A Place

I just want to live in a place long enough for the land to begin giving up its secrets.

A place where fathead minnows can be trapped in a wire-mesh cylinder in cutbank creeks of dingy water.  A place where the Topeka shiner minnow, to preserve its mating practices, can grind a whole road construction crew to a halt.  A place where, even in the upper midwest, enough green crayfish can be seined for a seafood boil, turning lobster-red the minute they hit the boiling pot.  A place where scrambling, moss-backed snapping turtles rule the creek like demigods.

I just want to live in a place where the peaks and valleys of fish populations are passed like code words among stern-faced coffee drinkers.  A place where crappies spawn among the rocks strewn by WPA workers in my granpa's day.  A place where people campout along shorelines for spring walleyes.  A place where farm ponds grow so thick with algae you think you can walk across it and where sunnies and bluegills bloom like silver dollars amongst the unnatural fecundity.  A place where northern pike bearing long clouds of orange roe make their fall runs up the rock river to slackwater holes where they smack daredevils like candy.  A place where hard-bodied perch can be taken by too many children crammed in too small a fishhouse, to be tossed on the ice to freeze, to freeze my hands when I scale them in the driveway, to turn crisp when my mother-in-law deep fries them, their eggs popping the oil wildly as they outswell the skin, to be eaten like the original fishsticks with rice on the darkest January night.

I just want to live in a place with prairie grass, with tall grass.  A place where the big bluestem stretches skyward in a matter of hours in late July along roadside ditches.  A place where, as tempertatures linger into the night and the humidity seeps from the atmosphere, its invisible root digs well past the shallow layer of life-supporting dirt and its crow's foot stretches like a crown above the pale gray of the common brome.  A place where the wide head of switchgrass has so much promise mad scientists in antisceptic laboratories seek to turn it into fuel.  A place where prairie cord grass raises its deep green seed heads in a heavy lash.  A place where the story lingers of winding that grass into cords to burn because there was no wood amongst the tall grasses.  A place where each week of summer gives up new wildflowers, even the butter-and-eggs that spurts along our frontage road, a transplant from Europe. 

I just want to live in a place where the wind is always to be leaned into.  Where the wind makes the trees are all of a gallop, bowing and waving, and where the house shifts and creeks as if its materials yearn to be set into motion like that once again.  Where the northwester chills your bones and pulls at your clothes for two days straight, before a wind from the straight south reaches blows so hard and so long that you barricade yourself into your basement, but even there its voice chastises you in fits of high-pitched rage.