By Jonathan Shipley
I imagine Walt Whitman here with me. I imagine the old poet perambulating alongside me in the morning light. The wise man would stop frequently. He’d take a long breath, the scent of the prairie filling his lungs. He’d laugh at the sounds of the small, jeweled birds: the flash of an indigo bunting, the charmed song of the eastern wood pewee. He’d stop and lie down in the fields, the writer of “Leaves of Grass,” and invite me to join him.
We’d look up, surrounded by sedge and forb, at the blue sky, the clouds, the sun lavishing us both with life. He’d repeat to me a line he wrote, “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of stars.”
The moment one gives close attention to anything—perhaps a single blade of grass—that thing becomes a magnificence, an awesome mystery, a miracle, a world unto itself.
We’d stand back up and continue our journey through Cherokee Marsh.
A prairie is one of the rarest and most biodiverse ecosystems in the world and are dominated by grasses. Grasses comprise 50% to 90% of prairie vegetation.
More than 400 species of plants exist on Wisconsin’s prairies. Whitman would have delighted in the rich variety, the rolling canvas of land colored with goldenrod and bergamot; asters and milkweed; phlox and prairie onion.
Prior to European colonization, prairies covered 2.1 million acres across Wisconsin. Less than .1% of native prairie remains in the state today. “Sure as the stars return again after they merge with light, death is great as life,” Whitman wrote. “The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time, the dead advance as much as the living advance.”
I imagine Walt Whitman here with me, advancing as time stops, and doesn’t stop, and bends backwards and moves forward.
Although he wrote deeply and lovingly about America and Americans, Whitman traveled little. He made only three journeys of length during his lifetime: to New Orleans, to Canada, and to Colorado.
What did he think of the Midwest’s grasses on his way to Denver? In September 1879, Whitman was invited to participate in the Old Settler’s Quarter celebration in Lawrence, Kansas. He went by train, eager to get as far west as he could after the event. He went as far as Denver. He arrived on September 19 in time to see the sunset splash across the Rocky Mountains.
However beautiful those mountains must have been to Whitman, what delight did he have seeing the oceans of prairie out his railcar window? The bison. The elk. The butterflies and bumblebees. The orchids. The coneflowers. The streams and ponds. The rivers and verdant valleys. The grasses. Yes, the endless grasses, grasses taller than Whitman himself—the big bluestem 12 feet high, the golden Indian grass. “You oceans,” he wrote, “how I feel you, fathomless, stirring.”
I imagine Walt Whitman here with me in this prairie feeling insignificant in the grandness of it and feeling grand in connection to it. I imagine our feeling a deep love for each other, knowing that one day would be our last, and we would be under the grass becoming grass.
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