A Picnic in the Rain After a Prairie Fire
Hello Loves,
After a prairie fire the ground is not just black. It is yellow and black and silver and dark brown. And then it is also green. The green is what counts.
Everywhere we’ve gone to hike this month, we’ve encountered burns. We’ve happened upon prairies where burns were days old. We’ve chased smoke plumes in our car and turned a corner on a rural road and found a blaze still going, a fireman in yellow gear from head to toe, drip torch in hand, tending the firebreak of the tarmac, the prairie blackening to the color of the road. We’ve seen burns in the distance. In the magnificent Nachusa Grasslands, an Illinois State Park and preserve partnered with the Nature Conservancy, we saw fires in the distance silhouetting the forms of the bison in the first herd to walk the grasslands of Illinois since 1830.
A prescribed burn in the prairie was a new concept to me when I moved to the Midwest. I’d heard about them first from my college boyfriend, the volunteer fireman, who would train at prescribed burns in Massachusetts, usually fires set to lessen the underbrush in forests. In a 2018 New York Times article about the yearly fires in Nachusa, Fèini Yĭn writes about the long relationship of settlers to the normal burn cycle in the American landscape, “A few catastrophic wildfires, including the Peshtigo Fire in 1871, which killed more than 1,500 people in Wisconsin, and the Great Fire of 1910, which burned three million acres in the Northwest, helped convince land managers that fire should be vanquished. The United States Forest Service started the Smokey Bear campaign, which portrayed all fire as destructive. But ecologists suspected fire suppression was disrupting natural life cycles. Giant sequoias, they noticed, were no longer regenerating in California. In the 1960s, scientists encouraged policymakers to allow for natural processes like fire. After a series of wildfires blazed through more than a third of Yellowstone National Park in 1988, the ecosystem quickly recovered. Prescribed fire programs grew in popularity.” I was raised by a geologist and a woodworker. Forests were for discovering hidden landforms or learning the secrets in the wood. How they came to be healthy or ill wasn’t part of those lessons. The idea that grasslands required burns to maintain their health, just as forests did, was as strange to me as the midwestern landscape I’d never seen in person.
In March, an essay I’d worked on all through the pandemic, Yarrow is Yarrow, came out in the Los Angeles Review of Books. It was the work that kept me company in confinement, something new that I’d run to when the work on the ocean book felt too harrowing. The essay, seed of the book I’ll write next, is about my Great Aunt Virginia, a pioneering feminist in my family who may have been a spy.
Her life has become a subject I am turning over to think about our difficult settler colonialist roots. She wrote a book called A Treasury of American Indian Herbs: Their Lore and Their Uses of Food, Drugs, and Medicine. She had a love affair with a former Army colonel who moved to the borders between the prairie and the Wyoming mountains to live in a sheep shack in used underwear even though his was a philanthropist and millionaire several times over. The Colonel donated his land after his death. It became a soil research station for the University of Wyoming. One of the uses of that land is to study the role of fire in forest and soil management.
I feel like I’ve been carrying Virginia and The Colonel with me for months. The ghosts we carry have history to share with us, about what it means to be alive in a complex world, and about how the times when we are burned over give way to something else, to green shoots and new life, even if it doesn’t resemble the old life at all.
As we’ve walked the prairies this month, the memory of John Prine keeps me company too, a ghost made by the pandemic. The anniversary of his death is today as I write this, April 7. The Illinois singer-songwriter legend faded at what felt like peak lockdown but was only the early days when we knew nothing, not yet. I hear his voice as I walk the burn zones, chiming in from one of my favorite songs, Christmas in Prison, which we sing at the Hideout in the wintertime, a song about waiting, and confinement, and love that transcends. Prine sings,
She reminds me of a chess game
With someone I admire
Or a picnic in the rain
After a prairie fire
I admire Virginia, she was a champion of reinvention, and I hope that in the rebirth of the time ahead, I get to spend time with her, with her mind and history. But I also hope that she can show me something of how to walk into new life with grace for what’s lost and what can be made from the ashes. The prairie fire has burned over my old self. I’d like to get to know who the new one is.
When I came to South Dakota in my twenties, the ocean-like quality of the grasslands made my chest ring like a bell, the echoes revealing acres of space inside my soul. I didn’t understand it, but I wanted to be close to it. It was the new landscape that helped me understand how much I’d changed in the year before, the year when I was diagnosed with kidney disease and the old version of me was burned over and the new one was just emerging.
Those prairies led me to Chicago, a place ghosted by grasslands, looking west to them from towers on flat land, partly built by another ancestor of mine, Cyrus McCormick of the McCormick reaper. Sometimes Andy and I have to remind Dex that the plains that have raised him are not the kind of landforms we recognize as home, the two of us from the Appalachian plateau, where forest and elevation is daily, not the wonder we feel when we find a hill to climb. He's told us he’s afraid of living in cities with hills. We've told him how long it took us to get used to one without them.
Settlers reported unease when they came to the grasslands of the Midwest, finding a new country for which nothing had prepared them. They set about destroying it.
A study of the history of grasslands from the University of Illinois describes how, once John Deere invented a tractor that could break the complex root systems that sustained prairie earth, the slow work of settlement accelerated, “Then, in a remarkably short period of perhaps 50 years, the vast majority of prairie in Illinois was plowed and converted to agriculture. Prior to settlement, more than 60% of Illinois, approximately 22 million acres, were covered with prairie. Today, just over 2,000 acres remain, less than one-hundredth of one percent.” It took the friends of Nachusa Grasslands 200,000 volunteer hours to restore the prairie that was lost on the land there, to return bison to roam there. It took time and the will to rebalance.
The second record I wrote in Chicago was called Prairie Music, and the song I loved the best was Navigatrix, a nickname that firefighter boyfriend had given me because I held the map while he drove us cross country. The song was about that love for the prairie, for a thing I found when my old life had burned down and I was mourning. In the wake of all that loss, the grasslands came and held me in golden strands and taught me that there is something waiting on the other side of losing everything. I wrote in the madness of first contact, Cortez and his soldiers driven insane by the open space, trailing blood and cruelty after them. I wrote about the way the former sea, rolling without hills, reminded me of what I loved best about home, about love emerging from loss. I sang,
Rain works up the window like flame
the prairie is ocean is everything new you brought
You can’t see it at first, but everything new is waiting in the soil.
The Nature Conservancy writes of prairie fires, “Some fires were caused by lightning strikes, while many more were started by Native Americans who burned to clear the land for agriculture, improve grazing and forage for game species, direct game migration and clear brush to ease travel or prevent hostile forces from approaching unnoticed. Fire is a natural part of the grassland ecosystem and helps maintain its health and vigor. It warms up the soil and reduces the leaf litter that accumulates each year, allowing sunlight to penetrate. Warming the soil increases microbial activity, which releases nutrients from decaying plant material that new grasses and flowers need to grow.” In that Times article about the fires in Nachusa, Fèini Yĭn writes, “Remove fire, and this dialogue gets interrupted. Weedy scrub accumulates, stifling the earth.”
Today, on the anniversary of losing John Prine, Andy and I will get our second doses of the vaccine partly funded by Dolly Parton. Dex gets his next week. We’ve laid in supplies for a few days of feeling terrible as the remedy for Covid burns through us, teaching our bodies to fight the new invader, remaking us into something we don’t recognize yet. Outside, the trees are budding and in the soil of Nachusa, where we’ll hike again when we are healed, we’ll see the new growth the fire made.
Prine wrote in Christmas in Prison about that feeling of waiting to hold the person you love,
Wait awhile eternity
Old mother nature's got nothing on me
Come to me
Run to me
Come to me, now
We're rolling
My sweetheart
We're flowing
By God
I’m ready to be flowing like the ocean of grass, to finish this revision of my ocean book, and be in archives in Wyoming researching Virginia and The Colonel for the next book, to be on the deck of a research ship looking for whales to wrap up the last one, to be in the embrace of people I haven’t touched in a year. The fire is burning, but it will pass. We’re flowing by god.
Love,
Eiren