August 24, 2009
I was absolutely certainly most completely unprepared for the prairie here at Ragdale. With place and landscape of such prominence in my writing and visual art, I have quite strongly held, patriotic, stubbornly inflexible, and downright epicurean tastes in terrain. My places are so deeply imbedded in my sense of self – perhaps the phrase this is/not my kind of place comes from this sort of psychological gesture of attachment.
After running relatively wild as a child in those peerless Tennessee woods, I gained a love for exposed limestone’s geode-cradling shale. For cold mossy creeks and actually stumbling into the pits of pioneer graves whose rudimentary coffins had rotted and left a seven by three by three foot indentation in the ground. For the filagreed delicacy of cedar trees in the sleet. For eidolon mists issuing up from caves that crouched down like guilty wishing wells within the shrewdly fatalistic hillbilly sadness of the hollows and hills.
While spring was lovely, it was somehow predictably pretty, whereas summer and winter came with a delicious set of anachronistic fears – perhaps the stubborn haints of Irish-Catholic pioneers kept those worries close. Summer offered ticks, rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, rabies, tetanus, yellow fever. And then the other provided black ice, starvation, rickets, breaking through partially-frozen farm ponds, and frostbite (which let leprosy tag along for free, in the sense of inexplicably romantic diseases of the flesh). On a completely conscious level, I expected the rapture would take place in either of these seasons. I looked forward.
Autumn was my favorite, because the frost would separate the particles in the soil, building up these rigid little towers of stone distinct from the dirt, and then a soft almost formless mantle of plant matter. I adored taking off my shoes and walking on it with barefoot – feeling the fairy structures give way slightly underneath, precipitously, and then catch me at the very last minute and hold firm.
The next terrain I encountered was Texan – there is a reason why Texans have such big personalities: to distract one another from the ugliness of the landscape. It’s nature’s equivalent of concrete. It says, we have work to do here. Nothing to see. Just keep moving. Up ahead there are cattle, beer and strong, feisty women. See you there. And it works. I’d say the Texan landscape is an effective one, as are their tactics for distraction.
Northern California is practically the reverse – in San Francisco, where three-quarters of the city can die of AIDS and nobody in the rest of the country much cares to help because the views are so gorgeous, and those hills are so amazing, and can you believe how chilly it is right smack in the middle of summer! Yes, the sunset over the ocean sure is beautiful. Yeah, people die. Absolutely. Now find me a good parking place, options at a biotech, and a nice glass of malbec.
And then along came the desert, and true love. The first time I met my true love and agreed to go out on a date, I dashed off to the ladies’ loo and escaped out the bathroom window. My desert is something like that – a sentient force in possession of relentless and ferocious neutrality in its capacity to take everything down to the bones. That makes first impressions often unpleasant, and survival a little suspenseful. Oh, is that you? Really? I thought you’d died long ago. Well, since you’re still here, take a look at these ten thousand year old sacred instructions for infinity carved into that little rock. Sarah and Moses knew all about that.
All that to bring me to the prairie, the mere concept of which I tolerated to the point of excruciating ennui solely because the prairie was unavoidable if you wanted to hang out with Laura Ingalls.
Grass. Grass, grass, grass. Oh look, some greenish grass – wait, wait, now it’s yellowish grass. Time to cut it. Tie it up. Feed it to something. Oh, it’s pooping. Oh look, there’s some grass back again! How pretty. Now, I hear somebody mention yellow fever? Mary has yellow fever? And there are Indians?
Ah, the error of my ways. In hearing that Ragdale estate sits on fifty acres of prairie, I thought, well, that’s one less thing to distract me from my work. You might say the Texan in me raised her head.
In hindsight, I’d say I can remember the exact moment where one blink revealed the Ragdale house, and another blink revealed the Ragdale lawn, and then the actual instant I opened my eyes and saw the prairie rolling out to the horizon.
When I saw this particular ancient prairie – I perhaps heard it with my eyes. It is a wild, intense, vivid seven foot high wonderland where art nouveau shapes and colors tendril themselves, vie for sunlight and shade, wilt and curl and twine, everything moving and waving, everything wrapped around and wrapped around again, rising up, falling down, crawling and creaking with growth. It is immensely womanly – dense, baroque, deeply-rooted growth in constant and beauteous movement.
Neither before nor since Arts & Crafts Movement architect Howard Van Doren Shaw purchased the property has a human mown or tamed or otherwise molested the prairie, not by the human hand, foot, or by the machines.
I have limitless epistemological objections to the word “virgin” when applied to most things, but find it particularly vexing in contexts of non-human organisms on the planet. This term “virgin prairie” suggests to me that the prairie has not had sexual intercourse – along with certain cocktails, a few metals, forests that have escaped the toilet paper factory, and the more expensive olive oils. When it comes to what has become a pugnaciously guarded terrarium of protected plant life, what does that really mean? Do they mean the human species? Are they suggesting that the prairie has not had sexual intercourse with a human male? Perhaps. Maybe that is what they mean. At the end of days (winter or summer, central Tennessee, definitely), any human destruction of the planet will be considered an actual act of specifically sexual aggression by male humans? Something to think about.
Ah well. If work with these tired gender tropes we must, I would say that Shaw’s love for the prairie as it is led him to create a summer house whose art nouveau sensibilities were a tribute to – and perhaps an elegy for – the lovely woman of the grasses…the man standing tall with dignity and respect in her midst.
By calling something – the prairie – virgin, it also invokes the spectre of loss. I can work with that as well. I suppose I do think of loss out here, in the same way I think of death in conjunction with the desert. Of course there is the cataclysmic loss of having a mere few hundred acres of original prairie left to us. But also, the idea of getting lost out here. Of dis-orienting oneself for a moment, seemingly forever – the height of the herb life – so perfectly calibrated to hide, obfuscate, or disorient any creature under six foot six is particularly fascinating to me – just about the height to get lost in, until you stand up straight and tall, and lengthen your human spine to its limits, and turn your lovely skull around to gaze upon creation.