It is late July 2021. I have driven my daughter an hour northwest to reach swathes of Minnesota sunflowers, the novelty of crowds of head-high plants taking our minds off the crowds of people we are still avoiding. We turn off the main road onto a rutted, grassy drive, where we pause more than once to watch small creamy butterflies dancing double helixes around each other. Once on foot, we can hear the fields before we can see the flowers. So many bees are feasting from the blooming yellow heads that the world has become a living hum. We make a contest of looking for the sunflower with the most bees on it at once (five). We marvel that there are not just bumblebees and honeybees, both of which we can identify, but also several otherbees, which we cannot. All going about their bee business, and each contributing one fizzing note to the chorus that vibrates on the wind.

Sunflowers reliably face east. As young plants, they shift their gaze over the course of a day to continue bathing their cheeks in direct light. But when they mature into impressive giants, their heads become too heavy to move. It feels vaguely sentient, their resolute turn to the rising sun. In an open prairie, all the other flowers appear lackadaisical by comparison.

When arrayed in farmed rows that spread over acres, every flower stands at attention, saluting the sun. Soldier-like symmetry in plants is a little disquieting, especially from the back where the flowers’ heads wear huge, spikey green cups that look oddly like helmets. But viewed from the front, the illusion of a battalion disappears. Broad leaves dissolve rigid spacing. The flowers’ pebbled centers — in fact hundreds of tiny blossoms — are ringed by densely overlapping petals that splay outward until each edge is differentiated by the sun. Ray florets, they are called. Because what else would you name such golden magnificence? As the light filters through, every flower gets its own halo.

We have had so little rain this summer that at least one of these farm fields has been allowed to die back, presumably to preserve water for the others. Stunted stalks tilt in the dusty soil, sharp contrast to the adjacent field that thrums with insects. I find myself wondering what the untouched prairie looks like right now. Are its sunflowers wilting before they can bloom? Or do ones that seed themselves naturally have roots impervious to short-term drought, roots that press deeper to locate small bits of sustaining moisture? I assume uncultivated plants are more resourceful because they have not been coddled — although perhaps that is anthropomorphizing and wrong. Possibly their seeds simply remain dormant, nestled into today’s too-dry earth, quietly waiting for a rainier summer. That, too, is a kind of resourcefulness.

~ 🌻 ~

It always seems to be winter when I pick up Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Even so, the scene I cling to is not the one where the family digs tunnels through snowdrifts to get to the barn for chores. Instead, I find myself beguiled by the moment her protagonist reminisces over his first immersion into sunflowers. Newly-orphaned at the age of ten, Jim Burden is sent from Virginia to his grandparents’ farm in Nebraska in the 1890s, which, as an adult narrator, he recalls exploring:

Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seeds as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had a sunflower trail to follow.

Cather’s novel is redolent with the wonder of this young boy, fresh from the Virginia woodlands, learning to understand the prairie’s splendid, wide-open skies and appreciate its promised freedom of movement. I love how his fascination with sunflowers as route markers casts them in the familiar mold of fairy tale: they function like a magical trail of breadcrumbs, perpetually renewing themselves to guide successive seasons of settlers safely west. Fuchs’s cherished story has an added ring of truth, tapping as it does into sunflowers’ power as a directional sign. It must have reassured countless drivers of horses and wagons across the plains that as long as they headed towards those sunny faces, they were moving in the right direction. Jim’s rhapsody takes a turn, though, to end here:

I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake’s story but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.

Despite the corrective that this is merely a legend, I find this last clause breath-taking. What a heady image — roads marked by towering flowers that proffer benediction over the movement of persecuted souls into a space where they could find religious freedom.

This passage mentions nothing of the people who were native to those plains. Of their relentless persecution. Of the incalculable damage those white settlers did in claiming land and displacing people and disrupting ecosystems and destroying long-established harmonies between humans and the earth. And yet, if read carefully, it admits to us that the flowers’ sanction of westward expansion is merely the stuff of legend, invented no doubt by white settlers. If read carefully, it might remind us that those roads were “bordered” by sunflowers because sunflowers were everywhere on those plains except where the roads, gashed through by wagons that scarred the land, prohibited the flowers’ growth.

How can we admire these breath-taking lines while doing justice to the truth that some people gained freedom by denying it to others? Where, in this complexity, does that leave the flowers? What is our relationship to the adulation and the promise, to the sheer joy of the beaming sunflower in its own right? Can we disentangle that from human history? Should we try?

~ 🌻 ~

May and June are normally rainy, plant-greening months in Minnesota. Grasses wake up. The monochrome of winter becomes variegated, lush. The state’s abundant water — 10,000 lakes! — is the stuff of legend, but it is also the winter snowpack, high water table, and abundant spring rains that makes Minnesota a promising location for the inevitable flood of climate refugees we know time will produce. Those living through years of devastating droughts to our west have periodically argued for the right to siphon off some Great Lakes’ water to slake their regions’ thirst. There are profound ironies in proposals to send natural resources west, as people contemplate fleeing east across North America seeking a more hospitable bit of earth.

But for the second summer in a row, Minnesota’s lot seems cast with the burning western half of the United States. In early July, grassy boulevards were simply tufts of brown. As I sit writing in August 2022, St. Paul, MN, is almost 7” below its normal year-to-date precipitation accumulation. Last year at this time it was even worse: some 80% of the state was marked Severe, Extreme, or Exceptional Drought.

My lilac hedge, some fifteen feet high and fifty feet long, droops. The soil is so dry, so deep, that any water you offer to flower gardens seeps far away from the roots before plants can slurp up enough to sustain themselves. Things I have never had to water — the rose that’s taller than my garage, for instance — are suffering. Small trees look pinched. Today I drove by several adolescent maples, not mere saplings, whose leaves were browning around the edges. Next year, they may be skeletons. If this landscape were a Dickens character, it would be described with a narrow face and pursed lips and a perpetually pained expression.

The perilousness of our situation feels ominous. A gossamer thread binds us together over our shared craving for water sources whose perpetuation we cannot command. I sense myself wilting too, these hot summer afternoons, under the weight of that concern.

~ 🌻 ~

By mid-August, none of us can recall accurately the last time it rained. One night, I dream that someone is outside throwing dried beans onto my roof. I awake in the dark, confused. Bags and bags and bags of beans clatter down, and I cannot figure out where they are coming from. Drowsily, I realize I am hearing the rattle of raindrops. I am nonetheless still baffled by the sound. When I wake up more fully, I register a deep sadness: it has taken just a few months to turn the sound of rain into a stranger.

Later that morning, I find myself holding my breath, afraid somehow to jinx the rain and make it stop if I celebrate too much. And yet I am ecstatic. I want to dance. It is raining. Not just a few half-hearted drops. But a persistent soaking that produces a smell lightly metallic and earthy — petrichor, it is beautifully named — a breeze wet with a wetness you can taste through an open window. It rains for hours before it clears. Miniature pools glisten on broad leaves in my garden, and I can breathe deeply once more.

The next night, it rains again, and I wake to a morning gloom that feels like celebration, a dawn overcast and damp. The heat has finally broken.

Out of town, driving through a downpour the following day, I get the giddy news from a friend: there has been a third night of rain! “Everything is saturated,” she writes. I do a little jig in my seat as I think of my trees, my roses, my enormous hedge, finally having their thirst quenched. I imagine them restored to a green as triumphant as the hills I am driving through: Wisconsin, the national map tells me, has experienced only Moderate Drought in one very tiny corner this year. I do not know how the drought knows where the state lines are.

~ 🌻 ~

I have quipped more than once, since moving to Minnesota, that I am grateful not to live in a sod house on the prairie when the winter winds come shrilling around the eaves and the snow mounts. But as I think about sunflowers and drought in this third summer of curtailed human connection, I find myself realizing how we are all tied to the land, even if we no longer live in shelters composed of it. We bear witness to the slow suffering of giant trees whose canopies become strangely translucent as leaves begin to shrivel. When rainless days extend to rainless weeks, we feel the tension in the air, the need palpable and parched, even if we do not consciously register it.

It only gives way when the rain comes, often in a powerful combination of disorientation and relief. I, too, was less wilted for a few days. The land was less gasping, the strain in people’s voices quieted itself a little.

And so, sunflowers. Reminders of our earthly obligation to coexist. They serve as map and guide, as exuberant marker and sober memento. We cannot command the rain, but we can be more conscious of that collective feeling of reprieve carried on the damp wind. We must take practical steps to combat drought in our children’s lifetimes. We also should lean more fully into the things that connect us despite a burning world. Morning sun on our faces, the relief of rain. The bees, the sunflowers, the wonder of seeing it all for the first time through our daughters’ eyes.

Read this in print by ordering The New Territory Issue 14 or get a PDF copy.

The post On Sunflowers, and Hope, in Times of Drought appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Buy tickets here to participate in the live and silent auctions.

Featured artwork in our live art auction:

“Moon with Clouds”

For Moon with Clouds, I wanted to offer a strong moon emblematic of the rugged American prairie below, a symbol of tenacity and grit, and a nod to the Kansas motto, Ad Astra per Aspera, to the stars through difficulties. To represent the plains farming heritage, I chose the cotton canvas of a vintage grain sack found in a rural antique store. The painting is raw and sculptural, comprised of paint, stone, indentation of wheat, rust and the black ash of freshly burnt prairie sage hand-gathered in north central Kansas. I use organic materials to connect people to the spirit of the wild things of the prairie. Rust symbolizes that time is fleeting. Grain reminds us that small things, well tended, can grow into greatness. Prairie sage encapsulates the pure energy of a hundred suns and moons absorbed through the plant’s leaves and roots. It is custom framed with reclaimed wood. (canvas 24×20 inch, 27×23 inch framed)

Starting bid at The Pageturner Fundraiser: $400

About Angela Müller and her Connection to the Midwest

Angela Müller is a visual artist and writer based in Russell, Kansas, a fifth-generation Kansan with a family farming heritage. She grew up on the prairie knowing the land and sky, but moved away as an adult and immediately felt a visceral disconnect. It wasn’t until she returned to the prairie years later so her children might enjoy a similar upbringing, that she saw this place with a new set of eyes and began to paint, incorporating hand-gathered earthen materials to connect people to the spirit of the wild things. She has shown work in group and solo shows across the county with an aim toward lifting up the ruggedness of the American prairie, creating with grain, stone, wild plant ash, cedar berries, rust, rainwater and other elements. Her studio is located on the mixed grass prairie at Fossil Lake. 

See Angela’s work in print throughout our literature section in The New Territory Issue 12.

Personal hopes for art in the Midwest:

“It is a place austere and wrapped in wind, where you can keenly feel your connection to something greater.”

My personal hope for art in the Midwest is that creatives continue to explore all the peculiar places, crevices and things that make this place distinctive. I think people who live on the land are connected to it in unique ways. We notice the geese migrating, sense thunderstorms forming on the horizon and pay attention to when the Cottonwoods change. That is because we depend upon the land. It is a place austere and wrapped in wind, where you can keenly feel your connection to something greater. When art opens your world to the innate beauty of a kernel of grain or causes you to think about the past life of a small fossil shell encased in limestone, you gain wisdom and an awareness of both eternity and impermanence. And that’s a special thing.

Buy tickets to The Pageturner here to participate in the live and silent auctions.

The post Angela Müller, 2023 Artist appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Gravesite

Sheridan County, Nebraska

By C.J. Janovy

It’s not easy to get to the final resting place of Nebraska writer Mari Sandoz, whose books, I’ll go ahead and argue, evoke one region of America as powerfully as William Faulkner’s portray another.

Paying respects to Sandoz in the traditional way of visiting her gravesite requires a pilgrimage far from the interstate, through Sandhills counties so thinly populated one can drive 20 minutes (it feels longer) without seeing another moving vehicle, on a two-lane highway dipping and rising through a forbidding grass-covered Sahara. Finally, about 27 miles north of unincorporated Ellsworth, a historical marker affirms that this is Sandoz country. A faded sign across from the Deer Meadows hunting outfitters confirms she is buried three miles farther back in the hills.

Getting to this point requires first knowing who Mari Sandoz was. I never encountered her name on any syllabus despite graduating from the Lincoln Public Schools and earning two fancy English degrees (I hope syllabi have changed). I made this pilgrimage only after reconciling a childhood mystery.

When I was a kid, Mari Sandoz’s name stared back at me from the bookshelves above the fireplace at my grandparents’ house in Oklahoma City. The book’s yellow spine sang out like a meadowlark, while tall red letters spelled two simple words: Old Jules. Below that was the author’s name in simple yet elegant black. The dramatic block letters told me the subject of this book was important. But what kind of name was “Jules”? It must be a man (tall red letters were for men). He was “old,” like the grandfather I loved, whose fireplace was where Santa delivered gifts, but this book was on high shelves where only the adults could reach it. The writer had a strange name, too. Was “Mari” a boy or a girl? How was I supposed to pronounce it in my mind? Decades later, after my folks cleaned out my grandparents’ midcentury modern house, this book was the only thing I wanted. And I finally read it.

The Swiss immigrant Jules Sandoz was an awful human, literally filthy and abusive but also educated enough to deliver breech babies on the frontier in the 1880s. Once the United States government had murdered or moved the region’s Indians, Old Jules helped colonize his part of the country through cussedness, luck, marksmanship and the help of obedient women, one of whom wound up in the insane asylum. I don’t know how often Mari uses the word “pounded” in this portrait of her father, but it’s a lot.

Generations of readers have put up with this man for 424 pages of what is now considered Mari Sandoz’s masterpiece. In this way, Mari’s accomplishment is far greater than her father’s legacy of towns and services in western Nebraska. Given the difficulties of making a life in this harsh place and time, one might wonder: Why bother? I think it was so his daughter could write such a beautiful book. “In Jules,” she observed, “as in every man, there lurks something ready to destroy the finest in him as the frosts of the earth destroy her flowers.”

Mari Sandoz Memorial Drive is a sand road that winds past a clanking windmill and ends in a patch of grass on a hill. Farther up is a plot surrounded by barbed wire, with a white gate. The plum-colored headstone reads simply “Mari Sandoz 1896-1966.” A metal glider allows visitors to sit and contemplate the view.

Near the gate is a mailbox; inside is a spiral bound notebook whose messages reveal it hasn’t been long since someone else was here.

“She was an admirable person & wonderful writer!” wrote one visitor from Windsor, Colorado. “I heard her speak at Kearney State College in 1965, approx. 1 yr. before she died. I can still hear her exclaim, ‘read my books.’”

Dan Kusek, vice president of the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society, had started a fresh notebook six weeks before my most recent visit.

“When they were bringing Mari’s casket here for burial, the hearse could climb no further,” Kusek wrote at the top of the first page. “Mari’s wish was to be buried at the TOP of the hill but they could get no further. A hawk came over us here while we were cutting grass & weeds. I have no doubt it was Mari’s spirit!!”

The only spirit I felt was the unnamed woman in Old Jules who tried to walk home to her one-year-old baby in a blizzard. “When the sun shone warm again over the glistening, drifted plains,” Sandoz wrote, “she was found curled up in a blanket in the slat-bottomed cart, a mile from home, frozen.”

Sitting in the sun on the metal glider, pondering the hills where Mari and Jules last lived, it was tempting to imagine her voice in the wind-stirring grasses. But even with a breeze, the place was so profoundly silent that all of my own thoughts were too loud.

Journalist C.J. Janovy grew up in Nebraska and lived on both coasts before settling in Kansas City. Her book No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas won the 2019 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize. Follow her on Twitter @cjjanovy.

The post Mari Sandoz – Sheridan County, Nebraska appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.