Word: madson
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Before the farms there was the tall grass, and before that the boundless wind and whipsawing climates, and before that mile-thick blankets of ice. "A prairie never rests for long, nor does it permit anything else to rest," wrote John Madson in his book Where the Sky Began, an eloquent evocation of the changing heartland and its people. "Those first Europeans had no basis for even imagining wild fields through which a horseman might ride westward for a month or more." The land enlarged their spirits and made them prosper...
...Today, Madson looks out over the frozen horizon from his home near the Illinois bluff by the Mississippi River with a sense of foreboding. "I don't think the farm culture will pass," he says. "Farmers want to farm. They will keep on until all is gone...
...elemental struggle it is, as old, in Madson's eyes, as the land itself. "It was a land of excesses--of blazing light and great weathers where a man stood exposed," Madson wrote about the grasslands as they were a century ago. "The wealth of the tall prairie was its undoing." Covetous men subdued it with the steel plow. Odd how history is now repeating itself. Wealth once again is the undoing of the heartland...
...eerie how Madson several years ago seemed to prophesy events when he wrote about earlier eras: "For this was alien land, not only in physical appearance but in its harsh rejection of familiar custom; it forced people into new ways of looking at the land and themselves and changed them forever." Sometimes it seems to Madson that the prairie is throwing off the predatory creatures who have filled it and damaged it. That could be the ultimate irony. The U.S. is exhausting its topsoil and a few decades down the road could suffer from food shortages, not surpluses...
...They stood up for their diplomas in the Greenfield opera house on a June night. Greenfield was still tentative then, with wooden buildings, dirt streets and the scuffed look of any human habitation that dares stand before the scouring west wind. "A land without echoes or shadow," wrote John Madson in his evocative new book, Where the Sky Began...