North
Dakota State University -- NDSU Agriculture
Communication7 Morrill Hall, Fargo ND, 58105-5655, Tel: 701-231-7881, Fax: 701-231-7044
agcomm@ndsuext.nodak.edu
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North
Dakota State University -- NDSU Agriculture
Communication 7 Morrill Hall, Fargo ND, 58105-5655, Tel: 701-231-7881, Fax: 701-231-7044 agcomm@ndsuext.nodak.edu |
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Plains Folk: Bohemian AlpsTom Isern, Professor of History
In generations past, if a place had a fellow like Ted Kooser, he might be referred to grandiloquently as "The Sage of [fill in blank with appropriate place name]." I’m tempted, then, to call Kooser "The Sage of the Bohemian Alps." He would feel compelled to snort at that publicly, but I suspect he would be pleased privately. Kooser’s new book, Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (University of Nebraska Press), is in the tradition of local color and local wisdom such as graced editorial pages and regional magazines of the past. Both his eye and his powers of expression, however, deserve an audience broader than local. Up and down the plains both old residents and newcomers are mulling what it means to live in a particular place. Many of them consider the sense of place to be not just a matter of personal satisfaction but also their chief marketable asset. They ask, "what makes this place of ours distinctive, and how can we accentuate that distinctiveness?"Geography and geographers hold part of the answer. They tell us that landforms are important as frames of reference. A river valley, or a range of hills, can help people sort out their territory, give them something to refer to themselves by. Culture, too, is important. Those parts of the plains with some distinctive ethnic settlement pattern have more powerful local identity.So across eastern Nebraska runs a range of hills settled by Bohemian (Czech) immigrants. The mounds of clay and gravel are studded with glacial red quartzite boulders that look, Kooser writes, "like uncooked pot roasts." They are known—"with a wink," he tells us—as the Bohemian Alps. Kooser lives a rich life in the Bohemian Alps because he keeps his eyes and ears open. His eye is on the swallow that is late to fledge. He knows the weathered mottle of the venerable grain trucks that appear each harvest to haul away from six-figure combines. He makes our lives rich, too, because of his poetic power of expression. One day he got into a discussion with his mailman about the definition of metaphor. That very conversation, of course, was a metaphor for what he’s doing in the book. He’s teaching us how to think and speak about our home place. And he is wise, or as I began to say above, sage. He notes and quotes the proverbs of his Bohemian neighbors, sayings like, "Do not choose your wife at a dance, but on the field amongst the harvesters." Now and then he generates his own epigrams, such as, "Guns don’t kill people, people driving pickups kill people." As with all such sages, especially those considered odd or radical by their neighbors, Kooser is essentially conservative. He feels something wrong with a situation where old farmsteads go to ruin while developers carve up the farms into lifestyle acreages. He can’t see why it’s necessary for the county spray crews to kill the native plums.As I finish reading Kooser’s book and compose these remarks, I am departing the Osage Hills of Oklahoma and flying to the Red River valley of the north. I look down on the Gyp Hills and Pine Ridge and a hundred other local places filled with local wonders. I imagine this airplane a transport filled with paratroopers under my command, each one a Ted Kooser. Every few miles I tell one of them to jump, to go down there and look and listen and write and be a sage. What a benevolent invasion that would be.### Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com
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