Theme: SIPHON

In the West, water runs uphill toward money.

-Richard Manning, Rewilding the West

Innocent, courageous, curious, the characters of Canadian literature have a longstanding reputation as victims: servants of colonialism, and explorers of an unruly nature. In her anthology, Survival, Margaret Atwood presents this underlying theme and poses Nature as a great Monster. She demonstrates time and again the monster’s fury, her weapons being rock, ice, and trees. But where in the story, does this leave the role of grass? It’s as if explorers reached the edge of the prairie and found the ample belly of the beast, naked and defenseless. Here, they thought, we can create order.

So they started carving straight lines running to the east and west, establishing order, and feeding the coasts. In some ways, they were playing the landscape’s own game, a game of motion, draining steadily to the east.

The uplift of the mountains created a gentle tilt of the old sea bed, a consistent slope of ten feet to the mile from the mountains all the way to the Mississippi. This tilt meant the plains would drain, but slowly.

Richard Manning suggests that our infrastructure was a continuation of motion, only now it was substantially sped up. Finally, the landscape was the victim. In Survival, Atwood presents some literary works that mark a critical shift in the perception of Nature from that of a monster, to one of a victim. Earle Birney’s poem, Transcontinental, tells the story of the Railroad through new eyes.

…behold this great green girl grown sick

with man                        sick with the likes of us?

Toes mottled long ago by soak of seaports

ankles rashed with stubble

belly papulous with stumps?…

…For certainly she is ill                her skin

is creased with our coming and going

and we trail in her face the dark breath of her dooming

On the Prairie, we are left to deal with her two sides, juggling her quiet malleability with her unpredictable rage. The “creases of our coming and going” were like canals, moving not only resources, but power. And with it, there is a steady drainage of people. Farmers, no longer able to compete with conglomerates, move on. The landscape continues to be siphoned.

This is a story not only of resource loss, but also the loss of a quality vital to place making, the unknown. As we build more sameness, and deplete or contain all rarities, we’re establishing a new emptiness. It becomes increasingly more difficult to lose oneself in the wildness of a place, as there is little left to be found.

More is known; there is less to know; we lose both what we know and what we don’t. It is certain that species are vanishing without ever having been known to science. To think about this is to imagine the space inside our heads expanding but the places outside shrinking, as though we were literally devouring them.

-Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Theme: EMPTINESS

It was so empty that two strangers could feel they had a common bond simply because they were encircled by the same horizon.

- Jonathan Raban, Bad Land: An American Romance

Emptiness is deemed as a space to be filled, like a parking spot, or a glass. Void of content, the space is charged with potential to be claimed, owned, and filled or altered. At the scale of geography, the North American Prairie was settled with emptiness at its core. But this was merely a cultural perception.

In his book, Place and Placelessness, E. Relph describes Geography as an awareness of the world relative to one’s intentions. He suggests that geographical space “is not indifferent space that can be arranged or dismissed, but always has meaning in terms of some human task or lived-experience.” In the eyes of farmers, ranchers, and founders of all kinds, the prairie was unequivocally empty.

Armed with telescope, compass, and chain, the surveyors set out on a cardinal trajectory to divide and package empty space. Each parcel held the promise of an empty glass in a well stocked bar, a vessel for whatever libation fueled your vision. Richard Manning proposes that the survey was one of the greatest acts of democracy his nation ever saw, and that it was a lie. “The land was assumed to be democratic.” They cast a perfect grid of square sections, 640 acres each, reckoned both equal and empty. It was an unprecedented structuring of Tabula Rasa. In its Latin origin, Tabula Rasa means ‘scraped tablet’. The space is not only empty, but erased.

Persistently malleable and unfixed, the prairie is unable to shake the habit of falling empty into the hungry eyes of yet another enterprise. Failed land passes from hand to hand, towns grow into cities without edges, drills dig deeper and broader. A blank slate or empty space is a magnet for the homo fabrican: Man the Maker. But as Joe Truett suggests in his book Grass: In Search of Human Habitat, there may also be a deeper genetic draw to empty spaces, a survival instinct. The short grass of the prairie provides good visibility, a habitat that “would have let us eat more and be eaten less.”

Consider now a shift in the perception of emptiness, from that of a void, to that of a thick substance, fluid, and unknown. In her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit reads into the title of a photograph taken from a common phrase.

The ‘leap into the void’ is sometimes read as a Buddhist phrase about enlightenment, about embracing the emptiness that is not lack as it seems to westerners, but letting go of the finite and material, embracing limitlessness, transcendence, freedom, enlightenment.

Emptiness in both terms is the promise of potential. The question is whether it is experienced as exclusive or inclusive.

Theme: DRIFT

The power of the land moves, and those who derive their power from the    land must move with it.

-Richard Manning, Rewilding the West

I began to feel that the vastness, the bulk, the overwhelming power of the prairie is the same in its immensity as the sea – only the sea is changeless, and the plains, as I knew, were passing.

-John Noble (quoted in Bad Land: An American Romance, Jonathan Raban)

Bo was always restless, always chasing another dream. When the bars went dry he went north. When the snow flew and the crop failed he sought out shelter in town. And when disease struck the town, he ran Whiskey by the carload. As a character he was both pig-headedly stubborn, and frustratingly impulsive, changing course at every junction. Wallace Stegner wrote him to be much like the land he came from, somehow hard and soft at the same time. And as I read his story, reflecting on the accounts of places and people I’ve found, he is the embodiment of an unavoidable penchant to drift.

The Prairie sustains itself on an underlying current. Motion is the only constant. In Grassland, Richard Manning tells a story of a place that goes back to a time of Glaciation.

Always there were winds, enormous winds sweeping off the unobstructed plain of ice. Wind and cold stripped vegetation, leaving soil exposed, creating dust. This dust piled in dunes that became the foundation of grassland soils today, a wind-bred soil ready to run again at the slightest excuse of wind.

Grass rooted itself deeply in the landscape, building soil from dust. But always there is the idea of some shifting body below the surface. Manning describes the grassland in flux, expanding and contracting, its edges shifting in response to rainfall and fire.

            The place shifts both in this slow, unperceivable way, as well as suddenly, without warning. This landscape is unpredictable, temperamental like the sea. In its early written and charted history, it was neither land nor sea, ambiguously blending with the whiteness of the page. But even today it’s greatly misunderstood. No matter how we try, it cannot be harnessed. Nothing can be sacred when everything is changing.

Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

- Willa Cather, My Antonia, pp 7