Ditch Gifts

We live on the edge of town, below the last shoulder of hill that climbs out of the valley where the Rock River and Chanarambie Creek court before they join their waters forever and ever a mile south of town. There’s a scant half-mile between the two creeks where Edgerton is built, a ridge of land that falls off at the end of Edgerton’s mile or so length and climbs up toward regular Buffalo Ridge height directly to the north of our house.

Our position leaves us quite sheltered from a direct north wind, but the typical Northwester funnels down a black top that leaves us vulnerable to its whimsy. Thus, every year I find tumbleweeds rolled down from the wild Northwest Territories and trapped in the various nooks and crannies around the house, a real Wild West existence.

Perhaps it’s this wind that brought some more welcome guests to our road too. Our neighbors to the north moved to their house when the original tenant, their mother, moved to the rest home, Edgebrook, a couple of years ago. They moved from the farm and brought a farm mentality with them: in the fall they overpower unwanted trees with John Deere tractors; in winter, they pile up snow into epic and haphazard mountains; in spring, the dandelions take over. And they don’t care. Truth be told, I really don’t either, ex-farm boy that I am, but others do. One day last summer the dandelion family’s next door neighbor confided to me in the coffee shop, “I think they were camping and I had just sprayed my lawn, so I filled up another tank of spray and let ‘er have it.”

To little avail. This spring the dandelions were back unabated.

But so were other guests. After the dandelion boom—bloom—two large bushes of yellow sweet clover grew out of one side of the railroad tie retaining wall that keeps the hill on their side of the road. In hindsight, I blame what happened on the sweet clover. Sweet clover comes in a bush. It’s big and impossible to miss. Yes, at this time in the summer it gets wispy yellow flowers on the ends of its leaves, little fingers of gold that are nice but not gaudy. What’s coming in the fall is less nice. Sweet clover gets tangly and brown. Perhaps it even turns tumbleweed and spreads its seeds around that way—I’m not quite sure. Whatever the case, sweet clover suggests a wilder heritage than we want in an Edgerton striving for a suburban look. So it was perhaps inevitable that something would be done about it.

However, on the other side of the retaining wall another visitor sprang up, a more welcome visitor. It’s a repeat visitor, too, which is one reason why I caught it early. Our road is like a frontage road. It runs alongside the larger black top that mounts the hill to Fey Industries, but then our road bends along the hill—“Terrace View Avenue” it’s called—to the line of houses along our street. Rounding the corner after some random pee wee baseball game, the visitor’s yellow witness first caught my eye, but, alas, in the busyness that is children’s activities, even in the summer, I had no time to verify whether it truly was or not.

Returning home one evening, though, the yellow witness had grown and was caught momentarily in the headlights; it was only too apparent that our friend was back and that it was time to check it out. “Is that butter and eggs?” I asked my children.

And just like that, we had to know.

We first learned about butter-and-eggs at Pipestone. Up the road from Edgerton, in Pipestone, lies the only National Monument that I know of within an eight hour drive. Pipestone National Monument is not really a monument at all, not like the Washington Monument, a phallic symbol pointing to the sky, symbolizing I’m not sure what even though I have my suspicions. No, Pipestone National Monument is simply an outcropping of rock, a very unique kind of rock, in the midst of the wide sea of prairie. The red rock outcropping that bursts the sea of prairie here as well as down the Buffalo Ridge at Luverne and east near Jeffers—where Natives took advantage of the sheer, flat sheets of red rock to write some of the history and culture of their people on what we’ve come to call petroglyphs—is not jasper, as they dubbed it in the town that’s misnamed for the rock, but Sioux Quartzite, a rock that can be quarried and turned into official looking buildings like county courthouses that are centerpieces of Luverne and Pipestone, but not easily. However, at Pipestone, a special kind of Sioux Quartzite, a layer that’s much softer than the hard yet brittle rock, is laid bare. This band of rock is softer, with a soapy feel to it. It’s much more malleable and therefore more desirable for shaping into pipes, the central unifying instrument in Native cosmology, and other small trinkets and talismans, like the humble and therefore supremely important turtle. The outcropping of pipestone, then, became a quarry, but more importantly became sacred ground to which the Lakota and tribes from all across the continent came to quarry the stone and fashion the artifacts so important to their world. The stone, the natives say, is the flesh of the ancestors; it’s their gift, a means of making peace.

At Pipestone, somewhat miraculously, the government—no doubt prompted by gentle and wise souls both native and white, or, more cynically, perhaps in order to pacify natives—saw fit to preserve this outcropping of rock and call it a monument. Oh, there is a short cliff where Pipestone Creek dumps its waterfall until it becomes a trickle in the dryness of late summer, and there’s a small interpretive center complete with workshops for native craftsmen, but Pipestone National Monument by in large allows the landscape—the prairie landscape with a small outcropping of rock—to be the monument.

We go to Pipestone National Monument maybe twice a year. When my wife works and I’m tired of the kids asking if they can play the computer, we find a guidebook to wildflowers or two and head down the road for a short hike through the monument. Although a host of burr oaks have taken root and obscure the cliff line that once was visible at Pipestone, the park has a native prairie plant going, complete with seasonal burns to insure the prairie’s health, and a trail leads through the prairie and to the different mining sites along the rock ledge. As the prairie flowers bloom throughout the year, park employees mark the different blooms with simple labels.

For me, Pipestone preserves something else sacred to natives. It preserves—or resurrects—the prairie. Walking monument trails was precisely how we discovered prairie wildflowers and tall grass prairie grasses. The easiest for me and my children to name and remember, because of its soft yellow and gold complexion, and its wealth of blooms surrounding a long stem, was called butter and eggs.

Therefore, back at home, as we round the corner in our road, when I ask, “Is that butter-and-eggs?” I’ve created all the stir I need. “Let’s go check,” my daughter urges. She’s a notorious fan of evening and late night excursions like this, whether to check on a plague of slugs on our hostas or a midnight meteor shower of blessing. I grab the flashlight and we cross the street, a total of no more than thirty yards.

Somehow, under the bright rays of the flashlight in the growing darkness, the flower is even more brilliant, a torch in the gloom if you will. The plant is about two-thirds bloomed, the blossoms opening around the stem in the manner of a holly hock, but on an eighteen-inch scale. The blossoms themselves remind me of the snap dragon, the gauzy outside of soft buttery yellow leading to the bright gold yolk center. At least a half dozen blossoms are poised to open in succeeding days, a rich blessing to a neighborhood aspiring to controlled grass and shrubs. (http://www.minnesotawildflowers.info/flower/butter-and-eggs)

The beauty of butter-and-eggs is innocent. That’s why I say that without the daring bushiness of the sweet clover, the butter-and-eggs may have avoided notice. However, the sweet clover was too daring a flagship for the prairie, and doomed these advance guards too.

I was working outside when I subconsciously heard a grinding sort of noise, lawn mower-esque but a little too grindy even for a lawn mower. Because one is accustomed to hearing several different pitches of lawn mowers, weed wackers, leaf blowers, and edgers, as well as a dozen kinds of saws in any given neighborhood, I paid little attention to the noise.

Until I realized it was crawling across the road in slow motion, right next to the railroad tie retaining wall. My neighbor, astride a red Farmall reconditioned for lawn service, was pulling a tank of spray and letting a 10-inch swath of lawn edge have it with whatever death-chemical she held in the tank.

I didn’t grow up knowing environmental or political action. The butter and eggs mean something to me and do little harm or pose little threat to a lawn that is at best an afterthought to my neighbors anyway. However, it never occurred to me at the time to run across the road and stand in front of the butter-and-eggs, to finally catch my neighbor’s eye amidst the grinding of the machine and to yell at the top of my voice so she’d hear me, “Hey, don’t spray these—they’re my kids’ favorite.” Rather, I chalked it up to a lost cause and hoped that the innocent flowers would somehow avoid her death-swath.

Two nights later, at our neighborhood float meeting, too little too late, I asked her, lightheartedly, “Hey, did you spray my butter-and-eggs?” An uncomprehending stare. So I explain. “I saw you out spraying yesterday along the road. I noticed those big sweet clover bushes were gone. Did you spray some yellow flowers on the other side?”

“I chopped down those bushes,” she tells me. “And if there were flowers on the other side, they’re dead now!” she crows.

Three more days, and her swath is completely brown, the length of the road. It is, in two words, absolutely ugly. Will the butter and eggs return next season? Considering the amount and apparent power of the chemical sprayed on them, I doubt it.

***

“And for all of this, nature is never spent.”

As I said, our road first acts as a frontage road to a larger blacktop. In the space between the roads where they run parallel, there’s a small strip of land that the homeowners on the other side of the road are expected by the city council to keep looking sharp—that is, they’re supposed to mow it. It’s July and two of my neighbors have been away or busy as the weather turns sweltering. After three days of not mowing, certain grasses are shooting skyward like a rash of fireworks. It took me twenty-five years of living on the tall grass prairie, but I’ve learned about what grasses show up when the weather gets hot and withers the imports. Then the native grasses, with their immense root systems fit for just such weather, are resurrected: the puffed out heads of switch grass, the arrowheads of Indian grass, and the purple-stained crow’s feet of big bluestem, the prince of the prairie.

One evening, at dusk, I walk through this swath of grass to confirm my hopes. Indeed, big bluestem predominates, another tall grass prairie advance guard seeking to regain its dominion, but mixed in is another surprise, another treasure: a lesser known grass, sideoats grama grass is in full bloom, with its feathery seed heads hanging down, combed to one side, the yellow specks of pollen still visible between them, like a girl whose hair is strewn with flowers.

And so one gift replaces another. In the roadside ditches, the tall grass prairie still lurks, biding its time, waiting patiently to unwrap its riches.