Heartbreak Road

This is what heartbreak looks like. In the past ten days they’ve come in with backhoes and skid loaders and driven right through a huge chunk of the seventeen acres.

It’s the beginning of building the road, a process that won’t really get going for a couple more months. This piece is just about running the wires we need here at the farm and wherever else they go underground instead of along the poles that were recently here. It’s also clearly about carving up the space, too. This corner, which during negotiations we called “the triangle,” will be a retention pond or some other functional clearing to serve the road.

The first few days the skid loaders were tracking back and forth and men were putting up the plastic fencing to mark the area, Steve came home at night and said, “I’m heartbroken.” They were running roughshod all over his prairie.

Prairies for Steve are works of art. Although I think people think of them in other ways– restoration of “original” landscape, habitat for pollinators, or even “weed patches” that displaced a lovely piece of lawn (how the mower where I work sees it when he comes and mows the paths in the prairie there)– Steve sees every plot he works as a little work of art.

It is dynamic– one year flowers dominate, another year it’s grasses, and some years what is noticeable are the bees and butterflies– but it is art nonetheless.

That’s why he’s willing to clear trees. He has a vision. And it is not a vision of a road.

This past week we watched a documentary called Sky Ladder about the fireworks/explosive art of Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. It is amazing. And though his art is ephemeral (once the smoke clears, it’s over) and very much spectacle (though his museum work and paintings made of gunpowder residue are seriously impressive), it is also environmental and based on a vision. I think of Steve’s work in that way– particularly his work in our backyard, which has had more than a decade to mature.

This year the burn was very late, and the flowers were not as spectacular as they were in other areas of prairie on the farm. Which only let the river of grass take its place as the centerpiece on that canvas.