody Guthrie sings about, people who were forced to leave the plains—all for virtually the same reason.As one Kansas preacher put it, “The land just blew away; we had to go somewhere.”During the massive dust storms, residents put up wet sheets across their windows to keep the red dirt out.With the sandy grit hitting the glass, the wind must have been a sad reminder of what the prairie failed to deliver after grasshoppers destroyed crops and fires burnt up what was left before the wind blew the remnants away.

While soil conservation has made ecological disasters like the dust storms of the 30s a thing of the past, every year the wind results in a fierce spread of prairie fires. One especially dry spring, it seemed to me that the entire state of Oklahoma was on fire.In the middle of the day you could look in any direction and see black clouds of smoke rising in the sky like an isolated storm system against the overwhelming blue. Along the road, singed black arcs were signs of small fires that had burned out. There were daily grass fire warnings and the television flashed maps of counties where fires were out of control and roads were closed.I thought it was all very catastrophic until one of my students explained that grass fires maintain the ecosystem of the plains, and without them, a delicate balance could be broken.These fires actually renew the prairie; frequent fires favor grasses because their roots, where nutrients are stored and the sections of the plant where new shoots emerge, are below ground and not affected by fire.Fire releases the nutrients stored in the dead growth of previous years and also kills most insects that have over wintered in the old growth.New growth takes place shortly after the above ground parts have been burned.Without the burning, woody shrubs and some trees would take over large areas of the prairie.

Without the wind, though, the fires could never spread as quickly as they do:Prairie fires can move as fast as 600 feet per minute and burn as hot as 700 degrees Fahrenheit.It is a daunting sight if you are headed somewhere on a two-lane highway and see the smoke and flames in the distance.I have been met by several grass fire roadblocks, turned back by sheriffs when there was no good alternative route to get to where I was going.

I haven’t always liked the wind for inconveniences such as this one.It can be an irritating feature of life on the plains.Wind is troublesome when it makes it is difficult to talk outside.“Call me later,” friends have said when I tried to converse outdoors by cell phone, “All I hear is the wind.”Too often I get a blustery coat of gritty red film on my windows and am forced to a task I detest, but when it comes down to it, you must respect the wind:the plains would not be the plains without it.

It is only when I travel elsewhere and immediately sense its eerie absence that I remember that the wind doesn’t blow everywhere as it does on the plains.Standing on a street corner in Lexington, Kentucky or Columbus, Ohio, I suddenly notice how very still it is. In Oklahoma, the strong push of air manifests itself in this country daily, continuously present in one intensity or another.I love the way it rolls sad tumbleweed across empty highways or lifts loose strands of hair around girl’s faces and into their lips.One must take care to secure certain possessions when exiting cars and houses.How many envelopes has the wind ripped from my grasp as I stood surprised at the mailbox?How many school papers, candy wrappers, and receipts have crossed my path, tugged from other people’s hands?I learn repeatedly that the wind will mock my best efforts to hold onto certain objects, and that sometimes what it takes, it keeps.

Before I reckoned with the wind in Oklahoma, it instructed me in plains gardening.Unfortunately, it took me some time to learn what it had to teach.My attempts to grow Bleeding Hearts and stately Foxglove were soon thwarted by gusts that toppled my plants like fallen soldiers.After a few too many casualties of this sort, I came to see that I could not make Ohio’s garden in Oklahoma. I hauled fewer truckloads of compost to mix with the crusty orange clay, working less fervently to improve the soil that challenges every gardener in this region.Too often, much of the compost blew off the top anyway before I could work it into the squash-colored earth.I let my garden go its own way, a little wilder and more rugged than my eastern backyard.It was easy to give up on a certain ideal after a realization I had when driving along a stretch of country where no one would ever think of planting an English garden.I saw something that helped me to appreciate this stark and spare aesthetic-- the role played by rock, wind, and sky.I noticed a rather solitary ranch house (one with a characteristically Oklahoma windmill on the acreage). There were two or three pieces of weathered metal yard furniture and rocks scattered around; clearly the blue-sky overhead was the most significant aspect of this prairie garden.Everything about the view said:Lose excessive ornament; lose clutter, lose order; turn it loose in the wind.And so I did.

Instead of Delphinium and Aster, I added native plants from the region like Indian Blanket and Yarrow--then dared the wind to press them to the ground.I placed statuesque red rocks where delicate flowers had dropped.These craggy ornaments stood against the gusts in rusted glory.Numerous rocks, the color of dried blood, are to be found in various parts of the state.You can pick them up along side of the road and no park ranger will be on hand to pounce on potential scavengers.On a smaller scale, there is the rose rock—a geological curiosity that forms in only two counties in all of Oklahoma.Although a lighter, coral-colored version of the rose rock can be found in Texas, California and Egypt, there is no explanation for why the crimson rocks are common in this region.One legend explains Oklahoma’s rose rock phenomenon in terms of Native American tragedy.It claims that on the Indians’ Trail of Tears trek to Oklahoma, God made the blood of the braves and the tears of the maidens turn to stone upon falling to the ground.The legend is printed on the packaging of rose rock earrings, necklaces and refrigerator magnets, but American Indians say the legend is not theirs—just another exploitation of Indians in order to sell regional wares. Wherever rose rocks come from, they have become a signature of Oklahoma gardens and porches everywhere.They offer a kind of delicate, but sturdy look—and in August when the heat renders my rose bushes mute, rose rocks offer up their sandstone petals—in glistening crimson—to remind me that stone blossoms can be dug from the ground, a floral treasure.

These days I have a new gardening aesthetic based on sky and wind.I have harnessed the wind’s artistic power, adding clusters of tall grass that arch and sway like hula dancers.The wind lends a visual dimension to the yard as well as an aural one.Three sets of chimes on my back porch chingle and ling throughout the day, sometimes violently.The chimes are soothing when temperatures move past one hundred degrees, like ice cubes in a glass.These wind-induced tones are now part of my garden, and the vigorous motion of these instruments tells of approaching storms, adding a particular drama to thunder when it comes.In periods of no precipitation whatsoever, the chimes sound at night while June bugs rain in a copper clutter on the porch, in search of what little light shines through the windows.My chimes are always a signal of what the wind will bring.

I think I have just about run out of things to say on the subject of wind except to add that Waylon Jennings has a few ideas of his own about it.He sings,

The Oklahoma wind slides across the burning sand

Over double crosses Mother Nature made

And nothing’s ever come as far as I’m concerned

From those dead tomorrows planted yesterday.Some, like Jennings, see this region as the dried up dusty former ocean floor, but I tend to think those early explorers got plains country right when they compared all this waving grass to water—to the ocean that it was tens of millions of years ago. This prairie stretches north and south and east and west of me like a sea.Here in the middle of the U.S. I feel, at once, anchored and adrift, lost and found, at the center of everything and nothing.The wind presents itself to me as a messenger, carrying something intangible from another region.On a summer night, while pumping gas at 11pm when the gusts are still warm, I stare out at the darkness on the other side of the bright lights streaming down in the Texaco parking lot. The hot wind blows in from the West and I wonder if it has rustled the hair of a baby in New Mexico or pushed more cellophane wrappers and lipstick-stained coffee cups my direction.This much I always know for sure:Even in the dark we are in the open.On the Great Plains there are few towns and hardly any cities that dot the vast grassland to act as a brake on whatever chooses to blow through.We know that whether we watch for June bugs, storm clouds, or red dirt whirling—In Oklahoma, the wind is a sign that something is always on its way.

Susan L. Kates' essay is about plains country in Oklahoma. Her work has appeared in The Laurel Review, The Journal, and Borderlands:Texas Poetry Review.

Email: Susan L. Kates

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