Kansas Day Dreaming

Windmills pull not only water up from below the earth but they also break a seemingly endless horizon to pull the eye toward heaven and optimism. In a stark, dry landscape, such attractions nurture not only bodies but also spirits. Just the memory of spinning blades drawing thin streams of cool water to spill into a tank is enough to send the mind back in time to recover damp earth scents and the sensation of green buffalo grass curling under bare feet. This ability to reclaim the past explains why so many paintings and photos of isolated windmills hang in Great Plains homes and galleries. This prairie icon means survival to anyone connected to this place for generations.

Wind has powered human life since early civilization. Confining it and making it work isn’t unique to Americans, but it has made homesteading and agriculture in Flyover country possible. Before these skinny towers lured  the eye upward from rolling waves of blue stem, Indian, and grama grasses, the arid nature of the place meant only nomadic people could survive here. Once Nathaniel Halladay invented the self-governing windmill, stickers—people who put down roots to stay through the good times and the bad—could claim homesteads and make dreams come true.

Once hopeful settlers declared the boundaries of their land, they drilled into the ancient underground lake beneath their feet to find water for themselves and their livestock. Those fortunate enough to tap into the aquifer no longer had to depend on live springs or the capture of unpredictable rains in a cistern. Where native occupants packed and moved when a water source vanished, this new technology permitted incoming settlers to create their own oases in what people east of the Mississippi called the Great American Desert.

This newly patented device promised more than it could deliver to many would-be ranchers and farmers who headed west to claim free land. Now days, poets, artists, historians, and the curious cruise dusty country roads to look for crumbling telltale towers silhouetted by collapsed ruins in the distance. Sometimes bullet-riddled vanes still spin in the wind, emitting a haunting banshee cry. Ironically, greenery growing at the base of these relics hints at still present underground treasure.

What these backroad wanderers find are stories written in dreams, sweat, and imported resources. Anyone who stops long enough to let their eyes wander over a former homestead in the middle of a current farmer’s wheat field or pasture has a decision to make. Do these ruins reveal the prelude to the lovely brick home and giant metal sheds up the road a few miles, or do they tell instead the sad tale of a forgotten family who left during hard times? Too often, the second version is the truth, but few of us find that romantic or memorable. We prefer the first, a tale of expectation and success.

Hope is what Halladay and his competitors’ windmills delivered and what makes them iconic prairie images even now. As long as some of us call these isolated plains home and long to remain here, someone will keep photographing or painting bent and tumbling towers that pierce the horizon and tell us dreams can come true.

What I Took for Granted

            For twelve years, I have enjoyed another person’s dream and labor, taking it for granted day after day and year after year.  In 1961, this man and his wife built a house, no—a home, overlooking Big Creek in far eastern Trego County.  Landscape influenced every decision that young family made as they positioned their home to welcome sunrise and enjoy sunset as well as view Big Creek and its abundant wildlife and trees. 

            From the first time I saw this then vacant house, I knew I wanted to call it home and savor its landscape.  I loved the well-planned southern shelter belt, the privacy surrounding cedars provided, as well as cottonwoods, locust, and ash trees winding along the nearby creek east and west of the house.

            Over the years, I learned where hawks, herons, mockingbirds, cardinals, wrens, and dove nested and looked forward each year to watching new families hatch and fledge.  I knew the pine where owls sometimes whispered love songs to one another.  I knew the cedar where squirrels ran to hide after they had ambushed our dogs. 

Each exit from and return to the drive at the top of the hill meant a three mile view of the creek west and east.  That winding belt of trees changed predictably with the seasons so we had pale then dark green belts that altered to yellow then orange and finally stark branches in winter. 

Like many folks, I take what I have for granted, and I assumed this beloved landscape would welcome me all the years I live here.  All that changed May 23 when a series of tornadoes not only destroyed many farmsteads in our neighborhood, but also the landscape that residents expected to see each morning. 

            So far, we have counted thirty-four uprooted trees the family who dreamed and built our farmstead planted by hand and cared for so they grew to protect this place.  The protection worked because the trees took the brunt of the storm and left our home dented but standing solidly in place.

            Mature trees along the creek a mile to the west and a mile to the east also fared poorly.  They now look like a snaggle-toothed hockey player smiling broadly.  Huge cottonwoods standing sentinel along the creek for decades snapped and shattered, leaving splintered arms and roots in grotesque supplication to the sky that first nurtured them, then splintered them.

            Sounds of humans cleaning up farmyards and fields pulse through the air as tractors, trucks, and saws clean up damage to buildings and shelter belts.  Soon the reverberation of building and repairing houses, barns, and outbuildings will replace the noise of tearing down and hauling away ripped and torn metal and wood.  

            The hawk nest and heron nests are gone as is the cedar that sheltered warring squirrels.  A new landscape formed not by a nurturing creek and warm sun, but by Mother Nature at her worst wends its way along the creek.  This landscape will not recover quickly with the artificial sounds of human tools.   Its silent replacement will come over decades, perhaps centuries.