What’s the Real Tumbleweed Capital?

Several years ago, mom gave me a sweatshirt advertising Hooker, Oklahoma, as the Tumbleweed Capital of the world. After a recent drive across the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandle, I’m certain Hooker is not the only center point of Russian thistle abundance. Winds that day blew an average of 40 mph so we saw droves of prickly Russian immigrants racing pell-mell across three states. Fence lines trapped enough to fuel miles of potential prairie fire. Clearly, this transplant’s adjusted well to arid western soils.

These herbaceous invaders adapted to the Great Plains environment better than many homo sapien immigrants who hit American shores during the same era. The tumbleweed’s human counterparts often left for easier pickings that included more moisture and less wind. This forb, however, took root and multiplied like creatures mentioned in biblical plagues. It prefers disturbed soil—so farmers breaking virgin grassland and then abandoning their efforts unintentionally supported the hardy newcomer. Aridity doesn’t hurt them, and winds strong enough to deform trees and make flags fly at 90 degree angles guarantees each plant sows its 250,000 seeds.

Think of that--one plant produces several hundred thousand potential offspring. Scientists have documented how many actually take root, mature, and reproduce. By the 1890s, researchers reported the first of these Ukrainian hitchhikers arrived in Scotland, South Dakota, in the 1870s. Before 1900, the government assigned U.S. botanist Lyster Hoxey Dewey to investigate this curse to western agriculturists. Dewey, wrote, “The rapidity with which the Russian thistle has spread, both in infesting new territory and in thoroughly covering that already infested, far exceeds that of any weed known in America.” According to writer Doug Main, the only two states that don’t have tumbleweeds are Alaska and Florida. That’s a record-breaking invasion!

The day I drove across the Panhandle, herds of rolling thistles bounded over barbwire fences, surging across roads. This dark force made me think of millions of roaming bison 150 years ago. Due to sheer size, these mammals halted train travel. The tumbling seed-sowers I encountered didn’t halt traffic, but they slowed it.

Due to wind speeds, thorny orbs, small and large, rocketed across flat grasslands. I was glad to travel protected in a vehicle and not afoot like pastured cattle or wild critters. A thistle scouring of this magnitude would leave a being picking stickers for weeks. Unfortunately, these dried plants came in numbers so enormous I couldn’t avoid whacking one after another and dragged several beneath my vehicle until friction shattered and scattered them.

While I smacked some, others slammed into the sides of my Toyota hard enough I felt vibrations through the steering wheel. I’d like to think these collisions halted their seed dispersion, but that’s a vain wish. In fact, I’ve probably introduced Oklahoma thistle DNA to Kansas varieties.

Hookerites may disagree, but that sweatshirt’s claim to fame limits the scope of this invasive plant. The entire Great Plains is the Tumbleweed Capital of America.

Join the Club

The calendar just rolled over to 2016, and it’s tradition to make resolutions. If your resolution involved more reading, joining a book club, or learning about the place where you live, then you might want to google http://hppr.org/programs/join-hpprs-radio-readers-book-club, and sign up.

Unbeknownst to many, committed employees of High Plains Public Radio in Garden City devote their days to connecting High Plains occupants with one another and the world. Obviously, they transmit public radio standards, including A Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, All Things Considered, The Thomas Jefferson Hour, and other shows recorded in cities far from our hometown. However, this station continues adding local programming. This creative team appeals to varied interests with     Learning the Birds, Growing on the High Plains, High Plains Outdoors, Ad Astra—Star Gazing on the High Plains, Agland, High Plains History, Prairie Tayles, Amarillo Symphony, Living Room Concerts, and the soon to be introduced Radio Readers Book Club.

After months of volunteer efforts to fine tune details involving webpages, study guides, discussion leaders, funding, book selections, forums, and more, the project launches soon--in January or February. If you enjoy meaty discussions with the likeminded or not-so-likeminded, sign up and order the texts from either your library or bookstore.

This spring’s theme is Sense of Place. Each selection explores landscape’s importance in human development. Anyone with a local address knows that living in the sparsely populated, arid high plains presents unique challenges, so the topic is worth examining. The initial books include the fiction, non-fiction, and memoir titles: Plainsong, Empire of the Summer Moon, and A Strong West Wind. Despite being different genres, each delves into the influence of place.

The first piece is the novel Plainsong by Kent Haruf. He set the interweaving stories in a small town in eastern Colorado. It’s similar to scores of communities bordering blue highways that connect the dots between grain elevators whose verticality breaks our never-ending horizon. Regional readers will recognize the teachers, farmers, adolescents, schools, quick stops, red cedars, dusty roads, and concerns that constitute his tale of small town existence. In simple, lyrical language, Haruf captures the essence of this landscape of waving grass, endless vistas, red cedars, and never neutral weather.

Empire of the Summer Moon takes us into the not so distant past when the southern part of this region was home to the Comanche who thrived in the most difficult parts of this expanse. It offers a sympathetic view of nomadic inhabitants who loved this landscape every bit as much as those who later homesteaded, built towns, and plowed the native grasses in order to farm the land. It peeks into native and white cultures to explore ideological differences that led a no win situation. Though it’s non-fiction, it’s an engaging read that leaves the reader mulling long after finishing the final page.

Gail Caldwell’s A Strong West Wind is memoir—a narrative based on her life in West Texas. A baby boomer, she offers a perspective of the developing agriculture and oil industries during the post war 50s and turbulent 60s. Readers respond positively to her introspective writing that explores the roll of landscape in a youngster’s development.

Through these stories and those coming next fall, High Plains Public Radio connects readers who call this contradictory landscape home. Participants may live a distance from one another, but using technology and airwaves,they can practice a new kind of neighborliness in this creative approach to a book club.