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Last weekend was pheasant opener in Minnesota. Since both my hunting buddies had deserted me (I have two friends), we loaded up the entire family and drove out to Grandpa’s old farm for the 9:00 start to the season. On a corner adjacent to our farm, a quarter section my dad used to rent, there’s a small piece of CRP that always holds birds. As a one man show, I figured it was the perfect piece to walk. It turned out the piece was flanked by corn this year. Even better, I thought to myself, the birds will have moved out from the corn to bed down in the grasses and the blanket of snow we’d received overnight would keep them locked in—they would sit tight in order to avoid contact with the snow, offering me good shots once I’d flushed them.
Leaving the wife and kids in the idling van, I donned my orange vest, loaded a shell in my pea-shooter single shot, and blew in my hands, which weren’t cold yet but were bound to be on this thirty-degree morning. I waded through the thickest cover of canary reed grass, high-stepping through it to flush the tightest sitting birds. Then I moved up to the thinner if taller switch grass, raising my gun slightly in case a bird would flush in grass that was high as my head. Since I don’t have a dog to do the work for me, I paused every so often in order to unnerve some skittish hen—if I could just get one bird to flush it might cause a maelstrom of flushing birds this early in the season. I traipsed around every corner of the five or so acres of grass for at least a half hour. Nothing. No birds, no shots, no tracks in the snow. Turns out the birds must have stayed in the corn.
No matter. Just over the hill from this corner was another one-man piece to hunt: two waterways, one of them bordered by gnarled trees craving alms of the sun, that bend around a three-acre hump of land and meet to form one larger waterway thick with canary grass and cattails and a few clumps of sorghum-like grasses higher than your head and thick like young bamboo. After the snow, this thicker cover would be a better refuge from the snow. Surely, I could jump a rooster or two from there, providing other hunters hadn’t gotten to it first. It’s a favorite spot to hunt among the locals.
Cresting the hill, however, I saw a vision quite different than what I’d expected.
The waterways have been decimated. The trees have been dug out. The pile of rubbish left from what was a farm place, the one where my dad was born, has been buried or carted off somewhere. Both arms of the waterway have been neatly tiled out and tilled flat. I am breathless at the change.
There will be no birds here this year.
I’m trying to figure out what they’ve gained, the two brothers who farm thousands of acres and rent this land from my dad. I suppose they’ve gained a couple of acres. No doubt they’ll be able to farm what were the edges of this waterway next year. In fact, they may be able to farm right through the waterways. It’s so nice not to have to turn your large equipment around more than you have to. Turning is so inconveniencing. As Paul Gruchow has written satirically, it’s so too bad we can’t just have one huge tractor with one huge implement that could farm an entire section in one pass.
But then we’re getting close.
Yes, I’m feeling sorry for myself. Yes, grass will grow here again. Probably some nice tame brome grass that might hold one pheasant. But I still wonder why. Do farmers think about the inches that they can "put into production"? Because these particular farmers don’t have livestock, aren’t diversified at all except for corn and soybeans, do they get bored during certain seasons of the year and think up how they can wreck hunting ground—or, more the point, how they can wreck my hunting ground? Do they fantasize about a completely flat and featureless landscape?
However, it’s not just about me, this ire I feel at more land being put into “production,” narrowly defined.
Several years ago already, just up the road, on the border of this same quarter section, our neighbor took out the fencerow that marked where our neighbor's land ended and ours began. I remember that fence: rotted fence posts like old bones, broken down barb wire and one ridge of built up dirt and grasses, a last refuge for wildlife. It’s one of the great ironies of the prairie: the hated barbwire that broke up this ocean of space had become one of the last refuges—albeit marginal—for wildlife. Now that’s gone.
Where the fencerow used to be.
(I’m not sure we’ve seen the last of those hated fences. Like Robert Frost, I know that “good fences make good neighbors.” If inches of land are worth the effort of radically altering the landscape, then it’s only a matter of time before farmers come to blows over whose is whose.)
The point, beyond my selfish concerns, is margins. Wendell Berry wrote about the importance of margins more than twenty-five years ago. In eliminating the margins—of a field, of society—we remove integral elements from creation, elements we may need to survive, elements as stewards of creation that we must remember the Creator cares about.
Farm policy in the 1970s famously encouraged farmers to farm “fencerow to fencerow.” Now, we’ve moved beyond even that. The fencerows are disappearing. Even ditches are under attack: I’ve seen ditches in South Dakota fenced up to the very shoulder of the road for grazing.
At a literature conference I recently attended, I heard Dan O’Brien, a South Dakota author and rancher, read an essay about his search for a rare butterfly, the Dakota skipper. He’d been asked to write a series of essays on the Great Plains and had been hesitant to do so: He was comfortable writing about the western plains, he’d said, but Minnesota—that was hopeless. It’s too late there, he said. The prairie’s gone there.
Still, he took on the task and the essay he composed was about his search for the Dakota skipper in Minnesota and Iowa, an essay that’s pure horror. O’Brien couldn’t find any Dakota skippers, try as he might, but his nightmares were filled with the unremarkable butterfly trying to get in his window. The Dakota skipper, he said, was probably responsible for pollinating a few rare prairie plants. Both of them may be gone forever.
Marginal creatures. Marginal creations. Is that what we’ll tell the Creator when he asks us about their disappearance?
Last night, after I drove home with landscape on my mind, I decided I had to photograph this decimated landscape under the heavy gray rain clouds of a soggy October, my marginal camera and photography skills notwithstanding. I decided I had to write about it. No, I don’t make my living directly off the land. No, I don’t have to think of it in financial terms, and especially during this wet fall, I’m glad I don’t have to.
But my marginal perspective on the land still counts, and I can still write about it and so I am. All writing is landscape writing. It’s of the utmost importance to consider the landscapes we inhabit: the economic, the psychological, the familial, and the actual landscape. That’s why writing is so important. It shows us the landscapes we inhabit which we shape and which shape us and which we sometimes deform and which in turn sometimes deform us.
And yet I’m not convinced that the pen is mightier than the plow. Much writing is marginal writing in that it comes from the margins in a voice that has been marginalized. Ultimately, all I can do is write what I see, call for action, write from the margins. I can continue the marginal voice of Henry David Thoreau, Wendell Berry, Paul Gruchow and others on how we should deal with landscape.
The tallgrass prairie of Minnesota and Iowa is one of the most deformed landscapes in the world. We’ve lost so much of it that I’m afraid it’s permanently deformed. But here I stand, on the margins of the land, describing the landscape I see. As Christians, as thinkers, as writers this is what we must continue to do: describe the landscape we see from the margins, calling for preserving and even expanding those margins, lest more margins are lost to our Creator’s masterpiece.
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