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“Our Turn at this Earth” airs weekly on High Plains Public Radio.
Almost all of the watercourses on the High Plains are fed by the Ogallala aquifer. Each one of them creates its own paradise. Red-winged blackbirds trill from their perches atop tall reeds. Deer, pheasants, wild turkeys, and other wildlife wend through thick meadow grasses. Cottonwood and hackberry trees shade the water, which is usually so clear you can see fish swimming in it.
Until I read the Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s essay “Landscape, History and the Pueblo Imagination,” the word “landscape” had strictly positive connotations for me. Hearing it, I imagined broad vistas of land and sky. I grew up enthralled by such vistas and still am. But Silko’s essay rang so true to me that, ever since reading it, I can’t come across the word “landscape” without questioning the way that my culture looks at the world.
“Our Turn at this Earth” airs weekly on High Plains Public Radio.
In my mid-thirties, while living back on my family’s Kansas farm after spending many years away, I couldn’t stand the automatic dusk-to-dawn yard light that blinked on each evening. In my childhood, we turned our yard light off some evenings just so we could gaze at the stars, and we always turned it off before we went to bed.
“Our Turn at this Earth” airs weekly on High Plains Public Radio.
I don’t think I could have been any older than ten. I remember I was crossing our farmyard, in shorts, my legs, bare above my cowboy boots, slicing forward in a purposeful gait. Perhaps I was headed to the barn corral to catch one of my horses.
Given the nature of the thought that was about to stop me in my tracks,
“Our Turn at this Earth” airs weekly on High Plains Public Radio.
Almost invariably, at meetings on the future of the Ogallala aquifer, the only issue discussed is the dwindling quantity, not the quality, of the water. And the only attendees are usually farmers and owners of ag supply companies. That’s why, at one such Goodland, Kansas, meeting, I was impressed by the participation of a man whose family had run one of the town’s home service businesses for as long as I could remember.
