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.
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 ...

4 comments:

  1. I absolutely agree!

    It 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. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'd have to agree with her. Maybe its the farmer genetics in me, but the praries of Montana are hard to shake.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yeah, 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.

    ReplyDelete