The Northern Steppes

A couple of years ago, I was driving back from Bismarck, and I thought I couldn’t take another day of the bleak brown and gray winter landscape, one drab, colorless, tawny hill after another, with gray clouds like suffocating pillows that stanched my soul. Then spring sprang. Glorious spring arrived in full flower a few days later in a tumultuous green, blooming with green, green, green. Oh, life itself was restored! Such are the northern steppes of the United States.


Today, with a soft, sleety rain falling, I know that the prairie crocuses and daffodils and irises are quivering below ground with anticipation for the air and sun and the freedom of these great plains. Transformation is just a few days, or a few weeks away. One day, I will look outside and they will have punched their way through the hard ground, and in so short a time, they will totter on their tender stems in the breeze, dancing with happiness.


I first visited here a few years ago, at the beginning of a September, on a kind of vocation vacation. We were rooting out potatoes in the garden one afternoon. I was bent over in the dirt, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a golden dome shining brightly in the afternoon sun. I thought it must be a building of some sort nearby, maybe a temple. I later realized that it was a hill of sparkling, golden wheat—magical in my eyes, a hill robed in wheat, majestically simple and abundant with promise.