Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [12]
Prairie is this: Twelve-foot-high big bluestem. Blazing stars. Sky blue aster. Purple coneflower, also called echinacea. Poppy mallow and downy gentian. It’s 230 species crowded onto a tiny, remnant “postage stamp” prairie. A prairie is marshes, filled with crayfish and ornate box turtles. It’s a silent sky, exploding with a flight of grouse. It’s dust tossed in billows by wallowing bison. It’s prairie fire sending smoke to redden, then blacken, the summer sun; it’s snow in drifts that can bind and kill entire herds of elk. Though the early explorers described what they saw as an ocean, their word “prairie” came from the French or Belgian name for a park or a grassy orchard. That’s a prairie—a place that invokes both ocean and garden, both the wildest place and the tamest. And that’s what Twain remembered—a lonely place, but also one replete and bounteous, a place whose sounds and smells and tastes remained with him all through his life.
Today prairie is also, very often—too often—much like what’s in front of me at the moment: a display, nearly a zoo. This tiny patch of grassland, acquired and maintained for the express purpose of preserving the prairie chickens, needs constant human care and attention. Without periodic burns and occasional grazing by hired local cattle to replicate prairie fires and bison, short invasive grasses could, and would, overwhelm Prairie Ridge. Keeping this place “natural” is damned hard work.
Still, for an observer like me, there is one great difference between the booming ground and a true zoo, and that is the sky. Even through the thin viewing slot, the sky is a palpable presence, stretching vast and blue over this postage stamp of teeming, wakeful grassland. When grass ruled, reaching this open land was a true shock, a moment of almost terrifying emergence after hundreds of miles of dark eastern forests. Twain himself remembered the suddenness of the change: “Beyond the road,” he wrote, “where the snakes sunned themselves was a dense young thicket, and through it a dim-lighted path . . . ; then out of the dimness one emerged abruptly upon a level great prairie.”
He recalled the prairie’s loneliness; he recalled its peace. And doubtless it was peaceful, especially to a boy of seven or eight, who could view it at his leisure before retreating to a forest-hemmed farmhouse. But, ironically, the quiet of the prairie was an early sign of sickness, the cough before the fever.
A healthy prairie is a living, breathing, and extraordinarily dangerous place—a place of malarial wetlands and brutal storms. Most of all it’s a place of fire. Tallgrass like big bluestem needs fire; fire is how a prairie breathes. Without periodic burns, the eight-foot-tall stems begin to choke on themselves, creating a wall of grass that a horse can vanish behind, far too thick for prairie chickens to nest on. Burning fertilizes the earth and allows light and water to reach the soil, all without damaging the roots that remain safe in the dark, cool earth.
Looking at the old tallgrass land today, it can be difficult to imagine the force and peril of a prairie fire. Prairie fire could move as fast as the wind, make its own weather, kill anything on the surface that couldn’t burrow or fly. In 1836 an eight-mile-wide blaze tore through more than sixty miles of grass in six hours before the Rock River halted it. This kind of terrifying burn was once an annual event.
No longer, of course. Beyond the grassy lek, the ground is bare; corn is harvested before the stalks are as explosively dry as grass. But Native Americans understood the relationship between fire and prairie; the Illinois nation used the same word, sce-tay, to refer to both. In fact, Native Americans were probably the single biggest source of prairie fires (the second was lightning). Fire softened and prepared bottomland for planting, promoted green growth to attract bison, or simply burned away dry growth, making the land around a village or a camp safe. Precontact Native Americans of the plains were gardeners of grass.
Burning helped to sculpt the