I recently read a blog by Kent Nerburn, author of the trilogy Neither Wolf Nor Dog, The Wolf at Twilight, and The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo, most of which are set in North and South Dakota.
Nerburn is a northern Minnesota author who was not initially impressed with North Dakota. He described it as “endless miles of boredom.” But then he went on to say that the Dakotas began to whisper to him, and he found himself being “pulled magnetically into the vast openness of the plains and prairies to the west.” So his next book, Long Dog Road, will be set, in his words, “in the land that had so touched my spirit and fired my imagination.”
Sound familiar? For many, be they native North Dakotans, transplants, or those just passing through, it often takes some time to warm to the wide-open spaces of the North Dakota landscape.
Although there is a lot of crop land, I suspect that for many people, the wide-open expanses of prairie are a large part of what calls people to love and appreciation of the landscape. Looking out over those vast expanses of prairie can be humbling. But those large tracts of prairie are getting harder to find. There are, however, still places in the state where one can look across the landscape and see largely unobstructed prairie with few if any trees or signs of modern human occupation.
John Madson described the prairie well in his book, Where the Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie:
“A man could stand in a small grove of virgin white pine of the same size and feel that he was in primeval forest. Not so with prairie. To the average man, a scrap of native prairie is just a shaggy weed patch between cornfields. Prairie must have sweep and perspective to look like prairie. It is more than native grasses and forbs: it is native sky, and native horizons that stretch the eye and the mind. To be good prairie, really good prairie, it must embrace the horizons.”
So, as you travel about the state, take a little more time to more closely observe and appreciate the unique aspects of the North Dakota prairie landscape. It may touch your spirit and fire your imagination, as well.
