1. Ethel
The sun is high now, and the day is hot. . .
Noon. . . Blue sky and
breeze. . . Gone.
Peter Matthiessen
Far Tortuga
“These
make me sad,” she said, holding the photographic prints in her lap, by their
edges so as not to put a smear on the surface. She slipped a fingernail behind
the one she was studying, then slowly pulled it toward her, to see the next.
“Sad?”
Nostalgic
is the proper word, she thought, but so formal, and so inadequate. So she said
nothing. Her mother had died when she was a child. Many times she’d said that
not everyone knew how it was to be a seven year old girl and have your mother
die. Usually she made this comment late at night, maybe out on the highway, after
a day at her stepmother’s. Sometimes it was a holiday, or one of the many
graduations, or births, when the clan descended on “Grandmother Jenny” and the
food was carried out on big platters, mostly beef, ham, five-cup salad,
steaming vegetables, and everyone sat around stuffing their faces and kidding
the older boys about their girlfriends. Then it would be over. She would offer
to help with the dishes, but Genevieve would say no, she’d do them later. On
the drive back is when she’d start talking about Jenny’s courage, walking into
that family of three girls and a working man, one of the girls just a baby, and
accepting the responsibility. When their mother had died, the two older sisters
had been sent for a time to their aunt and uncle’s farm, out in the panhandle. There
the western prairie’s crackling summer dryness stamped its unforgiving mark on
her memories. Never again would she see the smoke-green sage without saying that
reminds me of Aunt Ethel’s. A cicada in the August cottonwoods was a time
machine—you could see it on her face the moment the chirring started its rise
and fall: she was seven years old again, her mother had died, and she’d been sent
with her older sister to stay with her aunt and uncle on a farm near the town
of Woodward, Oklahoma.
Years
later, the mother of two daughters, she felt drawn back to Woodward. An inner
voice, it seemed, kept telling her a cycle of some kind wouldn’t be complete
unless her children saw the farm, walked through the buildings where she’d
spent that indelible summer, and listened to the cicadas. He agreed to drive
out to that part of the state, then bought black and white film for the trip. Farmsteads,
he knew, were yin-yang places—on the one hand idyllic, romantic, full of worn
angles and weathered lumber, the clutching emotions of a life obsessed with
growth, a life among the calves, births, deaths, the grand elements of
existence, and adoration of a God that giveth and taketh; on the other hand,
hard work, grinding labor in the howling wind, hours upon a tractor, the prayer
for rain answered by a swath of hail erasing in a few seconds a year’s
commitment to the land. Yes, a farm would be a place for black and white,
contrasts. He would look for designs among the outbuildings, she could visit
with Aunt Ethel, and the girls could play in the yard.
Outside,
the familiar high plains dry heat came to him on a gentle wind. The woodlot was
second growth, but the yard cottonwoods were gigantic. Only out here did they
achieve their finest majesty—twisted by the gales, gray bark a woven matrix
with wooden cords as thick as his arm. Down in the cracks he could see insects,
microscopic lives scurrying into tiny canyons, away from delicate translucent
spiders. An eight year old girl could almost put her foot into one of those
crevices, he thought, and use the cork ridges as steps into the branches, up
where the cicadas sang. He let his imagination run on. The cicadas were calling
her into an enchanted castle in the air. All she had to do was put her bare
toes into the bark and take the first step, then the trunk would change into a
spiral silver staircase. Desire, desire to get up to where the cicadas sang, a
wish, a want, was the switch to change a cottonwood tree into silver stairs. She
put her foot on the gnarled roots, felt the roughness, and turned her face,
squinting, into the canopy. She could not take the step. Her faith lay in other
worlds. It was the song she needed, not the rattling scratchy frantic insect,
the buzz bomb trapped by ornery hand, or a kingbird’s beak, but the song. The
song came with the soft knocking of waxy leaves against themselves, with the
western Oklahoma
summer heat, the stillness. She looked more closely at the trunk. Abandoned
cicada skeletons still clung to the bark, split open at the back, the tangle of
cast trachea like threads of a worn-out jacket. They had climbed out of the
soil, emerged, let the magic drop of fluid stretch their wings, then flown into
the swaying heights. He wondered how big this tree had been when she’d decided
not to climb. Again this year there were cast skeletons, still clinging to the
bark.
He’d
often thought about the lives of cicadas, how they were a part of his own
childhood, too, but not the same kind of part. His mother hadn’t died when he
was seven, and besides, in those days boys were supposed to be curious about
squirmy things—toads, snakes, various “bugs”—but girls were supposed to be
afraid. While he and a friend would spend the night with a flashlight watching
the cicada emerge from its nymphal case, waiting for the wings to unfold and
harden, saying to one another “if you touch it now, it’ll never fly,” she would
lie in the afternoon back bedroom, surrounded by old furniture, listening to
the rise and fall of the cicada’s song, then the chorus of chirring, and wonder
if her mother was in Heaven. For him, the insects were creatures of the night,
the secret climb onto rough walls, or limbs, the agonizing ecdysis, the dark
hours of soft flightless vulnerability, with finally the rattling dash into
hiding, clutched beneath a twig high in the elms, when there were still elms in
the city, with the morning warmth. His midnight flashlight, trained until the
batteries died on the persistent imago, symbolized his relationship with the
natural world. His excitement came with doing something nobody else did: watch the “locusts” at night, see them in
important times, do what the birds could not do, peel away the protective
darkness, watch the acquisition of flight, then smile, and go back to his
bedroom while the world slept, stole, killed, writhed under the covers, and
called it life, and ponder for a while before sleep the discoveries he’d made
the hundredth time.
But
for her, cicadas were creatures of the day, the afternoon, and they were
markers of major events in human lives. She would never hear another one
without expecting a change, usually one she could not control. She had an
expression, a look of the past; she was the vulnerable one, the receiver, the
one who responded; her thoughts were made by what happened to those around her.
Thirty years, and if she lived that long sixty or seventy years, could go by,
and anyone who’d been with her that summer in Woodward would be taken back
there by the look on her face when she heard the cicadas. It’s all gone, said
the look, my childhood, my aunt and uncle, the farm, the physical assurance of
a grandmother, and a mother, the carefree happiness of a little girl, the
caring in times of sorrow, gone into the Oklahoma wind, gone with the leaves,
paint on the barn, all gone except the cicadas. She never wanted things to change.
She wanted to stay a child, her own children to stay children, her parents to
stay alive, and her aunts and uncles. She did not like death, did not consider
it educational. But the world would not wait for her. The grinding politics of
war, starvation, the clearing of vast forests, rivers sucked dry, chemicals
poisoning the soil, drugs, schoolboy bullets in their classmates’ brains,
tangled shards of steel and blood and broken glass along the highway, missiles
in a silo on the prairie, the hopeless clash of race, of religions, all came to
her in an endless parade of “news.” It never ended, this mess made of a lone
world drifting in the hollow arm of the galaxy. The cicadas sang. She did not
want to go where the songs took her. The journey would erase all that had gone
wrong since she was seven years old, but the songs would also erase all that
had gone right. From the paradox came
the look on her face. The chirring in the heat said in falling rising
words: good and bad; only one with the
other.
Wandering
among the buildings, he took some pictures.
He knew they would not show what he had in his mind. In the negatives
there was never enough contrast for him, never a fraction of that he could see
in the gray boards, a rusted nail driven decades ago, the barbed wire hidden in
a tangle of wild plum, all telling him of the hardest work and the deepest love
for the land. The western prairies seemed to homogenize the landscape—one
farmstead was the next, low hills were places to see more low hills, tree-lined
creeks were snakes you passed while the radio played weather, local news, and
markets. But weather and markets were
the news. His contrast lay at a higher, more abstract, level, than his pictures
could show. Somehow, he thought, if a person could work at the higher level, he
could show the human experience on earth in a way that could not be seen
otherwise. The yin and yang were not really in the deep shadows behind bleached
boards of a loading chute; no, they lay in the constant battle of growth and
death in a fertile land of a dying culture, in the elusive subtle complexity of
a flat horizon over upright grass, in the native’s rich visual world against
the visitor shading his eyes in the glare, and in the timeless memories bound
so tightly to the calling of an insect.
They’d
walked through the buildings and empty pens together before she went inside to
talk to Aunt Ethel, and he and the girls, bored, wandered back into the yard. She’d
remembered the names of the cows. This hadn’t surprised him. She remembered
birthdays of nieces, nephews, towns where second and third cousins lived. He
didn’t have to ask whether she’d given the cows their names that summer when
she was seven. They’d all been named well in advance of her mother’s death. Ethel
was the kind of person who would name cows. They were female; they worked hard
to keep the family fed; they suffered in the drought and cold, the isolation;
they grew old and weathered; their late winter coats were tattered. They did
their duties, walked their paths worn, by habit and efficiency and their
burden, into the prairie sod. Yes, Aunt Ethel would have named them all. He
wondered if the cows answered when called, maybe hearing Ethel’s strained voice
through the blowing dust and turned their heads, trying hard to see. There were
no longer any cows in these buildings. Plowing ran nearly to the fence. Except for the homestead itself, the land was
leased. Ethel was free. Cicadas chirred. He called to the girls. He’d seen his
picture and he needed them.
The
driveway into the farmstead was dirt, or more properly, dust, sandy dust, in
this part of the country. Tracks curved away from the blacktop, from the gravel
on the shoulder where the mailbox stood, toward the woodlot, and then beneath
the giant cottonwoods where lower limbs dragged their umbrella of leaves on
small thin branches out over the lane. Late afternoon sun bounced off the sand,
made him shield his eyes as he looked from the highway to the house.
“Run
toward me, along the driveway. Race!” “Race” was a better word than “run,” at
least for a picture.
“Go!”
He waited until they were halfway to him, then pressed the shutter.
“Who
won?!” Breathless; laughing; yet, tense.
“I
forgot to look.”
Winning
had not been the purpose of this race. But in all fairness, they could not have
known that. He felt bad about not worrying who would win; he owed them the
judgement for their efforts. On the other hand, nobody had thought to mark a
finish line. Someone says “race” and off we go, not knowing where it will end,
then ask someone else if we won. He refused to dwell too long on this jaundiced
view of his world. They were on vacation. He was taking pictures of the family.
The philosophy could wait for coffee break at work. But the metaphoric dash
down Ethel’s driveway did not leave his mind gracefully. He turned his thoughts
to the negative, the print. He was not really a photographer; he had great love
for the negative, too little patience with the print. Maybe there was a lesson
in that situation, too. He needed a beer and a nap. He walked to the house and
got iced tea and a conversation about distant relatives instead.
The
print was eight by ten, on F5 paper, his own purposeful violation of some
photographer’s rule, or perhaps his own homage to an internal world of stark
contrasts. He did not care; he was no professional with a camera; he made his
living as a scientist and the image coming to him under the red safelight was
art. He waited until there were two, nearly black, silhouettes beneath an
equally dark cascade of boughs, shadows reaching out behind the running
figures, all against the glaring path of tire tracks. The girls had lost their
faces in his use of the chemicals, but the loss was somewhat of a gain. More
yin-yang, he thought, then filed away for future times alone with his art the
possibility that the western prairies were responsible for his mental
processes.
How
do people who live in the mountains think? he wondered. One mistake in the
mountains and you fall past layered geological epochs, the timeless earth itself
seeing you not as a person, but as one more potential fossil—Archeopteryx with a ballpoint in his
pocket. Is this why the Swiss make such fine watches? Do it carefully, with
precision, notice every small detail, if you are to live in the mountains? Unforgiving
land breeds watchmakers. But on the prairies you walk forever, fall, and only
the wind says try again, take another step, maybe you’ll get further this time.
Surely there is something to see on the prairies besides horizon and sky. The
baby learns to catch flowers, ridges carved by intermittent streams, grasses
lying low, and later the child watches geese, and such trees as are sculpted by
the wind. There are no watchmakers on the prairies, he decided; too many
options, too many opposite ways of seeing, too much change mixed with stability,
to even need a watch. At home he studied the dry print. My own children, he
said to no one, they’ve lost their faces in my use of light, chemicals on
paper, but they’ve gained a certain timelessness. Two sisters once again race
down a dusty path. The ancient cottonwoods smile to one another, and whisper: they’re
doing it again, they say, the girls are racing down the driveway, again.
He
was satisfied with what he’d done. They’d made the pilgrimage to the farm at Woodward,
satisfied someone’s need to convince herself that she’d survived her mother’s
death. He had looked around the place, wondered what there was to be recorded
for all eternity—was that not the reason you took a camera on vacation—and come
away with the reason they’d gone to Aunt Ethel’s in the first place. He could
look at the picture of his children and see in it his wife and her sister as
children dealing with a shattered world by racing down a couple of tire tracks
in the prairie while the cicadas chirred and the cottonwoods stood smiling. But
he had achieved nothing else.
That didn’t bother
him much; he understood himself well enough to know why he saved his most
serious thinking for black and white film. He was a person of inner contrasts: the
artist was always struggling with the scientist, the worker with the bum, the
radical with the reactionary. But for him the opposite of “right” was not
“wrong,” it was “many shades of right.”
The opposite of “wrong” was not “right,” but “wrong only in certain
ways, or at certain times.” He lived on a sliding scale of contexts. So he was
not a man of color. Color had a story all its own. Colors lived in a different
domain of reality from pure white light. So he was satisfied with his black and
white print of two girls running under the trees. He could look at the picture
and hear cicadas. But the prairie wind didn’t whistle through his picture, the
sand didn’t move, the miles of blowing grass said nothing to him, and he knew
why. Even as he smiled and said he didn’t care, he remembered the wind and the
horizon; they were in his mind. He didn’t need a picture.
* * *
In
the beginning was all the universe within a point, a dot, and then the dot
exploded. Fourteen billion years later, apes rise on their hind legs to think,
then do the math that allows them to look backward to the beginning, to write
books about the first three minutes, and the last three, and to predict the future
ten billion years away. In all their efforts to erase time, the scientists have
come full circle to the arts: their laws have shown a history. This is the way
things behave, they say, and by “things” they mean small mites of energy. Then
they build stars, and planets, on paper, and because they’ve built the planets,
they consider themselves to have also made the prairie winds, cottonwoods,
cicadas chirring on an August afternoon. But once a mind has shown eternity to
have a beginning and an end, then the brain has put itself in the same category
as fingers whose clutchings at a shutter make one picture, one and only one, a
phrase that sounds like math, or other theory. “Pretty,” or “powerful,” says
some critic, or color-coded for my living room she says with checkbook in hand,
but unique, he says from behind the lens, looking toward the edge of a vast land
where no one falls down very far, stretching straight and flat to a distant
horizon. The captured bit of time will be there for all to see, like a tiger in
the zoo, proof of striped cats afoot in the jungle, because we caught one and
put it in a cage. And how do we know the universe is old, that once it was
young, and that some day it will die? He caught a piece, with his camera, and
put it out for all to study. The piece he caught was there, once, and now is
gone. Like the cicadas, and her childhood, her mother, Aunt Ethel’s farm, the
cows, two sisters racing down a path, it is gone. But here in her hand, when
she looks at it, the chemicals on paper make her sad. And because she’s sad, he
knows the picture’s good.
Afterword:
This
piece was originally written for a book of photographs by John Spence, a local
artist friend and superb photographer. Virtually all of it is true. John walked
into my office one day, laid a large envelope of his photographs on my desk,
and asked if I would be interested in writing something to accompany them,
perhaps for submission as a coffee table type book. Of course I agreed to try
the writing without even looking at the pictures; I knew John and his work well
enough to say “yes.” Then I brought a stack of those photographs home for Karen
to see, and she did indeed sit down in her living room chair, carefully slip
her fingernail beneath the edges, and say “these make me sad.” With that
statement, I knew immediately how to write the essay. We had visited Aunt
Ethel’s farm at Woodward years earlier, and I had taken the photograph of our
two daughters racing down the driveway under the cottonwoods. And for each of
the fifty years that Karen and I have either been dating, or engaged, or
married, every time the cicadas start chirring in late summer, she comments
that the sounds remind her of that summer at Woodward after her mother died. So
this essay is actually about the tiny things that connect us with major life
events, the almost invisible threads that are woven into our lives from the
very beginning, and the way certain moments can direct our vision backward,
toward those very small details we accumulate over time.
The
Spence manuscript was written mostly in third person. I tried to put myself in
his mind when he took the pictures. In looking back on my writing, painting,
and scientific activities of the past six decades, trying to evaluate their
quality, what they actually say about the universe, that Spence manuscript
stands out as one of the pieces with which I am most personally satisfied. Naturally
it was rejected over and over again, and the photo-essay project never saw the
light of day. One of the essays in it did eventually get published, however,
appearing in my book Dunwoody Pond as
the chapter entitled “The Road to Roscoe.” Dunwoody
Pond gathered only three or four reviews, none of which was in my local
newspaper, The Lincoln Journal/Star. But
one of the DP reviews, I’ve forgotten
from where, singled out that chapter—“The Road to Roscoe”—as being “particularly
riveting.” Those two words seemed to validate my own assessment of the
material. I have been a guest speaker at gatherings where, while being
introduced, my host reads sections from that particular chapter. I am still very
satisfied with the Spence manuscript, regardless of its ultimate fate.
Someone is likely
to read this last paragraph then react in the cynical, sarcastic, way that
pseudo-intellectuals, especially those in positions of power, often react when
a writer claims that something is among his or her best work. Anyone who has
produced anything original, be it art, music, literature, or science, knows how
difficult it is to actually assess serious original work at the time it is
produced. And anyone who has produced an original work has first, if not the
only right to judge its quality. The quality, or lack thereof, that others
attribute to the work is all in the others’ minds or, some believe, in the
marketplace. Sometimes when students, especially the pre-meds, are
uncomfortable passing judgment on their own work, I suggest playing the role of
Dr. Paul Gachet in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, and imagining that during an
appointment with your patience Vincent van Gogh, he’s just declared “one of my
pictures will sell for $40 million.” Such a declaration would do nothing to
dilute your opinion that van Gogh was crazy. Remember, however, that van Gogh
thought Gachet was even crazier than he was.
The
Woodward farm is gone, now, at least as a family enterprise with which I have
any connection by marriage, although the land itself is still in production,
farmed by members of the large Campbell
family, next door neighbors for nearly a century. If a writer living throughout
the Great Plains has anything to say about his or her nation’s evolution from a
personal perspective, it’s a commentary on the demise of the family farm, not
so much as an economic unit, but as a cultural one. This claim may be a
stretch, but the cultural loss is, I believe, manifested in the majority of
today’s college students who are ignorant of rat, or for that matter any
vertebrate’s, internal anatomy and who are startled by what they find when they
dissect a freshly killed one in biology lab. Our vision of Farmer Jones in his
overalls, smiling in pastoral bliss beside his barn, is the stuff of old
children’s books. Nowadays, Farmer Jones may still be in his overalls, but individual
producers—farmers and ranchers—must become skilled accountants, diversify their
operations, and increase their holdings in order to maintain a family business
in any kind of healthy condition. The literal homestead as an ideal, a metaphor
for the American dream, is as gone as that day beneath the cottonwoods at Aunt
Ethel’s, but the concept remains, morphed into every entrepreneur’s startup
loan, remodeling of an old building, printing of stationery, and uncrating the
inventory. Indeed, this metaphorical homestead is almost a defining character
of a powerful nation founded by people seeking relief from religious
oppression, venturing across a treacherous ocean in surprisingly small ships,
and staking claim to a bountiful land occupied by aborigines. The very word
“American” carries with it an assumption of risk, adventure, and freedom to win
or lose at any of life’s games, no matter where those games are played, even
five miles south of Woodward,
Oklahoma.
The statistical disappearance
of the family farm, and the nuclear family committed to it on site, obtaining
all their sustenance from its activities, is well documented in United States
Census records from the past century. The land remains, of course, but use of
that land is increasingly mechanized and corporate. Between 1940 and 2000, the
number of American farms dropped from about 6.3 million to around 2
million—that’s a loss of four million individual businesses over the productive
lifetime of one farmer—while the average size of the remaining farms increased
from 140 acres
to 471. That documentation, the de facto
disappearance of people from vast regions of the central prairies, led to one
of our more interesting, relatively controversial, evolutionary ideas
promulgated by Deborah and Frank Popper, a couple of Easterners with PhDs and
described with a rather infective catchphrase: Buffalo Commons. The idea was perceived by many as simply allowing
this part of the world to return to its original state, but in fact the Poppers
saw a much larger process, a “softer” evolution of the prairie biome into a more
“natural” economic system in which bison could, if not should, play an economic
role.
The
life, experience, and as yet unfixed fate of this two-word phrase—Buffalo Commons—comprise a model for our
evolving nation, that is, a device for achieving a certain level of
understanding about the way our United
States of America operates. Although it’s a
somewhat roundabout approach to explaining why Buffalo Commons has such metaphorical staying power, we might begin
this explanation with the birth of Thomas Sidney Lucas on April 29, 1872, in Mt. Pulaski, Illinois.
Twenty years later, in Winfield,
Kansas, Thomas married Lillian
Marie Hoge, a year and four months his senior. Tom failed to stake a claim in
the 1893 land run, but he and Lily Lucas nevertheless established a homestead
in Woodward County, buying a 160 acre
“relinquishment” from a local “Mr. Horn.” Like many settlers, Tom quickly built
a one-room sod house in the northeast quarter of Section 23, Township 22 North,
and Range 21 West. Six children resulted from this marriage—Mildred, Claudie,
Ivan, Ethel, Emmett, and Evelyn, in that order; all must have helped with
chores and learned about birth, death, and weather from firsthand experience. Ethel
was born on September 18,
1897. She later married Ferris Campbell, one of the Woodward
Campbell clan’s many landowners, and moved to his farm east of the Lucas
property.
Evelyn, the
youngest, was born July 15,
1908. She eventually married Glenn T. Oneth, a mechanic from Jet,
Oklahoma (2000 population, 230, including 113 males and 117 females), with whom she produced three girls—Dolores,
Karen, and Wanda Sue, in that order—then died in surgery for an intestinal
blockage in El Reno, Oklahoma, on March 14, 1948. Evelyn was 40 years old at
the time of her death. When Evelyn died, Karen, Wanda Sue, and Dolores were
sent to Aunt Ethel and Uncle Ferris’ farm. There the western prairie’s
crackling summer dryness would stamp its unforgiving mark on Karen’s memories. Never
again would she see the smoke-green sage without saying “that reminds me of
Aunt Ethel’s.” Then John Spence would go out into a rural prairie landscape,
take some photographs, and bring them to Karen’s husband’s office. These
pictures would find their way home, into her lap, where she would look at them
one by one, holding them by their edges so as not to smear the surface,
slipping a fingernail behind the one she was studying, then slowly pulling it
toward her to see the next, and saying “These make me sad.”
The term Buffalo Commons has legs because of its
power to bring back such memories. The idea of returning vast regions of the
Great Plains to wilderness, presumably occupied only by bison, prairie dogs,
coyotes, rattlesnakes, meadowlarks, pocket gophers, a dozen species of
perennial grasses, cottonwoods and willows along the stream beds, and red-tailed
hawks, is an intriguing one, especially to people who don’t live in rural Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, eastern Colorado,
or the Dakotas. Those of us in this part of
the country still tend to think of ourselves in terms of this wildlife
occupying our signature landscape, even if that landscape is found only in a
nature preserve far outside of town. But a 532 mile drive from Crete,
Nebraska, to Willis, Oklahoma, a drive I take every year as part of my job,
does not necessarily reveal a disappearing rural America. Instead, there is a
defined set of houses, outbuildings, machinery, silos, and livestock pens, all
landmarks that tie the Buffalo Commons into a single unit, at least in the mind
of a person taking this trip. Some of these structures need paint; others have
been painted recently. Children’s ride toys suggest changes in the lives of
residents rarely seen as I pass their homes at a mile a minute. Over the years,
mailboxes acquire stylized purple cat heads; the kid who once used that ride
toy now goes to Kansas
State University
and his ride toy is probably a full-sized pickup. Once in a while there is a
yellow ribbon tied around a tree. Someone has gone to war.
People are in fact
living and working in this vast, open, water-challenged, environment. The
infrastructure that allows these lives to be pursued would be considered
science fiction by Lillian (Hoge) and Thomas Lucas, Aunt Ethel and Uncle Ferris,
could these folks suddenly be resurrected and plopped down in the Buffalo
Commons armed only with their knowledge and experience earned at the hands of
the Kincaid Act. As a minimum, that infrastructure consists of genetic research
on strains of wheat, genetically engineered seed corn, computer programs to
control center pivot sprinklers, the global commodities market and political
machinations that control it, startup biotech companies, pesticide chemists
battling insect resistance (itself strong evidence for evolution), a highly
complex set of agricultural subsidies and regulations negotiated by elected
officials whose first hand knowledge of rural America is, at best, lost in
childhood, the prime interest rate, a food processing industry so intensely
competitive that it almost redefines the word, dietary fads, and an occasional
cow exhibiting symptoms of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a single animal
that can set off a world-wide economic blaze not unlike that real fire started
by one of Kate O’Leary’s five, all of which, we must surmise, were named, but
none of whose names survive. Were they still alive, Ferris Campbell and Tom
Lucas would be on the Internet daily and their respective wives might well be
owners of a cottage information technology company.
Within minutes, if
not seconds, Ferris and Tom, plunked down at their new laptops with itheir 500GB
hard drives, 16GB memory, and 2.66GHz processors (by the time you read this,
these figures will be passé!) could easily discover that the very term,
“Buffalo Commons,” and the idea it conveyed, had already morphed into a variety
of forms: a serious attempt to actually produce one (Great Plains Restoration
Council), a McCook, Nebraska, folk arts and storytelling festival, a futuristic
sci-fi military command, a mathematical exercise in the solving of complex and
ill-defined problems developed by Bernard Hollister, an Illinois Mathematics
and Science Teacher Academy Master Teacher who “passionately believed that a
teacher's role is to stimulate the natural curiosity of students to
investigate, question and learn,” and copyrighted by the Illinois Mathematics
and Science Academy's Center for Problem-Based Learning, a birding tour guide
industry, a “weblog devoted to books, authors, and readers on the Great Plains
of North America,” along with links to booksellers’ own web pages, a bison
hunting operation with a professional guide, a title of a poem, an Oklahoma
geographer’s assertion that he’d originated the idea, an anti-bio-terrorist
training exercise conducted by the North Dakota Department of Health, and a
Virginia Wesleyan Student’s description of the difficulty of solving this
problem in a class designed to teach problem solving in general. What is this
problem that seems such an ideal teaching device? It is the problem of how to
manage essential natural resources in a wise manner at the national level in
the modern world. Everyone has an idea; nobody, not even a student at a small
university, has a solution acceptable to all. That’s why Buffalo Commons has, as they say in the advertising business, legs.
John Spence took
his photographs before the Poppers published their idea.
