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Go DeeperThe Nature Conservancy in Kansas Flint Hills Initiative
Submit Your StoryLearn how to submit your story about a lasting impression of a natural place. |
Human Nature: Big-Sky Prairie
Learning to see the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
By Sally Shivnan
Out here, I feel crushed by the sky. I feel exposed — little mouse on the prairie. It’s too big, and I’m too small, and I don’t know how to relate.
I have Nature Conservancy biologist Brian Obermeyer to help me — born here 46 years ago, never left, soft spoken, trim bearded, in denim baseball hat and hiking boots, an un-cowboy-looking person in this cowboy neighborhood. He flies down the dirt roads in his pickup, a solid faraway gaze in his eyes. He scans the horizon, to distant creeks revealed by dark, snaking lines of cottonwoods and oaks, and to grassy tracks that lead away across the hills to nowhere.
Then he does his magic trick — his far-gazing eyes pull up short and so does the truck, and the tires throw up a cloud of dust. “Did you see that?” he says, and we walk back to check it out — a collared lizard basking on a rock no bigger than an egg. That’s the trick, evidently, to see far away and up close at the same time, and not just with your eyes but with your mind.
I try it. I turn in a slow circle and see green prairie hills rolling out like ocean swells in every direction, under a vast blue sky. I catch wildflower scents chasing past on the wind. I feel the brush of the grasses against the knees of my jeans.
At my feet, a little world hums: a net of grass, some fanning out low with long arching blades and some high and stiff and waving feathery seed heads, and a bright upturned bouquet of snow-on-the-mountain pushing through, and grasshoppers popping like popcorn, and deep in there, the ground-hugging prairie rose’s hips ripening to gold.
We’re in the Flint Hills, a 60-mile-wide spine down eastern Kansas into Oklahoma, and the last great swath of tallgrass prairie left. I’m here because I’ve always wanted to see this thing, tallgrass prairie, though I’m not sure what I expected. At first I don’t get it; I feel I’m looking at a whole lot of nothing, and I’m used to looking at something. But I realize in a way that’s the point—it’s a great stretching austere emptiness. Brian says, “This is the only place I feel uncrowded, able to breathe.” He levels a firm appraising stare out at the landscape. He tries to teach me how to see it. He stops the truck and says, “This is the south end of a pasture.” I note the line of barbed wire running out of sight. “You see the difference on this side of the fence?” I don’t but keep looking. On this side, a number of plants, some wiry, some bunchy; on the other side, fewer of these, and thicker grass. It seems the cattle graze into the wind all day and pile up at the south end of places, resulting in this lopsided look. Who knew cows did this?
Brian knows all kinds of things. “What are the names of these plants, that grow where the cows pile up?” I ask.
“Ironweed, pigweed, broomweed, sumpweed.”
“So they’re weeds?”
“Ranchers call them forbs.”
Later, he stops the truck for a pair of mating grasshoppers, and I wander off to study grasses. I scare up a jackrabbit with gigantic ears that bounds up the dirt road ahead, then stops and looks back at me. Plump meadowlarks wing up, then coast low. Creaky grasshopper noises fill the air.
I squat down by some switchgrass. It is fine-stemmed, with delicate seeds held out in a wide spray. Who knew a single branch of grass could be such a lovely thing? I hunch down low and look up through it — an airy constellation of tiny purplish points — to sky that is empty blue.
I never told Brian how when I first got here, I felt his sky press down on me. Now I’m glad I didn’t, because now I know that prairie and sky are joined, if you only get down low enough to look.
Photos (top to bottom, left to right): Photo Courtesy Sally Shivnan; © Chris Helzer (Flint Hills); © Chris Helzer (Rose hips)
