This country has always been defined by its grasslands as much as it has been by its forests, mountain ranges, and rivers. Grass informs our landscapes, shapes our history, and probably has more to do with our future than we realize.
Our western grasslands are iconic. In 1541, on his quest for yet another fabled city of gold long before the pioneers headed west from St. Joseph, Coronado marched northeast from Mexico City to Kansas. In the middle of what would become Texas he noted, tersely, “I reached some plains.” Indeed. He was the first European to encounter a sea of grass more vast than anything west of the Russian steppes. Shedding their armor and weapons in the summer heat, he and his men trekked to the banks of the Kansas River (chain mail was found as late as 1880 along their route) through what to them was a featureless vegetal ocean. Unknown to him, at the same time De Soto, coming from the east, was crossing the Mississippi, noting the same endless vistas along the way. Both followed game trails through head-high grass, and both noted that the native populations were adept at navigation in this formidable environment. Even today you can see that grass here and there—most notably at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas and a similar tallgrass prairie in Oklahoma.
Like our native grasslands here in Oregon, the prairie was managed by fire. We tried that on a piece of virgin savanna my father bought in western Illinois after he’d read about the Nature Conservancy’s efforts at managing tallgrass prairie further west. One late October day we lit a section, figuring the recent rains would keep things under control. What we hadn’t counted on was the fact that nearly a century’s worth of accumulation had built up quite a fuel base beneath the stalks. . . and under the adjacent trees. The result was that five of us spent a frantic night tracking the slowly moving fireline through the hardwoods as it flared up slopes through hickory, ash, walnut and oak, and slowly ate its way down the slopes towards the creeks. It never caught any of the trees, but had a good time with the accumulated leaf litter underfoot. We ended up burning quite a bit more than we intended, and considerably more than we owned. It looked terrible. I think my father began to doubt the wisdom of this most recent experiment (re-introducing wild turkeys the year before had been a brilliant success. . . so he was on a roll.) But the next spring was a miracle—first, as the ground thawed, flowers we’d never seen poked up, then deep lush grass far more vigorous than before. And wild ginseng and sassafras. These, we discovered, had been there all along, but hidden. The park ranger next door (Siloam Springs State park) was suitably impressed and initiated his own burn, albeit more controlled. And the other neighbor, whose woods we scorched, (and liked all the excitement) said the morels that spring were prolific, so he planned to burn regularly.
And now is the season for haying. The oddly comforting smell of a newly mown field this time of year claims our valley as surely as the smell of sagebrush conjures the high plains of central Oregon. Cut grass is particularly evocative for farm kids I suspect. As a teenager I spent summers on a haying crews back in western Illinois—in the days when baling entailed a triple rig of tractor, baler, and wagon with one driver on the tractor and two (usually kids) working the wagon. A bale would inch out rear chute of the baler accompanied by the unforgettable rhythm of the piston compressing the next load—and when it came close enough to the edge of the wagon, you would lean out, swing your hayhook, and jerk the bale (around 50 lbs) over the 3 foot gap. All the while trying not to lose your footing as the wagon lurched along. Once you had it on board, you’d toss the hook to your companion, carry the bale to the back of the wagon, and stack it. There was a particular method of alternating the layers so the stack remained tight up to around six feet high. Getting that last layer on meant heaving the bale over your head.
Once the wagon was two-thirds full, there was no room for two kids so (in strict rotation. . .) one could hop off and have a break until it was time to drive the wagon to the barn where another set of kids were running the elevator, loading and stacking hay in the tops of the barns. If working the wagons was hot, at least you were in the open; unloading bales from the elevator in the top of a sweltering, airless barn was torment. Had Dante grown up on a farm, he would certainly have worked this particular activity into The Inferno.
We baled mostly timothy and alfalfa—sweetly scented, almost narcotic when you drove the sickle-bar mower through the fields or raked the dried grass into windrows once the dew was off it. Baling straw after the winter wheat had been harvested was less evocative and more punishing—already dry, it held the dust generated by the combine, and the compressed sides of the bales rasped flesh from your forearms. Even in August you wore gloves and long-sleeved shirts. Everyone hayed together, in a mad rush between storms. You’d spend a day cutting and while that field dried, you’d move to another, then back to the first for raking and baling if the weather held. We’d do my grandfather’s fields, then my uncles, then ours—big crews, kids and men. Everyone ate together too, and a young boy could learn a lot of things that weren’t covered in school. I remember being alarmed the first time I met a grown up, one of my uncle’s men, who couldn’t read or write. It was as shocking as coming across a torn up snake in a bale. The world was full of surprises.
This suggestive power of grass is one of its legacies—level fields of waving grain, uniform, seemingly endless, offer abundance and promise a sort of grace bestowed by nature, a gift. It hides nothing, all is open for inspection— you can relax in its presence. Unlike purple mountains majesty, grass is neither heroic nor aristocratic. Shortly after Walt Whitman opens his astonishing “Song of Myself” he brings in the grass– “I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass./ Houses and rooms are full of perfumes. . .” For him, grass is the ‘journey-work of stars’, a ‘delicate miracle’ in which we read a cipher of ourselves in the vast new Republic he celebrates. Grass is the ultimate democracy, the ‘uniform hieroglyphic’ that sprouts and spreads according to a logic we are not privy to. In Whitman’s eyes, we too are grass. Caring well for it may indeed be the best form of self-preservation.
