year earlier, approaching Eastend from the south, we’d been ushered into town by coyotes, distorted forms caught in the headlights’ glare. Now, arriving from an approximately opposite direction, we found ourselves in the company of a troupe of Ice Age hills, their ancient energy held in suspended animation. And more strangeness was in store as we rounded the final bend and rolled down into the wide bottomlands of the Frenchman River valley. Instead of proceeding into town as we had expected, we appeared to be heading straight for an earthwork of ridges and conical, turretlike hills that blocked the view ahead. At the very last minute, the road jogged left, discovered a gap, and delivered us into town and onto the main drag. A sign announced that we had entered the Valley of Hidden Secrets.
Our new house was essentially perfect as found. Built in the early 1970s, it featured mahogany-fronted cabinets, complete with copper-trimmed knobs, and a planter-knickknack-and-book-shelf combo that was straight out of my teenage years. Even the crimson carpet in the bedroom—“This will need to be updated,” the real-estate agent who showed us the place had told us solemnly—exuded a shabby, retro charm. The real glory of the place, however, was not its stylish accoutrements but what in a more competitive market might have been written up as its “prime location, surrounded by parks.”
Our place was at the very end of the street, on the outermost edge of town. Beyond the back fence, across the alley, lay the bend of the Frenchman River where young Wallace Stegner and his friends had once congregated to swim. To the north lay a wide grassy field, really a floodplain, that was bounded by a sweeping arc of the stream and housed the town’s baseball diamonds and campground. Past these amenities and across the creek, the land rose up and away from us in a choppy sea of conical mounds, intercut by coulees and shadowed by a tangle of chokecherries and rosebushes. The wide prairie world was right there, on the other side of the wall, just begging for us to come out and continue our explorations.
Strangely, however, the house turned a blind eye to this view. Although there were openings in every other direction, east, west, and south, the entire north wall was windowless. We were loftily critical of what we saw as an aesthetic error, until someone pointed out that the previous owners might not have looked at the scene through quite the same lens as us. The Taylors—we knew their name from a decorative knocker affixed to the front door—had been ranchers who spent summers somewhere up in the hills and retreated to this house in the fall, much as the Stegners had done a generation before. (All this we gleaned from conversations with our new neighbors.) Perhaps, like coastal fishing families who face their homes away from the sea, the Taylors had preferred to turn their backs on the prairie and its lethal winter storms. Keith and I, by contrast, were mere visitors, in the country though not yet of it. Regardless of wind and weather, the prairie was calling to us and we were eager to open ourselves to its wide horizons.
In remarkably short order, we had cajoled a local contractor into ordering a picture window (four-paned to echo the four-paned knickknack shelves in the room divider) and inserting it into our living room wall. Now, with our brand new secondhand love seat positioned directly in front of the glass, we could sit side by side and gaze out at the scene: from the bare symmetry of the poplar tree in the foreground to the dense scrawl of bushes along the river and then up, layer by layer, fold upon voluptuous fold, to the bony haunches of the hills that loomed over the town. Sometimes, we watched as small herds of white-tailed deer grazed on the flats along the stream bank or held our breath as they circled close, doe eyed and fleshy, and walked under our windowsill. Above them, against a leaden sky, the snowy hills told the hours in shadowed pools of blue that spread and deepened and finally merged into the darkness.
And then it was spring, and life settled into a pattern that has served us well ever since. Although we spend most of our time in the city, we make a point of getting to Eastend at least once a month. During the university term, when Keith is occupied with lectures and meetings, we usually only manage three or four days at a time, but in summer, when the pressure is off, we often have the luxury of settling in for a span of weeks. Over the years, the balky old van to which we owe our Eastend adventure has given way to more reliable wheels, and the dogs who accompanied us on our early travels have all died and been replaced, sometimes in super-abundance. These days we are accompanied by two retrievers in the back seat and two dachshunds up front, with Calla the cat wedged in somewhere or other. In recent years, for longer stays we have rounded out the menagerie with two quarter horse geldings, Tanner and Tex, whom we tug along behind us in a horse trailer.
By the time we have reached our destination, delivered the horses to their rented pasture (an idyllic valley with a spring-fed creek), and settled in, Keith and I are usually content to sit and stare out our new window for an hour or two. But before long, the view, plus a barrage of canine entreaties, lures us out the door. Sometimes, we stroll down the back alley and across a narrow margin of grass to stand on the cutbank and gaze down into the slow, syrupy water of the Frenchman River. As a student of Wolf Willow, I know that Wallace Stegner stood on this very spot when he visited town on a reconnaissance mission in the early 1960s (shyly, slyly, giving his name as Mr. Page), impelled by “the queer adult compulsion to return to one’s beginnings.” 1 And it was here, electrified by the “tantalizing and ambiguous and wholly native” musk of the wolf willow, that he reconnected with the “sensuous little savage” he had once been.2
For newcomers like us, however, the excitement is more immediate. Look, see that sudden shimmer down there in the water, by the old piling? It’s a beaver, a muskrat; no, it’s a mink, swimming upstream, impossibly black and shiny. Or follow the river back toward our house and west around the first bend, no more than a hundred steps, and stop on the bank again. Do you hear a catbird mewing in the bushes; notice the kingbirds hawking for insects from the low, overhanging branches; see the swallows, lithe as fish, slicing through the air? Try to follow their acrobatics with your binoculars and all you’ll get is blur. Barn swallows, check. Bank swallows, check. Tree swallows, check. Northern rough-winged swallows, check. Violet-green swallows, check. Who would ever have guessed that they could be so swift, so blue, so varied, so alive? So thrilling.
“Biodiversity” is a bloodless term but here it was, on the wing. The wild tangle of life along the creek bank offered a moment of grace, exempt from decline and loss, in which beauty coexisted with abundance. As a student of grassland ecology, I knew that this was a rare and privileged experience, a dispensation from the ecological tragedy of the Great Plains grasslands. Back in the city, my office was strewn with reports that attempted to quantify everything that had been lost: number of acres given over to cultivation, percentage of wetlands drained, the extent to which prairie rivers have been channelized or curtailed. Other documents tallied the body counts of the disappeared and the dead—plains grizzlies, plains wolves, pronghorns, prairie dogs, prairie chickens, sage grouse—all the special creatures of the grasslands that are either long gone or grievously diminished in numbers.
Leading the list is the plains buffalo, known with scientific insistence as Bison bison bison, an animal whose hair was once woven into every bird’s nest, whose hooves aerated the tough prairie sod, and whose flesh fed tribes of hunters, both two- and four-legged. Massed into herds of hundreds and thousands, the buffalo flowed across the landscape, eating on the run, and creating a textured mosaic of grazed and ungrazed habitats. Diverse habitats for the prairie’s diverse organisms. Even the buffalo’s dung played a role by helping to sustain the invisible universe of the soil.
The special genius of the grassland ecosystem is its ability to ride the extremes of a midcontinental climate—a meteorological rollercoaster of blazing heat, brutal cold, sudden downpours, and decades-long droughts—by storing precious moisture and nutrients in the ground. As much as ninety percent of the biological activity in the grasslands takes place in the soil. When this life force puts up shoots, the vegetation may look meager and stunted, but it is bursting with energy. The power of the soil, the wind, and the rain is concentrated in every leathery shrub and every blade of sun-cured grass. Transferred up the food chain, this vitality takes on animal form and becomes manifest in the blue of a butterfly, the bright eye of a snake, the eerie voice of a curlew echoing over a lonely landscape.
But
