Prairie's Edge

“Prairie: an extensive, level or slightly undulating, mostly treeless tract of land characterized by a highly fertile soil and originally covered with coarse grasses.” Dictionary.com

 Platte River Prairie in Nebraska

In the American imagination, the prairie has symbolized freedom and self-reliance.  To Chiricahua Apache war chief Geronimo, it was a place without enclosures where the wind blew free.  To Great Plains homesteaders, it was a force of nature that could bring afflictions such as dust storms and tornadoes.  Prairies once covered 15 percent of Indiana, primarily in the northwest and west-central counties.  Drainage, farming, and urbanization have replaced most grasslands, but some remnants remain, such as Hoosier Prairie in Schererville, now a state nature conservancy. IUN dean Herman Feldman worked on safeguarding Hoosier Prairie for over ten years, along with university botanist F.C. Richardson. Finally, in the early 1970s, with IU President Herman Wells, State Senator Adam Benjamin, and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources involved, funding was secured for the purchase of 300 acres.

 Hoosier Prairie

Prairie’s Edge is the name of a trading company and Native American art gallery (in Rapid City, S.D.), a dairy farm (in Fair Oaks, Indiana), a casino resort (in Granite Falls, MN), and an outdoor supply store in Rensselaer, Indiana, where From the Edge of the Prairie literary magazine originated as an annual publication of the Prairie Writers Guild.  Managing editor Connie Kingman dedicated the 2005 edition to her mother and fellow writer Anna Marlan.  Knigman wrote: “Here by the edge of the prairie, the passage of time is visibly marked by the growth of field after field of maturing corn, [and Anna] left us unexpectedly when the corn was but knee-high.”  Fittingly, the opening story is Chuck Schuttrow’s “Jasper County, the Buckle of Indiana’s Corn Belt.”

From the Edge of the Prairie contributor Philip F. Deaver wrote “Ray and Winter,” about being at recently-closed St. Joseph’s College in 1967 and playing pool in Rensselaer (“you pretty little prairie town”).  He and Ray were walking to the attic they shared (my junior year at Bucknell, I split an off-campus attic with Roger McConnell).  Deaver recalled:

I lived a two-hour hitchhike

into Illinois, Ray was from South Bend.

Rensselaer represented both our homes,

our parents’ voices in us still, but now muffled

by the clink of change.  That was us changing.

A new hard wind across the fields in winter,

new smell of different candles in the chapel,

stone cold dark and silence in the cemetery,

the little river under avenue bridges built for more,

the park with its soldier statue, whisper of war.

Introducing an excerpt from Bree Ma’Ayteh’s blog, editor Kingman defined the genre as an Internet web log that anyone can read and respond to.  Bree listed 100 items constituting, in her words, “more than you ever cared to know about me.”  These included her love of spinach dip and, when 13, TV soap operas and the boy band New Kids on the Block. 

43. Once, to impress a boy, I jumped from the middle of a going-up escalator.

44. I did not impress this boy. 

45. But I did make him laugh.

46. And then I went out with his friend.

47. Who was 18.

48. I was 15

49. I have always dated older boys.

. . . .

97. I belt out Lionel Ritchie and Mariah Carey love songs in the car.

98. I am the 20-something Angela Chase (in “My So-Called Life”).

99. I cry at the drop of a hat.

100. And I love the sound of my full name.

Bree Ma’Ayteh contributed to “Cringe: Teenage Diaries, Journals, Notes, Letters, Poems, and Abandoned Rock Operas” (2008) edited by Sarah Brown.  In the author index she claimed to be happily married and no longer pining for her childhood crush.  Let’s hope the same still holds true.

Mel Guth Senior League’s Renaissance man Gene Clifford, 81 - a sportsman, aviator, writer, craftsman (of bird feeders), retired bricklayer, raconteur, and lover – rolled a 600 series.   He suggested that I work on my follow-through and keeping my shoulders squared as I delivered the ball. Over the summer Gene drove to Fairbanks, Alaska with teammate Dorothy Peterson and took a train to the Arctic Circle, where the temperature climbed close to 70, and care had to be taken to avoid sunburn. There were no July Fourth fireworks because it doesn’t get dark enough.  Gene met a guide from Hobart and another who had relatives in Clifford’s hometown of Valparaiso.  I told him about a driver pointing out a moose during a ride from Anchorage to Whittier for a glacier cruise aboard the catamaran Klondike Express. Gene had a similar experience in which, with a guide’s help, he spotted moose, caribou, and a black bear with two cubs.  Also, a wolf ran across the road in front of the vehicle.

In 2012, on the Alaska Department of Fish and Game website, Ken Marsh, who claims to have lived in Alaska since shortly after the last Ice Age, wrote an article entitled “Little Grouse on the Prairie: Alaska’s Bird Hunters Enjoy an Ice Age Leftover” in which he asserted: “Not so long ago, just beyond the fringes of written history, interior Alaska was a vast prairie linked to the steppes, or grasslands, of Eurasia. That connection was lost about 11,000 years ago when the ice of the last glacial age, the Pleistocene, dissolved in a global warming trend and raised sea levels 300 feet or more.”  Two birds that have survived their prehistoric grassland ancestors are the sharp-tailed grouse and willow ptarmigan.

 above, sharp-tailed grouse; below, Kim, Beamer, and Nicodemus Pickert

How to summarize what the GOP presently stands for?  Beamer Pickert suggested Greed Over People, Guns Outweigh People, Grotesquely Opulent Plutocrats, and Grabbing Other’s Privates. Josh Talley suggested “Grand Old Pussygrabbers.” Ray Smock wrote about the Alabama Senate candidate who in his 30s trolled a mall looking for teenage girls to prey on:

The Judge Roy Moore scandal, where pedophilia has been added to his other considerable disqualifications for the U.S. Senate, needs to be seen in the larger context of current Alabama politics and the national debate which has reached the U.S. Congress. 

Kay Ivey, a former state treasurer and lieutenant governor, became governor of Alabama in April this year when Governor Robert Bentley stepped down over charges of campaign finance violations. He was also about to be impeached for a sex scandal involving intimidation of women in the governor's office.  News reports suggest that Governor Ivey is looking to Donald Trump for signals about what to do about Roy Moore. Why would she turn to a self-confessed sexual predator for advice?
          The U.S. House and Senate, feeling the pressure, have instituted new anti-sexual harassment training for all employees (and, I hope, all Members) to deal with the sexual intimidation that occurs in both houses of Congress.

Stop Roy Moore, and stop all sexual intimidation and acts of sexual aggression whether, in Alabama or anywhere else.