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Prairie Lite... Letters to the editor |
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Thursday, 01 May 2008 |
Letters to the editor are such fun. I savor witty opinions of substance, sagacity and slash, and so I told Mike Morrissey, when I called him last week. I also told him that he was this year’s recipient of the Jonathan Swift Award, which is awarded by moi to the wicked, satiric pen most certain to send Swift into a happy dance in the heavenly end zone. Bravo, Mike, and good onyer.
There were some excellent letters to the editor in the May issue of the National Geographic. As some of you may recall, the Nat’l Geo recently featured an article called “The Emptied Prairie.” The focus was on North Dakota’s uninhabited spaces and ghostly, abandoned houses. I was impressed with the photography, but depressed by what one letter writer called a “hard, harsh story.” It was grim enough to make you want to play pheasant and leap in front of a passing car.
Many magazine readers protested the story, and wrote to state their objections, Gov. John Hoeven among them. He courteously invited the writer back to take another look at the state’s charm, growth and “mood of optimism.” Right on, guv.
I love the letter Rachel Levy wrote. Rachel, 15, is a student at Valley City High School, the daughter of Leesa and Jeff Levy. As she wrote, she’s lived half her life here. She wrote, “Struggling small towns and abandoned houses can be found all over the United States. This state is far from barren, even in winter.”
She described the beauty of sun dogs, and concluded with this paean to North Dakota: “The prairie truly is where the earth meets the sky; perhaps there will be a time when its stunning beauty is told of and appreciated.”
Rachel, I feel the same way. I moved here in 1997, and have been falling in love with North Dakota ever since. The air is clean, the roads clear, and as one other letter writer said, “…there is a community in North Dakota unlike any other. Until you have lived here, I don’t think you can fully understand the bond that runs through each and every one of us.”
North Dakota isn’t a state for the faint of heart. It can be a harsh land. But there is nothing so achingly sweet and full of promise as that first meadowlark’s call in the spring. When the wheat is golden and moves like waves I have seen on the Pacific Ocean, I am not so homesick for the sea.
Sometimes the fault is ours. We moan about the cold, long winters, and people outside our borders are quick to pick up on this seeming discontent. Sometimes we give ourselves bad press. Articles such as “The Emptied Prairie” should remind us instead of what we have, and how important it is to treasure the beauty, majesty, and independence of our state and its resilient people.
I feel a bit sad as I write this. My husband will retire next year, and we are probably going to move to a small town in a state south of here. The operative word here is “small town.” North Dakota has ruined me forever from craving urban areas, thank goodness.
We’re having second thoughts about leaving North Dakota. Where will we ever find another home we can afford, or a place as safe, or people so true? And what can I say about the Missouri River? My years of working at Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site taught me much about the fur trade of the American West, and the role of the Missouri in transporting people, furs, and ideas. What a river, what history. Can I leave and not yearn for it?
And where will Loren and Marla Yellow Bird be when I want to stop by their house and say howdy? Loren gave me my Indian name. How can I forget that? I don’t want to leave the land of the Arikara, Mandan, Hidatsa. I’ve learned so much from my Native American colleagues.
I haven’t even left North Dakota yet, and I’m already missing it. What a wonderful place this is to raise families and stay close to the land. We may decide not to leave right away.
You’re right, Rachel, m’dear: this is the place where the earth meets the sky. If it makes us better friends and neighbors in the process, how blessed we are.
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