So I think the main reason my friends in McIntosh County invited me down to speak at their chokecherry festival this year was that a few years ago, I wrote a little ballad called “The Chokecherry Song.”
Of all of our berries, I love the chokecherries
Their scent in the spring is an earthly delight
When the sunflowers are beaming and the blackbirds are teeming
The chokecherries ripen as black as the night
And so on through a set of stanzas detailing the glories of chokecherry wojapi, chokecherry jelly, chokecherry syrup, chokecherry wine. The song is light fare, but in its modest way, it fits with what I have been saying recently about the importance of native fruits, and the rituals around them, to the sense of place on the northern Great Plains.
And that, in turn, if I may put on my academic hat for a moment, fits with what we are coming to understand of how that sense of place came to be, and how it eventually gelled into a consciousness of the larger region we call the Great Plains. Molly Rozum’s book, Grasslands Grown, through group biography of the first settler generation to grow up on the land, lays this out. Prairie girls and prairie boys, growing up with the land, picking berries and undergoing countless other place-specific experiences that filled their senses, grew up knowing their place on the land. Then they went off to college, where they found there were countless others with similar experiences, which they talked about. And the next thing you know we were awash in rising historians, grassland ecologists, landscape painters, and prairie poets who created the region of the Great Plains.
The first generation that crossed the Atlantic, you see, saw opportunity on the prairie, but the old country had a grip on their hearts. They might renounce the king or the czar and swear allegiance to the United States when they became citizens en route to proving up a homestead, but in their hearts, the old country was still home. I think of that favorite folksong of the German-Russians, “Kein Schöner Land.”
Kein schöner Land in dieser Zeit
Als hier das unsre weit und breit
Wo wir uns finden wohl unter Linden zur Abendzeit
Wo wir uns finden wohl unter Linden zur Abendzeit
Which is to say, this is a fine country, but oh I miss those groves of linden trees where we used to gather back home.
On the other hand, here comes Snorri Thorfinnson, the sage of Fort Ransom, born and raised among the Icelanders near Munich, a man familiar with the Norse sagas, but a singer of a new song in the new country. When, like Snorri, I traipse off with my retrieving dog coursing the Coteau in search of sharptail grouse, and I get tuckered out, and I sit back against a buffalo rub to have a little nap, I sing with Snorri as I doze off,
I love the mountains, I love the hills,
Winding rivers and whispering rills.
But my heart with contentment fills out on the plains I love.
Out on the plains where the wind blows free,
That is the place I am longing to be.
That’s where good fortune will smile on me—
Out on the plains I love.
