Prairie Fire!

Our volunteer crew had just left when Larry Shaffer called and said he's be right over to light our prairie on fire. It was late Sunday afternoon, and we'd been trying to get a fire going for weeks. We'd get everything arranged, and it would snow. Or rain. Or there would be high winds.

But suddenly the cndidtions were perfect, and Larry was on his way with a helper and some water-backpacks and other equipment. Michael got on the phone and called our neighbor Scott, who had his own burning equipment, and then they all headed out to start a fire.

Comrade Mao said it only took a spark to start a prairie fire. That's true. But conditions have to be right; that single spark does not ignite a wet prairie, or a green one either. Last week, the prairie remnant on the hill across from the house was way too wet to burn. Another week, and it would be too green to burn. There is a narrow window every spring when the prairies in Wisconsin can be burned. And then, everything depends on the weather. Mostly, it's been too wet for the fire to catch. Sunday, it seemed too windy to burn safely, but Larry is a pro, and we'd cut firebrakes that had passed DRN inspection.

So the fire was set. And hour later, the hill across from the house was black where the fire had charred off the brush. Prairie plants, which co-evolved with fire, have deep roots and will flourish if burns discourage invasive plants. Within a week, everything was greening up nicely. It did take only a single spark to light that prairie fire--a spark, and perfect conditions.

The Spirit of Place

Years ago, regional writers used to talk about the "spirit of place" and how it informed their work. I came of age as a writer in the midst of that conversation, which has continued to influence my thinking about the arts. I spent most of my life in Alaska, so the "place" I considered was the subarctic, the taiga region where the northern forest meets the tundra. I remember many bitter conversations with other writers there about how writers from New York were imagined as writing about life, while we were supposed to write about moose. Now I love moose as much as the next person, but moose are oddities, queer unlikely beings, to someone who sees pavement as normal. How could one capture that "spirit of place" so the New Yorker (person and publication) might hear our voices?

Lately I have begun to revisit the idea of "spirit of place." Having just read Jennifer Larson's fabulous book, "Greek Nymphs," which deals with the way ancient Greeks saw places as being literally spirit-filled, each having its own nymph, I wonder if the spirits in question are not merely aesthetic constructs but something resembling semidivine beings.

Places speak, if we listen. The voice of a bog seems dramatically different than the sound of a mountain. But what is speaking? Perhaps the joined breaths of all the beings that live in that place: sparrows, little rabbits, worms, deer, raccoons. All breathing out and breathing in, and the plants breathing in reverse, filling the air with oxygen as they respire, slowly in winter, pantingly fast in bright summer. Oaks, goldenrod, morels, blackberries. In another place, lichen and crows, heather and otters. Each place a unique community, tied by breath in space.

In our endangered world, place seems no longer a regional literary concept, a matter for discussion among those whose poems are peopled by moose rather than pigeons. Describing the hallowed sense of place was part of the craft of storytellers from the earliest human times. We need to now recover that simple craft and tell again the stories of the many precious places we know.

Worming through spring

My friend Liam studies soil megafauna.

In a word: worms. A soil scientist from Dublin, Liam studies the way that worms interact with various soil microorganisms. I’ve learned a bit about worms from Liam, most interestingly that all Midwestern worms are immigrants, having arrived here (slowly, one imagines) after the last glacial period, some 10,000 years ago.

The Driftless Area in which Brigit Rest is located was not glaciated during that period, nor during the previous three eras of glaciation, hence the regional name that refers to the absence of the ground-down rocks or “glacial drift” found in other Midwestern soils. Liam had a theory that there might be worms of ancient lineage, too, on the land. So we conducted a science experiment one summer afternoon. Liam brought the equipment: a bottle of formaldehyde, a box made of thin but heavy metal, and some dry mustard. With his young sons watching gleefully, we mixed the mustard with water, pushed the wood into the soil, and poured the mustard-water over it.
Within a few moments, worms writhed forth from the soil, unfortunate little mustard-gassed soldiers. Liam grabbed them with a long tweezers and popped them into bottle of formaldehyde, where their writing instantly ceased. “Martyrs to science,” he called them.

We tested a few locations—in the woods, in the grass, under a big oak—but always with the same results. We caught the same immigrant worms found in Illinois and other glaciated Midwestern states. Perhaps those pre-glaciation species are there, squirming around making soil beneath our feet, but we can’t prove it.

I have been thinking about worms a lot this spring, because I have been gardening a lot. We are establishing a new vegetable patch, which entailed plowing up a huge stretch of lawn. Mulch paths are helping keep down the weeds that erupt from the newly-exposed soil, but in the vegetable beds themselves, I’m on my knees every weekend with my little trowel, digging.

I have been reading about no-till gardening, and it sounds a worthy aim. I’ve always wondered whether tearing apart the soil fabric was really conducive to soil health, and the idea of using mulch and hand-pulling to keep down weeds (rather than the yearly rototilling) seems sensible. I was especially interested in the question of whether tilling disturbs the soil microfauna, especially the fungi that live in mycorrhizal relationship with plants, helping their large green friends absorb nutrients from the soil.

But I didn’t start reading about the no-till approach until the plowing was already done and the fungal colonies thoroughly dislodged. I have no doubt that many worms died in the preparation of the new garden. This year, such disruption of the land bothers me, because I have been following the frightening progress of the colony collapse disorder that has stricken American honeybees. Thinking of bees and worms, I ponder the importance of the small beings of our world.

Bees, worms—the “eek” and “ish” factors come into play when we think of these insects. They are not cute like pandas or awesome like polar bears. But they weave the web of our world. And they feed us: worms creating the soil in which our food plants grow, bees pollinating them to bring us fruit and seeds. Unless something happens to them, we ignore them. We never, for instance, give thanks to the worms when we pray over dinner.

Perhaps we should. As I’ve been gardening this spring, I’ve sent grateful thoughts to the worms that build our soil. I've kept my eyes open for them in my digging and move them to another part of the row rather than risking plunging my trowel through their muscleless bodies. I think of how human life is held together by these seemingly simple and unevolved creatures who have occupied our soil since the time of the dinosaurs.

Humble things, worms. Yet without them, our soil would become rock-hard. Corn would wither, trying to grow from the stony soil. Forests would fall, and erosion would gouge great canyons through the land. In the new and sterile world, who would know that it was the loss of the humble earthworm that wreaked such a catastrophe?

"I don't care if it ever snows again."

It was a rainy gray day in December, and we were in an antique store in Ohio. We brushed the rain from our coats as we entered, greeted by an effusive elderly clerk.

“Nasty weather,” she said. “But at least it’s not snowing. Me, I don’t care if it ever snows again.”

I smiled as warmly as I could, but I didn’t respond. She was friendly, in a rather needy way, complaining at length about recent medical problems while we prowled about the store. I didn’t want to be disagreeable, but her opening comment bothered me. That was because the weather bothered me. Mid-winter, and there had been little snow in the midwest. The Japanese quince in front of our house was confusedly putting out tiny leaves. Meanwhile the television weather reports told us “another nice day ahead, so enjoy the warm weather!”

We had come into the shop looking for books from the Little Leather Library. Neither of us had ever heard of the series before that week, when Michael’s sister gave us a tiny edition of the first mythologically-based play by William Butler Yeats, “Land of Heart’s Desire.” We were both charmed by the tiny book, about 3 inches square. We sat cozily beside the fire reading the play aloud to each other, delighting in the fantasy of an Irish Beltane night where fairies hear the wild and reckless heart of a young bride and come to steal her away to their own land:

The wind blows out of the gates of the day,
The wind blows over the lonely of heart,
And the lonely of heart is withered away;
While the faeries dance in a place apart,
Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring,
Tossing their milk-white arms in the air;
For they hear the wind laugh and murmur and sing
Of a land where even the old are fair,
And even the wise are merry of tongue;
But I heard a reed of Coolaney say--
When the wind has laughed and murmured and sung,
The lonely of heart is withered away.

Closing the tiny book with an appreciative sigh, we set out to find out more about the Little Leather Library. We found that the Library was Albert Boni’s idea; he left to found the Modern Library, with the same general mission. His partners, Harry Scherman and Maxwell Sackheim, kept the Little Library going for a dozen years but ultimately closed it down to start the Book-of-the-Month Club. Between 1914 and 1923, perhaps 40 million Little Leather Library books were manufactured. First they were sold at Woolworths’ “five-and-dime” stores, then through mail order in sets; sometimes they found their way into cereal boxes as premiums. In a standard format, at a very inexpensive price ($3 for 30), readers could get not only Yeats but George Bernard Shaw, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and of course Dante and Shakespeare. For literally pennies, great literature was made available to ordinary readers.

Today, you can still find tiny books on the wall racks as you approach the counters at chain bookstores, offering whatever the gods of commerce deem appealing: diet tips, astrology hints, humor. A far cry from Dante and Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw and Alfred Lord Tennyson, all of whom the Little Leather Library offered its readers.

The project had some flaws that are obvious from the 21st century viewpoint. The literature was entirely by DWEMs (Dead White European Men). A couple of the authors were still breathing, but dead was more typical, because the publishers could avoid paying royalties by using what was in the public domain. The white, European, and male parts were important, too, because at the time the literature of that ethnic and gender grouping was considered to be universally true and appealing.

That (albeit large) problem notwithstanding, the Little Leather Library inspired us. Why should publishers assume that readers or listeners will not find inspiring literature appealing? Why not package such work as cheaply as possible, so that anyone can have access?

Today, the internet offers the possibility of sharing literature widely at little cost; at Black Earth Institute, we are working on projects to do just that. But we must take seriously the challenges that we face today; simply promoting “good work” is not enough. The literature (and, eventually, other arts) needs to be of the sort that the German poet Ranier Maria Rilke wrote about when he described the magnificent “archaic bust of Apollo” that brings to us, as a message from its beauty, “you must change your life.”

The clerk who found the small collection of Little Leather Library books is a typical American. She would be surprised, I suspect, to learn that polar bears are dying of starvation as they try to swim between increasingly distant ice floes; she would probably be surprised to learn that her (and our) consumption habits are to blame. Poets and other artists can help her make the connection. But where and how is she to hear their words? Through a podcast? In a musical setting? In some new version of the Little Library? We’re looking for answers to that question.