One

I'm sitting on one of the high slopes of the west butte, Sweetgrass Hills, Montana, looking off over leagues of the endlessly supple and insinuating musculature of the Great Plains. It swells and rolls. It lifts and twists close beneath the skin of the earth, headier than Ocean. Of all the landscapes on the continent this one has been opening capillaries for me like no other, calls me again and again. As an arena of light and air it cries out for the elemental homage and interaction that brought me here. I'd like to unleash 50 dalmations from the coulee below and send them off full-tilt across the spaces in the sun.

At least three mountain ranges are visible (not counting the obvious backbone of the Rockies just west), small pine-clad densities hovering isolate from the surrounding plain a hundred miles and a dozen soaring buteos from here. By my figuring they would be the Bear Paws, the Little Rockies, and the Highwoods. To the south the lip of Marias River's rough cut casts a shadow. To the north Milk River arcs teasingly through southern Alberta before swinging back toward the Missouri.

Through binoculars I can make out the green burgundy wheat elevators of scattered Canadian hamlets. There is Foremost; there is the village of Milk River. The sight of the latter rings modest ritual bells, a salient of ritual being foreknowledge of an end with the major motions mapped: In an hour I'll be driving north and pulling up before the familiar bakery there for a bag of the first and best butter tarts beyond the border.

It¹s middle September and the breeze has an edge. Wild rose bushes huddle russet in the draws; the low mountain maples give a matte, disenfranchised yellow. Farther off, in one of the inner folds of the orogenic system comprising the west butte, aspens are half-turned and fluttering.

One can see equally far from Lookout Mountain, I suppose, or from scores of other high spots; but not off into such an expanse of legendary untrammeled space. From the forks of the Saskatchewan to the lower Pecos in an irregular swathe maybe 500 miles wide, the wind blows and the grasses shake. As an earth feature, the plains are simply one of the most imposing regions on the globe, a zone of a million and a quarter square miles, a thing on the order of the seas or of India.

On this continent and in the psyche of its peoples the plains have always been a staggering presence, a place of myth and cliche, a place for transformation, bafflement, or heartbreak. From the east they are release from the clawing of swamp and tangle and human density. From the west they are a drop and a straightening after the kinks and strains of mountains. Entered from any direction they are new air, a joy to behold, a combination of large-scale intimidation and primordial inner acoustics.

Within the monolithic image of the plains, within the stereotypes of dull transcontinental drivers, there is constant variety and continual change. In a sensitive aerial view the various sub-regions and their perfect flora would show as diverse and intricate and colorful as if under infrared. They stand out by their individual textures and tones as surely as the distinctive components of hardwood forests in autumn. Each has its own musical theme and instrumentation like the characters in Peter and the Wolf. To an open eye the Staked Plains are singular, as are the Osage, the Souris, and the Querecho plains. The Smoky Hills, the Flint Hills, the Antelope, the Ree and the Red hills each have their own rhythm and stride. There are local pockets remarkable only to the keenest eye. There are scapes within scapes, but from the bold northwest plains of Montana to the Nebraska Sandhills, on into occupied Kansas and the Texas panhandle the wind blows, grasses shake, and cottonwoods in the stream bottoms rattle...

There exist various and contending climatic, topographical, and botanical definitions of the Great Plains (variations on the "treeless, flat and dry" theme) each seeking to fine hone the boundaries and unravel the mystique, but for the person sitting cross-legged on the butte or driving the cattle truck across U.S. 2 or gazing from a high story in Rapid City's Alex Johnson Hotel, the essential Great Plains experience is rarefaction. Take all the vectors, passions, and psychological tendrils found, say, at a Friday night dance at a large high school in, say, the Bronx, and scatter them in an area 30 by 50 miles in extent, for example. I assume the phenomenon was very similar for the elephant hunter of western Kansas some 10,000 years back.

The effect of the spatials is more than scenic. It stirs and incites, induces movement in all its forms, rediscovers near-forgotten needs-to-be-gone. It is the horizontal charge of transversable space. The spatials of the Smoky Mountains or the Atlantic from Red Hook are meditative and inertial. The planar pull of the grasslands provokes and challenges. It is a seductive space of suction and vortex, of migration and wandering and swirl. Open to sun, open to lightning, each day and step have a distinct uncanny potential for revelation.

I'm a third of the way down the slope, heading for the car, when I realize I haven't had enough. I drove two days to do this very thing on this very spot. There's another, sharply conical hill just west of my knob, crowned with ponderosas in an inviting way. I angle across and up its flank and into the stunted grove at the top for another look south.

There are accounts of early 19th Century Blackfoot boys walking from this very region all the way to Taos to see what¹s there and trade or raid a little, and old-time Kiowa stories of monkey sightings that indicate penetration probably as far as the Yucatan.

It is a dilation, that's the word. A dilation on several levels at once, a call to inner movement as well as outer.

At the very top of the conical hill, in a small half-oven of rock I find the remains of an old fire. Someone had gathered him or her self in out of the wind, up into the rarefaction.

I poke in the ashes out of idle curiosity and turn up a dead half-inch metallic green bee‹a dazzling malachite green, a jewel of a desiccated bee and the focal point, for a mesmerized second there, of a hundred miles in all directions.

The wind blows. Nihil obstat. "Sheep May Safely Graze."