Prairie Panorama

By Michael Ogden

The first shot is a tractor glinting in the sun, running to make more lined grooves. It is all saccade, the shadows move on, quick and delivered from an outside edge of visual awareness. Golden wheat fields and stark blue ponds at 60 miles per hour all day long while driving to jobs. The scream of churning drills and the drone of steel motors belching diesel. Men dwarfed like mice in the light of towering oil derricks that pop up like cities in the night. Then it’s on to the next rig in the eerie glow of halogen. It is a flurry of essence and the soft oily things in the patch are memories that fade with every new mile gone.

Glowing orange haze horizon

black Promethean landscape echo.

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Dinosaur blood, sulfur, crustaceans

Pump jack dipping down!

back up,

down.

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Oil.

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Black gold, clean wheat

radiating spica.

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Flat great drain tops

ocean basin, layered lines

receding pool.

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Oil.

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Say you start as a worm on a rig, crawling out of the cellar to beat down nuts as big as wheels onto the BOP, or Blow Out Preventer. It is roughneck work, and if you are skilled enough to crawl past worm status you might get lucky, but not like Monkey, the man with no thumbs who now grips levers like a lobster since the morning his thumbs were clipped off like butter.

Abandoned farm houses in regal decay with rusted cars and farm vehicles weathered down to a color somewhere between cinnamon and black. The clothes line that last hung Sunday School clothes in the Great Depression. The swing set hanging by a bolt. A bright white porcelain cookstove you can see from the road as the rafters and walls have collapsed into it.

There is new life near the shelter-belts of trees with cocky ringneck pheasants climbing over road berms and flapping above speeding vehicles. Hawks, falcons, eagles, American White Pelicans, geese, ducks, porcupines, elk, deer, antelope. A bull moose racked and split clean in a truck bed at the M&H Smoke Shop with its tongue the size of a loaf of bread hanging out on the tailgate. The steaming head of a Black Angus bull blowing vapor out of his nostrils and a frosted sheen to his coat. A white horse, still among the background of a broken gray barn.

A sidewalk showdown with men walking down the streets of Williston swinging Subway sandwich bags with the intensity of carrying bazookas into battle. Bloated machismo. What if teachers or plumbers acted like that? I have a job, so get out of the way? The humble yield to grace and manners.

Are we all in this together?

Michael Ogden is from the Flathead Indian Reservation in Western Montana. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism from the University of Montana. Ogden is currently employed in the petroleum industry and lives in Williston, North Dakota.