De Plains! De Plains!

I never thought I would be one to like the prairies. I grew up in wooded swampy places and I love trees, rocks, moss, etc. But I began to get an inkling that the prairies weren't so bad when I read excerpts from Kathleen Norris's Dakota! Not only did Norris adapt to living on a windy flatland, she actually came to enjoy it because it was uncluttered, clean, and pure (but could also be menacing during summer storms and winter blizzards) - a "countercultural" kind of place to live, she called it. It couldn't have done her any harm to make her home on the plains, because later Norris wrote the top-selling The Cloister Walk, about the monks who lived nearby.
Before Dakota!, my thoughts on the plains were influenced primarily by Iowa farmland and O.E. Rolvaag's novel Giants in the Earth (which is quite popular among us Norwegians), in which people freeze to death in blizzards and a woman goes a little nutsy with all that open space around her. As my mother says, "There's nothing to hide behind."
But the more I live out here in western Canada, the more I grow to appreciate the wide open spaces. I've come to see the prairies as an ocean of grass, with the clusters of trees being islands. You can argue that there's nothing beneath the prairies like the ocean's surface, but that's not true at all. Beneath that prairie-ocean there are dinosaurs, and arrowheads, and oil deposits, and insects, and Jimmy Hoffa maybe... You can't go far without seeing a colony of prairie dogs (or pocket gophers, whatever you call them), mice, hawks. If you can tolerate the wind - and I admit, that's the worst part - you can really appreciate all that sky. Last year Richard and I drove out into the country and saw the most astounding northern lights - shimmering, folding, and flashing every colour, like titanium, for as far as the eye could see. Today we drove through countryside and little cottage towns, keeping the windows down so we could smell the fresh rain, and the flowers. One half of the sky was stormy, the other bright. You could see for miles (km, actually). In the film Gas Food Lodging (a classic chick flick), one of the characters feels trapped in the southwestern desert until she falls in love and begins to explore it. Then she finds all the little hidden treasures that you can't see at first or second glance, and tells her sister, "It's magical out there! It looks empty but it's not." That's how I feel about the prairies. I wish others could see the beauty, too; a friend of mine lives in Nebraska and despises the open spaces. But I guess you just have to look harder for the magic out here.
So - even though I will always love woodsy places - I feel very much at home here, drifting on a grassy ocean.