I loved the prairie, even while I feared it. God's Country, the old-timers called it. There is something about it which gets a man -- or a woman. I feared its relentlessness, its silence, and its sameness, even as I loved the tawny spread of its sun-drenched ridges, its shimmering waves of desert air, the terrific sweep of the untrammeled wind, burning starts in a midnight sky. Still in my dreams I can feel the force of that wind, and hear its mournful wail around my shack in the lonely hours of the night ...
Friday, August 7, 2009
I loved the prairie ...
Not unexpectedly, quotes about the evocative nature of the Montana prairies are fairly common things. Here's a paragraph from a memoir by Pearl Price Robinson called "Homestead Days In Montana," which described 1910s farm life outside of Big Sandy. It was featured in the March 1933 issue of Frontier, a wonderful quarterly journal once published by the University of Montana.
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Yes...she nailed it!
ReplyDeleteI absolutely agree!
ReplyDeleteIt was a very evocative piece, and I hadn't done more than skim it before I started looking for quotes for this blog ... so this whole Montana blog thing is turning out to be really good for me, as well as fun. :)
I'd have to agree with her. Maybe its the farmer genetics in me, but the praries of Montana are hard to shake.
ReplyDeleteYeah, me too. It's really sad, I think, that so many people believe that Montana's beauty doesn't extend beyond the mountains. Some of the loveliest settings I've seen have been in eastern Montana.
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