tail marks streaked through the sand come morning. I would write about Dassanetch fishermen who pull nets of Nile perch and tilapia to dry in the sun. I would write about the monkeys of a Costa Rican rainforest from which I’d returned only weeks earlier. However, as I wrote about the brash, deafening calls of Howler monkeys in a forest canopy, it hit me. I put down my pen and looked out over the lake that actually reminded me very much of a lake I’d frequented as a child in my hometown. I’d had my eyes closed to so much beauty right here in my own country, in that state no one in my family quite remembers the name of (Idaho… Ohio..?). I’ve ignored the people who love this place and want to showcase its wonders, renew the tall grass prairie that dominated the north and central parts of the state, known as the Des Moines Lobe, after the retreat of glaciers almost ten thousand years ago. A portion of Lakeside Lab campus colored with yellow and orange milkweed are the remnants of prairie dug up and literally rescued from bulldozer, shopping mall, cornfield. As a nature preserve, historic district, and field station, Lakeside is an ecosystem all of it’s own. I walked down to the dock mid-morning on Little Miller’s Bay to watch dark clouds come in – layers of deep floating cobalt swooned at the far end of the lake, and a cold breeze rushed across the water, raising goose bumps on my arms. Jane, the Education Coordinator, whose grandparents homesteaded on land not far from here, was fishing for plankton in a flowing blue skirt. We peered through a beaker, looking for life – a miniscule squiggle smaller than a thread on my shirt, but still, very much alive. And as Jane would point out, very important. Plankton are a crucial food source to the bass and bluegill that make a home in these waters. “I tell people who come to my programs the Aesop’s Fable about the lion and the mouse,” Jane said. She reminded me of the lion who scoffed at the mouse that would one day save his life. When the lion got caught in a hunter’s snare and could not break loose, who else but the mouse gnawed through the rope and set the entangled lion free? The moral of the story (in Jane’s case with the plankton), being that small things are vital to ecosystems. For humanity, this has somehow translated to mean, the smaller, thinner and sleeker your cellphone, the better. But in the “real” world, we wouldn’t exist without many of the creatures we can’t even see, like the beneficial bacteria in our guts. Even animals big enough to see aren’t often noticed for the role they play in maintaining stability on our planet, let alone for their own inherent value as fellow inhabitants of Earth. When’s the last time you stopped to watch a squirrel gather acorns, or robins build their nests? Looking over the lake one quiet evening, I heard a crackling in the honeysuckle bushes below the deck where I was reading. As I edged over to the rail, I expected a deer munching on the round red berries, but it turns out the black and white snout was that of a raccoon, and not just one, a family of them. They ate quickly and moved on through the undergrowth. I only heard one small chirp, and they were gone. A student from a prairie ecology class held at Lakeside told me that he raised an orphan raccoon and it purred just like a cat. I relished the time I spent kneeled against the deck like a church pew, my small prayer to this bit of wildlife along the lakeshore. I ducked low so the raccoons wouldn’t see me, though one individual poked its head up from berry collecting to sniff the air. Perhaps that’s what alerted them to a potentially dangerous presence, and
they fled. I couldn’t help but wonder if this is what it feels like to be a God, to peer down on creatures without our power to create and destroy. Or in the case of humans, who often act like Gods of the earthly realm, to peer down on creatures without the things that we consider essential – language, Wifi. On the dock, I asked Jane about the weather, if I should go out to Cayler Prairie that morning. “There’s no such thing as bad weather, as long as you’re prepared for it,” she said, lifting another water sample from the lake rippled now by raindrops. “Besides, the colors of the flowers will be beautiful against this gray sky. Just watching the clouds move will be magnificent!” I felt ashamed for not thinking of this myself. With that I changed my clothes and headed off the highway, down a gravel road edged with farmland and over the Little Sioux River. I parked in a tiny lot at the side of the road, a sign read: No Horses, and underneath, a picture with a slash-mark running through a snowmobile. At first, I was disappointed. This is it? I didn’t know where to walk – I could see where the prairie started and ended – wind turbines to my right and farmland on virtually every other corner. In my imagination, prairies are like oceans, ranging as far as the eye can see. I stood in one place, disheartened by the seemingly small scale of this natural place. Then I looked down. Hundreds of species of plants danced against my legs – purple blazing stars, big bluestem, blackeyed Susans, prairie sage and wild roses. Again, I was ashamed of having not noticed them sooner, of having closed my eyes to the red-winged black birds and bobolinks flying overhead. Before long, I was down on my knees. As I explored wetlands, morsels of prairie preserve, and unique remnants of glaciation, I began to understand what this place means to people here. Although less than 1% of the state still retains any prairie – which for the most part was plowed down when homesteaders came along – prairie is very much in the blood and bone of people like Jane, who scour roadsides, often a last refuge for prairie, looking for seed sources to restore grass and flower to its natural habitat. I never felt the need to preserve the place I lived, or felt such a strong connection to the earth where my parents raised me. Sure, I spent my summer days hunting frogs and turtles in a nearby pond, but as the land was owned by another city as watershed property, it never felt like my own, and from a legal standpoint, I was trespassing. My aversion to that flat Midwest had turned to appreciation and wonder in the space of a few weeks. I only wish it hadn’t taken me two and a half years to have this change of heart. I visited Cayler Prairie many times over the course of my residency at Lakeside. I went in the mornings and the evenings, on days that were sunny and days that were gray. And Jane was right – the purples and blues really did stand out against gray sky. The names of flowers and birds became urgently important to me and I wrote down detailed descriptions of everything I saw. I’d abandoned my writing project on a rainforest I had recently visited in Costa Rica, and instead focused on what was around me. I was even lucky enough to spot what I later learned was a Dickcissel on a barbed wire fence. I stopped my car and peered through binoculars at a bird I had never seen or heard of before, singing its little heart out, a red splotch on its chest bursting with each staccato song: dickciss-ciss-ciss! 25