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Not Just Any Land: A Personal and Literary Journey into the American Grasslands

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(from the Aug. 2004 issue of NCB News of Nebraska Center for the Book http://www.unl.edu/NCB/)

In the first sentence of the acknowledgements page, John Price states: "This is a memoir." But what follows in NOT JUST ANY LAND is not simple autobiography; it is more a combination of scholarly research, self-searching, and the time-honored method of using others' words to clarify his own thoughts about the region formerly known as prairie, what we call the Great Plains. This "memoir" is grassland exploration and ecology literature search at its best: Price cites over 65 authors in his bibliography.

Price traveled to South Dakota, Kansas and Iowa to discover what remained of the prairie, and in the process interviewed four writers whose books had spoken to him of the region. These writers - their varied views, stories and struggles - are the subjects of the four main chapters of the book: "Reaching Yarak: The Peregrinations of Dan O'Brien," "Not Just Any Land: Linda Hasselstrom at Home," "Native Dreams: William Least-Heat Moon and Chase County, Kansas," and "A Healing Home: Mary Swander's Recovery Among the Iowa Amish." Price's insightful questions and sense of humor make the book's subject highly accessible and memorable.

Great Plains enthusiasts, as well as those wanting to understand this often-overlooked region ("...where surprises can live and grow"), will delight in his extensive use of quotations from well-known writers such as Wendell Berry, Gretel Ehrlich, Wes Jackson, William Kittredge, Wallace Stegner and Terry Tempest Williams, to name just a few. Woven through the narrative in often lyrical passages is Price's own exploration of place, community, family history and an understanding of "...what it is that the land demands of us in our daily lives: the nature of responsibility."

Price, who grew up in north central Iowa, has written an important book about region that will be studied, discussed and enjoyed for years to come. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

This is an excellent regional history - social, biological and natural history - of the American plains.

John Price's voice is expansive and insightful, including his family connections to various spots in the middle plains states. It also is a look at just what it will take to ground him, via nature, in life. And, as a relatively recent husband, it is also a reflection on where that grounding will take place, and the give-and-take that will be involved with his wife.

As to the specifics of life on the plains, while finding much to celebrate once stereotypes are penetrated, stereotypes still have a fair degree of truth, as do cold, hard facts.

Racism and sexism can still be found in the Midwest, for example. They may be fading away, but they haven't disappeared.

Unfortunately, what has disappeared is untainted land. Take these eye-opening stats from Price's home state of Iowa, for example.

Just one-half of 1 percent of the land is in a pre-European natural state, the worst of any of the 50 states. Even worse, it is so farm-and-ranch chemical laden that only 20 percent of it can EVER be restored to that pre-contact state, it is estimated, citing Richard Manning's "Grassland."

Can we change to something more sustainable? That question, too, gets pondered in this book, and from different angles.

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Two caveats on matters historical and botanical.

First, the Quapaw and Caddo lived in the southern plains, not the northern ones; second, the prairie did not extend from Appalachia all the way to the Rockies -- Illinois was the one cis-Mississippian state with significant prairie.

As I look forward to again attending The Prairie Festival at The Land again this year, I relished reading this book. It was fascinating reading the four authors' discussions of their work and their lives as they intersect their published writing.

This book also spoke to my interest in the Operation Migration project which is leading the way for the whooping cranes to again be wild and part of the land. John Price ponders and dissects the importance of place and the meaning of home and how we can follow Wendell Berry in really knowing about the place where we live.

"Though Heat-Moon's final quest for memory is a times awkward and self-conscious, it is for him essential. If America, if the human species, is to survive, then it must work actively to rejuvenate and reconstruct geographically specific, ancestral paradigms-deep maps-that move it toward a grand harmony of people and places."

Anyone who has seen the movie "Into the Wild" will resonate with Price's description of the effects of William Trogdon's decision to write "Prairy Erth" under the name William Least Heat-Moon.

"This rejuvenation begins with the individual journey, with the singular act of self-creation represented, perhaps, by William Trogdon's decision to rejuvenate the William Least Heat-Moon name. Whatever the consequences for the larger world, it was clear to me that the "Heat-Moon self" had led Trogdon to write one of the most important books on the prairie in American literature, a book that had had a profound impact on my own commitment to place. That fact alone suggested that what Heat-Moon had written about names was true, that they have he power to shape who we become in relation to the land around us. He writes:'Many tribal Americans believe that a person turns into his name, partakes of its nature in such a way that it is a mold the possessor comes to fill. When names lose their first meaning, as they have to most Americans of European descent, that mold becomes only a handle for others to move us around with.'"