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