Anytime is a good time for a prairie hike. What could be better than strolling amongst purple cone flowers and black-eyed Susans and Mexican redhats and all the other flowers of a luxuriant native meadow?

Mexican redhats

But if spring on the prairie is wondrous and perfumed, late summer is magnificent and awe-inspiring. On a recent Sunday the Living River Sierra Club invited the public to hike our hills. Thirty people from many walks of life, from a toddler to a retired biologist, wandered and wondered the trails together. We explored the mysteries and identified the myriad grasses and forbs that thrive on restored and rehabilitated stretches of the Missouri River bluff.

As much as I enjoy sharing this realm with others, I at least equally enjoy going alone. This afternoon I sprawl in a world ruled by beetles, ants, mice and voles, the bottom of a food chain that includes the red-tailed hawk and the turkey vulture that sail the updrafts in search of food. I lie in a tangle of mixed prairie grasses in their glory, big bluestem, Indian grass and switch grass towering six feet high and waltzing in the wind, and contemplate the cosmos. The pitches and tones of the moaning wind are an orchestrated harmony played on grass heads and stems above, but not a breath of breeze touches my face on the floor of this forest of grass. I understand why the Zapotecs, the Maya, and other indigenous peoples of central and southern Mexico saw grasses and other plants as the spiritual link between Heaven and Earth. I inhale purity and absolution, exhale body moisture and heat, my breath rising toward the heavens, expiring in the cosmos. Whatever my transgressions, I find at-one-ment in the universe.

Below my elbows and thighs, the prairie roots reach down, both system and symbol. Each June, restored prairie and remnants of unbroken sod reawaken along our bluff, even here and there in pastures of brome where native grasses and forbs somehow survived decades of plowing, overgrazing and chemical warfare. Roots of the same big blue stem and pale purple cone flower that fed buffalo and elk for centuries resume their above-ground life.

The miracle of survival is simple, really; the roots are unfathomably deep. By weight, more than two-thirds of many prairie grasses is subterranean; the roots of big bluestem may reach 12 feet down. In the 1930s, University of Nebraska ecologist Weaver Clements excavated a small patch of prairie grass, and from a half-square-yard of earth, extracted 150 miles of root! And modern man thinks his fiber optic filaments complex.

But it would be a rare half-yard of earth that would contain the roots of a single plant. More likely, any place one sprawled in healthy native prairie, he would be within arm’s reach of at least half a dozen grasses and forbs. That, of course, is by design. “The old prairie lived by the diversity of its plants and animals, all of which were useful because the sum total of their cooperations and competitions achieved continuity,” said Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac. In the modern world of monoculture, nothing fills me with wholeness and wonder like the rich diversity of native prairie.

–Jerry

Read more from Jerry in his book, Waiting for Coyote’s Call