Meditation On A Tallgrass Prairie
Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve ©2023 Richard Olsenius
By Christine Olsenius
It was one of those evenings when the warmth of the day lingered over the land, and a slight breeze murmured through the bluestem and Indian grasses. The sky stretched endlessly over the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve located near the Flint Hills of Kansas. My husband, Richard, and I walked the trails where the rolling prairie and sky met at the distant horizon. America’s tallgrass prairies once stretched from the Rocky Mountains to east of the Mississippi River, supporting a diverse ecosystem of plants and animals. Now the remnants of this once vast sea of grass are tucked away in parks, preserves or a few isolated corners of rural America.
There is something about the prairie that has always drawn us to its long vistas and waving grasslands. We cannot explain the draw as we both grew up in the city and never saw a real prairie until we were in our mid-20’s. But when we first crossed the Missouri River in South Dakota and looked at a panorama of endless open space, the landscape spoke to us and filled some inner need for a wild expanse of terrain. We were now on a quest to see some of the remaining vestiges of this remote landscape, a search that brought us to this rural patch of Kansas prairie.
The poet Paul Gruchow once wrote in “Reasons For Living”, “The work of a life is like the work of bluestem, which sends up a few blades of grass…to conceal the hundreds of miles of vital roots in fertile darkness. A prairie, it is said, is like a forest whose canopy grows underground. A life is like that too. What it produces is buried in the hearts of others.” Did our love of tallgrass prairies reveal deeper feelings and needs in our lives? Was that what lured us to these places of quiet, subtle beauty?
We were far from interstate highways or large towns. It was so quiet that you could hear voices from the parking lot nearly a quarter mile away. And when the doors had slammed shut and the cars had peeled out of the lot, their sound was drowned by the intense prairie silence. As the sun began to set and the first evening stars became visible, I knew there would be a brilliant Milky Way stretched across the sky later that evening. By the time we climbed into our truck, darkness was falling quickly as we headed back to the park where we were camping. The country road was narrow and undulating, weaving its way through the now pitch black countryside. The walk had lulled us into a relaxed state of mind. Then it happened so quickly we had no time to react.
At the crest of a hill we came face to face with 14 large black Angus cattle that had managed to escape their fencing and climb onto the road. We had no time to reduce our speed as our headlights shone on the herd stretched across our lane and half of the oncoming lane. A crash seemed imminent. Richard moved the steering wheel a slight fraction of an inch to the left without breaking to avoid spinning out of control and descending into the steep roadside ravine. I thought for sure that we would hit several cattle.. But somehow, magically, we threaded the narrow clearance through the oncoming lane, relieved that no car was passing us at that time. The average Angus bull weighs about 2,000 pounds and a female over 1,000 pounds. Hitting cattle can be fatal. Richard called 911 to alert authorities to the herd on the county road, in the hope of avoiding any further close calls.
The reality of this narrow escape set in when we returned to our campsite, feeling more shaken than during the roadside confrontation. Life seemed so ephemeral; at one moment we are strolling along the most peaceful landscape on earth and the next we are facing death on a lonely country highway. How quickly our fates can change.
But our search for wonder, for solitude and open spaces remains a life-long quest. That evening, as we sat outside under the sweep of the Milky Way, I thought of a line from a Mary Oliver poem, “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
We want to experience and celebrate the quiet places of wonder that still exist. While the search for wonder has its price, the effort is worth it.