Celebrating The Emptied Prairie, Again
Published by gwen March 25th, 2008 in North Dakota People. Tags: No Tags.Clay Jenkinson, a well known scholar who sometimes portrays Thomas Jefferson, is celebrating North Dakota’s Emptied Prairie. In a recent column, Jenkinson (who was born and raised in North Dakota) said this:
At a time when there is more clamor in America for open space than ever before, we North Dakotans have open space in glorious, stupendous abundance, almost in infinite supply. If I were the state tourism department, that’s what I’d try to sell to the rest of the world. Come to North Dakota to have it “all to yourself.” Commune with “Nature and Nature’s God” (as Jefferson formulated it). In the great circle of land and sky that is North Dakota (America’s true Big Sky Country), you can stand alone between the Earth and the end of the universe and … pray, shout down the gods, dance to the music of the spheres, listen to the wind, rehearse your proposal, cry for your losses, put your fingers in the ground, recall (or reinvent) your life. But if you just shut up and look around in wonder, the sheer vastness of the Great Plains will swallow you up in all the right ways and you will ask some big questions before you get back to town.
I’ve never had my own feelings regarding ND’s open spaces put so eloquently.
North Dakota has enough room for dreams as well as for the people who dream them. That’s worth celebrating.
On our honeymoon, we stayed Ann & Alistair in Scotland. During their visit to the US in 1998 they traveled by train from Washington to Illinois. I think I was sharing some thoughts about living in South Dakota after living in mountainous Idaho most of my life.
Dear Alistair said he loved traveling through the plains, that in that wide, open space your mind just opened up, spread out. Now I know what he means.
I love to get out in the middle of nowhere and look around, exploring backroads and such. That’s where a lot of my photography comes from!
One thing unique to American culture is the cross-country automobile trip. Those voyages “into the great wide open” are why American cars in the 60s and 70s developed into big land barges, with spacious passenger accomodations and enormous trunk compartments. Contrast that with the little econo-boxes that developed in Europe, with narrow streets and shorter journeys.
My little boys are too young to enjoy (or remember) a family vacation, but when the time comes we will be going by car. To fly over the USA is to miss its best parts. And it’s hard to pull over and enjoy the occasional roadside oddity!
Clint
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