photo credit: with much gratitude to Nicole Louden, Sandhills Prairie Girl

I love Nebraska because every word is sifted through its great sky. –Don Welch, journal entry, 1997

I left Nebraska in 1979 after I finished graduate school at Kearney State College. I transplanted my life first to Wisconsin and then to Iowa, where I’ve lived ever since. I left physically, but never emotionally. Never spiritually. Nebraska will forever be the home I return to in my dreams.

For years, I bore the brunt of Nebraska “burns” delivered in jest by co-workers, friends, and students in Wisconsin and Iowa: I’ll bet Mrs. Vesely took a Conestoga wagon to school! Hey, I told my husband to drive straight through Nebraska at night, since there’s really nothing to look at. You probably had to mow your sod house occasionally, right? You get the picture. Before each school vacation or break, one of my college instructor friends always told me to have a good time in Kansas. He would laugh and wave me off, gleefully refusing to acknowledge that I was traveling to Nebraska. When I first moved to Iowa and, naively, wore my Husker gear to grocery shop one weekend, I was met with open-mouthed stares. In Hawkeye and Cyclone country, publicly sporting my Husker sweatshirt was tantamount to treason. Over the years, I’ve taken the ribbing and purchased the requisite Iowa college clothing. But I’ve never forgotten my home.

This week, as I read reports of the catastrophic wildfires that continue to blaze across Nebraska, my heart broke. On Sunday, when I asked my church to pray for Nebraskans as they battled these fires, I was disheartened—but not surprised—that most hadn’t even heard of the ongoing tragedy. Even in Iowa, one state away, what happens in Nebraska rarely appears on the radar. As a former student once said, “After all, Nebraska is flyover country.”

To refute this claim that Nebraska is merely “flyover country,” in 1980, my father wrote his poem “Nebraska.” At that time, he claimed it to be “one of many apologias written for the state in the past decade.”  He explained that “if it sinks back into that morass of poems which are unable to keep their heads up, then it will have had at least a small advantage: for a moment it gave me a better definition of the place I love.” His response to those who argue that Nebraska is a good place to be from was to say that “[b]y starting in Nebraska, one may very well get a good interior compass; there is much here which points true north. I would go farther, however, Nebraska is not only a good place to be from: it is a good place to be.” In the 1995 Midwest Quarterly, my father recounted an experience with an “Easterner [who] kept calling the prairie dispiriting.” He responded by noting that “it was the beginning of evening, and there was a fine rare circling of blue. Like an old hawk’s inflection, barely holding us, it was true.” What the Easterner found “dispiriting,” my father found “rare” and “true.” For my father, Nebraska was truly a “good place to be.”

In Every Mouth of Autumn Says Goodbye, my father confessed that “[a]s good as it is to love the world, it’s better to work lovingly hard on the local.” In a 1998 journal entry, he noted that to become a famous poet, you must write about a famous place, providing a better description of that place than anyone else had. If you did this, my father wrote, “your immortality is assured, but you must pick a famous place.” He mused, “Can you imagine a poem written about the meeting of the Loup and the Platte rivers in Nebraska?  I could do it because I grew up in Columbus, where they meet.  Unfortunately, none of the three is famous enough.” Even in adolescence, I was painfully aware of my father’s struggle to publish as a Nebraskan competing on a national stage. For most, Nebraska is neither a “famous” nor a notable place. Submitting a poem about the meeting of the Loup and Platte rivers near Columbus, Nebraska, might be like pissing in the wind. And yet for decades, this is exactly what my father did. He worked “lovingly hard on the local,” ultimately doing his share to bring national attention to Nebraska, as he published poetry and essays, winning several awards and the hearts of many. Could Don Welch imagine writing poetry about the Loup and Platte Rivers, about the sandhill crane migration, about the wind and the prairie and the vast Nebraska sky? Yes, he could.

After visiting Kearney and reading poetry on the University of Nebraska-Kearney campus years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver mentioned the Platte River in her essay “Winter Hours”(Upstream: Selected Essays, Penguin Press, New York, 2016):

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together We are each other’s destiny.  

As astonished as I was that my parents hosted Oliver during this Nebraska visit (and that she actually spent the night in my childhood bedroom!), I was even more astonished that a Northeasterner shared a reverence for the Platte River and the Central Nebraska Flyway, where 80% of the world’s sandhill crane population, along with millions of ducks and geese, converge each spring. Oliver didn’t see Nebraska as “flyover country,” but rather as one of the “unbreakable links between each of us and everything else.”

In his 1997 journal, my father wrote, “I have always been like Thoreau, preferring broad margins between myself and others.” For him and many Nebraskans, the plains offer these “broad margins,” the physical and spiritual space to live “the good life,” as Nebraska’s iconic road signs announce. Years ago, I encountered the prairie photography of Solomon D. Butcher and began researching his journey to chronicle the settlement of the plains. In one of his photos, “Lookout Point Near the Snake River, circa 1890,” the “lookout” bumped up just enough from the prairie that you could call it a hill. What immediately interested me about this photo was that Butcher had drawn in seven trees, two horses, and a man. Into the photo, he inked life where he saw little. Perhaps he believed scarcity wouldn’t sell art to patrons east of the Mississippi, who, like the Eastener my father encountered, might find the prairie dispiriting. Perhaps he loved the land enough to give it a spit shine of life. And perhaps he feared he wouldn’t find an audience of those, like my father, who preferred the “broad margins” of this land. There have always been these folks, however, and there always will be. Where others see nothing, they see home.

I don’t wish to romanticize life in Nebraska, which can be good but hard. I think particularly of those ranchers who face the challenges of unpredictable weather and cattle markets, as well as rising costs for equipment and fertilizer. Today, fires have burned more than 820,000 acres in Nebraska and left more than 35,000 cows with no grazing land. Aerial shots of these fires reveal the devastation. What’s left looks more like a desert than a prairie. There were 24 fire reports across the state on March 12-13, according to the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency. Today, the Morrill fire, the largest, has burned 643, 074 acres and is 98% contained. The other large fires, too, have been mostly contained now. Life for Nebraska ranchers has always been hard, but for many, it will be much harder in the months to come.

As I read about this natural disaster and the challenges ranchers will face in its aftermath, I’m grateful that, for years, Nicole Louden, ranch wife and mother, photographer, and writer, has brought ranch life to thousands worldwide through her photography and posts. Nicole, Sandhills Prairie Girl, works “lovingly hard on the local,” sharing her family’s land and life through stunning photos and poignant posts. Through her lens and pen, Nicole reveals the qualities that mark this way of life: perseverance, faith, family, and hope. In her, my father would find a kindred spirit, a Nebraskan who loves the place she calls home, a “rare” and “true” land where one can find a “good interior compass” for all seasons of life.

This is the land where my father chose to “stick.” In a 1997 journal entry, he wrote that “Wallace Stegner described those who settled the American West as ‘stickers and boomers,’ those who settled down and those who rushed dollar-first along.  All my life I’ve been a ‘sticker.’” Once, as we were standing in my backyard and looking into the timber which surrounds our acreage, he turned to me and said, “Don’t you ever get tired of all these trees?” I chuckled, confessing I’d grown to love the trees and hills of my home in southeast Iowa, and knowing full well that he would always be a “sticker,” preferring the wide, open spaces of Nebraska where “every word is sifted through its great sky.”

As I pray for all those affected by the Nebraska wildfires and pay tribute to all Nebraskans, I leave you with my father’s poem, “Nebraska,” a poem he claims to have given him a “better definition” of the place he loved. It is a testament to his great love for the state—and to mine.

Nebraska

Going west when the sun is going down, following

the highways like light cords. 

*

If Nebraska were the name of a Russian woman,

they could love her. 

*

There would be a certain large-boned beauty

about her.

*

Or, she would be dressed in black and lace.

Her waist would be small,

and she would drag her long dress over a floor into

a study lined with French books. 

She would be a pawn in huge novels of war. 

*

As it is, she is a woman of spare beauty. 

*

Turning away from him so that the fine hollows of

her back were toward the bed,

she said, Why do you do this to me?

Why do you keep imagining me in other

places and states?

And why do you keep assuming our children 

are unhappy?

     Don Welch (1980, The Rarer Game)

Crane migration in Nebraska – Credit: Kylee Warren / Crane Trust

If all the birds disappeared, men’s eyes would starve. —Don Welch (journal entry)

In a letter to friend and fellow Nebraskan Stan Smith, my father anticipated crane time: “It’s in the air. Pretty soon we will hear them before we see them, that long, high yodeling sound as if the sun had its symphony of wood-winds.”  As missiles are launched and stock prices fall, I confess to logging onto the live webcam from the Rowe Sanctuary, a wildlife refuge on the Platte River near Gibbon, Nebraska. Here, you can lose yourself in the chortling masses of sandhill cranes during their spring migration. This refuge is, in the words of poet Robert Frost, “a momentary stay against confusion.” It may be momentary, but I’ll gratefully take it.

My siblings and I grew up loving cranes because our parents first did. When we grew old enough to ask about how our parents met, they regaled us with the story of their first date. While other college students were holed up in vinyl booths of local diners or necking in parked cars, my parents were crouching behind a haystack in a field along the Platte River. My dad said he sprung for two dime cups of coffee and drove my mom into the countryside, where he planned to introduce her to the magnificence of the crane migration, close up and in person. And so began my parents’ annual spring pilgrimage to the crane fields.

After my father’s death in 2016, I inherited many of his books and files. One file labeled “Old Pete” caught my eye. In it was research my dad had collected from Mark Peyton, a Gothenburg, NE resident, regarding Old Pete and the whooping crane recovery and captive breeding program. A wounded whooping crane found near Brady, NE, in May 1936, Old Pete became the patriarch of this recovery and breeding program. Housed at the Gothenburg Game Refuge, 3,000 acres south of Gothenburg, NE, along the Platte River, he was one of 20 remaining whooping cranes in the world and one of only two whooping cranes in captivity. Peyton’s interest in Old Pete’s story was sparked when Gothenburg natives Tot and Pauline Holmes told him that the whooping crane population today owes their existence to Old Pete. From there, he gathered information from locals, biologists, and scientific journals concerning Old Pete’s contribution to whooping crane survival. It was clear my dad was fascinated with this research, for his folder contained copies of Peyton’s work.

As my dad was introducing his poem “White Cranes in Spring” during an address he once gave at the University of Nebraska Kearney, he recalled how, as a child, his father had taken him to Bert Daggett’s place, south of Gothenburg. Daggett ran the city dump, mended fences, and fed the birds at the Gothenburg Game Refuge. At the time my father visited, Bert had a menagerie of wounded and crippled birds, including Crip, one of the few existing whooping cranes at that time, and who, along with Old Pete, was one of the first cranes drafted into the captive breeding program. 

My dad loved a good bird story and came to regard these whooping cranes as heroic figures to be memorialized. In his book Gnomes, he writes of Old Crip:

        For just a moment
	I am 6 and running again with Crip,
	a white crane dangling his hopeless right wing.

	Running ahead of him,
	my hand full of tease bread, his left wing way-high;
	under the blister of a Dust Bowl sky.  

Last year, I made a trip to Nebraska in April and was dismayed to discover I’d missed the cranes. In previous springs, when I’d returned to Kearney, I’d roll down my windows after I passed Grand Island in hopes of hearing the cranes in the fields. Even with Interstate traffic, I could often hear them. Their collective voices, “that long, high yodeling sound,” welcomed me home. My dad wrote that without birds, “men’s eyes would starve.” As would our ears. Entering a field of sandhill cranes is a full-body experience.

For my Iowa readers—and readers unfamiliar with Nebraska’s crane migration—consider a trip to central Nebraska some spring to take in the spectacle. As you look out upon the Platte River, you may be fortunate enough to spot a whooping crane, a descendant of Old Pete or Crip, a stately white figure among the gray masses. Visit the Rowe Sanctuary, where one of my father’s poems hangs in the entry, and where you’ll be graced with all-things-crane. You won’t be sorry.

White Cranes in Spring
                     —for Marcia

There were white cranes that spring
the feathered bowls of their wings
scooping out air, lifting them up
like unstemmed peonies.

Over the Gulf they could only circle
so long as Galveston’s halos
before they broke for the Platte,
a blue braid which runs through Nebraska.

For centuries they had danced on 
corn bones, on the fossilized memories
of nomads, or played contrabassoons
to the winter through the long folds

in their syrinx. In each bird
was a red germ, the unison cipher
of sex. And that spring,
paired up, we too flew north,

following the kissed-out leaves
of the willows, as if for a million springs
we had said the same thing
and were crying it hoarsely.
          Don Welch (1992)


My Mother Visits the Sandhill Cranes

She remembers the first time.
When others were coupling in dark theaters 
or drinking sodas in corner booths,
she knelt along the Platte River behind a haystack 
where her date promised she would be amazed,
where soon his presence would eclipse
the universe of gray bodies that had spread out
before them.

The day was ending,
but the field would not succumb,
the warm earth breathing beneath great wings
which hummed and fanned the flames
of last light.  

They mate for life, he told her,
his hand finding hers 
as the March wind took a corner of the haystack
and blew it towards the river.

When it was finally too dark to see
and they made their way back to the road
where he’d parked his car,
she’d already seen how she would return: 
      
      to this field of a thousand dancing birds,
      to this love with an enormous wingspan,
      to this man.
                                                              
          Shannon Vesely (2022)