Category: Art

Last night WeatherGirl [Flickr] [blog] and I learned that four of our submissions (two each) were juried into a regional exhibition. The show "Horizontal Grandeur" is being hosted by the Stevens County History Museum will open with a fancy reception on Friday, 13 July, at 6:30pm. The theme was the prairie that is our home here, with the name taken from an essay by the same name by Bill Holm.

The top two are from WeatherGirl (who needs to post more of her excellent photos!): "The only trees were wavy lines" (a line from Holm’s essay) and Silo. The bottom two are mine: Fighting back (Tilting at windmills?) and Waiting.

WeatherGirl and I obviously stretched the prairie theme a fair bit in our submissions. It wasn’t obvious how the judges were going to respond, and I was pleasantly surprised that they accepted four of our six submissions. All four of these photos emphasize in different ways the huge changes wrought on the prairie by arrival of European Americans.

The settlement of this part of the world brought plows that replaced the seemingly endless (and treeless) oceans of prairie plants with the contemporary landscape: rows of corn and soybeans. That settlement was greatly accelerated by the building of the railroads, which brought settlers and carried their grain back east. Morris, like so many of the towns here, was built by the railroad companies (and named after a railroad engineer), providing a place to drop off and pick up both people and goods. Sadly, passenger traffic ended decades ago, but the freight trains still rumble through, carrying coal, grain (stored in the silos that steadily puncuate the landscape), heavy goods and (more recently) ethanol produced from local corn.

To grow all that grain requires good soil (which the settlers found in abundance once they learned how to break the prairie sod) and water. Rain isn’t an entirely reliable source here (we’re fairly dry), so wells were sunk and acquifers are pumped out onto the fields. If, as some predict, climate change leads to drier weather here (like the very hot and dry July/August last year), then more and more irrigation will be brought to bear. Acquifers, however, aren’t infinite…

The settlers also brought trees, for decoration and fruit and shade and wind breaks. Many of the early boulevard trees in the midwest were elms, which are now being decimated (such as the one on the top left) by dutch elm disease.

Going through pictures to consider for submission, it became clear to me that I really don’t have much in the way of prairie photographs. There are some nice patches of largely undisturbed (whatever that actually means) prairie around here, but I’ve never gone out and photographed any of them seriously. I’ve got lots of shots of native flowers from our gardens, but little to nothing from the "wild". I should try to fix that this summer.

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