August 7, 2023

The first time I drove through the northeastern Colorado Pawnee grasslands, I was on my way to Minnesota, on a solo car trip running away from my teenagers. I basked in the dun-colored prairie, the road flat and the horizon miles and miles away. I wanted to live in that place because it felt familiar and safe. I meandered my way into Nebraska, turning down gravel roads to stop with my windows down so I could hear the wind in the grass and meadow larks singing. It felt like home.

Four years later, I revisited the grasslands again when I fell for a big strapping man who lived in the middle of the middle of nowhere. My first weekend with Al on his ranch, I blathered on about Erlich’s book. We were bouncing around in an ancient pickup and he was pointing out the dry creek, the small buttes and the acres and acres of grass that swept to the horizon in all four directions. The Rocky Mountains in the distance kept me from being completely disoriented. At one point, Al held my gaze and quietly intoned:

“A lot of people don’t appreciate what is special about this place. I’m glad you do.”

“My dad always referred to places like this as a whole lot of nothing. But that’s what I like. It leaves my imagination free to roam.”

The grasslands move me to a meditative place. And unlike the classically beautiful places, a simple deviation from the linear traces of light playing on the sugar beet fields becomes profound and impossible to ignore. In a hilly terrain it is easy to miss the cloud shadows’ dance over the landscape and I am reminded how small I am on this planet. Once I tried to paint a picture of the plains, thinking it would be an easy task capturing the prairie in a two- dimensional form. But it was difficult because the colors are truly complicated in their variation, each blade of grass and broken corn stalk adds to the whole of “nothing”.

Looking over the Pawnee Grasslands with its lack of striking detail a single detail can pull your eye and your eye’s attention. Even if that detail is nothing more than a stone catching the sun. But the absolute absence of that one thing begging to be beautiful becomes a macrocosmic and beautiful detail. The grasslands ask me to stop and look, look beyond the hard line between January’s dune colored grass and steel tinted sky. Look past the dash dividing the green of warm weather grass and ardent blue of the warm weather sky come mid-summer. The wind through the grass, and the meadowlarks’ call and response would not be noticed as acutely if the landscape were littered with the epitome of picturesque details. A grove of statuesque trees, a cluster of flowers, soaring mountain peaks would crowd out the spare beauty of nothing but grass and sky.