Driving out of Des Moines on a late August afternoon. West on the four-lane highways, then the the two lanes, then onto the gravel.
I come around a rise in Carroll County, and the whole thing opens up:
A sea of corn stretching to every horizon, the rolling waves of it lifting, cresting, falling away along the hillsides.
Down the road, a silver water-tower catching the sun like a bolt of lightning out of the cloudless, silent sky.
The white farmhouses standing like statements of the case alongside their bold red barns.
The blue of a sky so blue it almost hurts.
A lot of people think Iowa is boring, if they think about it at all. It’s not Vegas, that’s for sure. It may not even be Milwaukee. Whatever; to each his or her own.
But I can tell you one thing for sure about Iowa. It’s beautiful. And it’s beauty is the kind we need right now.
I’m home after four days in the Hawkeye State, where we were shooting a story on the shifting politics in Iowa, listening to people in various parts of the state. I listened, and I learned a lot. Look for our report—and clips on social media—in the coming days.
But it’s Sunday, and I want to sing the praises of Iowa’s Midwestern beauty.
We are used to thinking that only wild nature is beautiful. But we are nature, too.
Human beings are part of this good earth, and at our best we make a life with our surroundings that is soulful, poised, and beautiful.
Now—I am not blind or stupid to the cost of the lovely Iowa landscape. One issue kept coming up again and again in the conversations I had with people around the state, and it surprised me: Iowa today has among the worst surface water in the country. And cancer rates there will not stop climbing.
Under the sea of corn was once tallgrass prairie, wetland, and woodland—a primeval ecosystem now more thoroughly erased than almost any place on earth. A “toxic brew” of nitrates, crop chemicals, fecal bacteria, and heavy metals courses into water sources. Iowans are demanding action.
Some of these changes are irrevocable. And the damage has accelerated as the good land of Iowa has been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, most of them corporate. There is so much work to be done, and I was glad to hear so many Iowans demanding action.
Still, that work—that need to repair this wounded land—should not make us blind to the beauty that generations of Iowans have made here.
There is a glory in the landscape Iowans have made.
Here is a truly “vernacular landscape.”
That’s a term I’ve loved since I first came across it decades ago. The American geographer and historian J. B. Jackson coined it to describe a landscape built not by architects or by government decrees, but by the habits, practices, commitments, and daily work of ordinary people going about the long business of living on the land.
It’s what you see along the country roads in the Connecticut River Valley, or the South of France, or the the West of Ireland. You see people and the land they live, work, and die on—and shape.
“The beauty that we see in the vernacular landscape is the image of our common humanity,” J.B. Jackson wrote. “Hard work, stubborn hope, and mutual forbearance striving to be love.”
That “mutual forbearance” is what we need in this moment in order to work together and heal our lands, wild and vernacular. Too much discussion of environmental issues is too often couched in contemptuous absolutes: “Drill, baby, drill” is immoral. So is “People = Plague.”
Human beings have worked and changed and shaped the earth for thousands of years. At our best we have been stewards of the land, but in the span of a few decades we have become vandals of creation.
“We are not God,” Pope Francis wrote in his environmental encyclical, Laudato sí. “The earth was here before us and it has been given to us…This implies a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature.”
Iowans, like so many rural peoples through history, once embodied that mutual responsibility, and made a beautiful land. Last week, I felt the strong stirrings of a bipartisan movement to take up that sacred mission once again.
Our poem this week, fittingly, is by an Iowa poet. James Hearst (1900-1983) was born on the family farm in Blackhawk County. At one time, he was known as “the Robert Frost of the Midwest.” Some of Hearst’s friends thought of Frost as “the James Hearst of New England.”
This poem is about the land and the farmer on it, and the blazon of hope in every farmer’s eye every year since time immemorial.
—Terry
Landscape—Iowa
by James Hearst
No one who lives here
knows how to tell the stranger
what it’s like, the land I mean,
farms all gently rolling,
squared off by roads and fences,
creased by streams, stubbled with groves,
a land not known by mountain’s height
or tides of either ocean,
a land in its working clothes,
sweaty with dew, thick-skinned with loam,
a match for the men who work it,
breathes dust and pollen, wears furrows
and meadows, endures drought and flood.
Muscles swell and bulge in horizons
of corn, lakes of purple alfalfa,
a land drunk on spring promises,
half-crazed with growth—I can no more
tell the secrets of its dark depths
than I can count the banners in a
farmer’s eye at spring planting.