Sojourn from the tempest

By JoAnne Young 

I’ve been thinking about the Sandhills of Nebraska a lot this past week, it’s natural social distancing and beauty and people and animals. 

It’s a good time to do that while we’ve taken a pause on running around in our much denser  surroundings where it’s hard to avoid people and the things they’ve touched. 

It’s a good time to think about shades of green and tan grasses that turn to blue as evening brushes the hills. About clumps of cottonwood and oak and cedar trees that hide homesteads from view. And dragonflies, thousands of them, that fly unperturbed and perch on watering tanks and barbed wire fences. 

  

About white speckled calves that go about their business and cows that cast vaguely curious brown eyes at the human passing through their simple world. 

The ranchers and their families live distances away from each other and must travel miles to be in the presence of others. At the same time, they have sons and daughters that live just acreages apart and come and go easily, to sit at the table in the main house to talk about what needs fixing, or who will run whatever errand, or how a grandson or granddaughter did in Nebraska’s big rodeo in Burwell.

It’s a peaceful, unencumbered existence that would feel reassuring and downright welcome in these times. 

Let me follow all this with a disclaimer. I’m not from the Sandhills. I’ve only even visited them a few times, once really into the heart of the land that makes up a quarter of the state. And only for several days.

But I absorbed a lot in those days of talking to the people who live and work there, riding in their pickups and side-by-sides over rolling, bumpy hills that went on and on, rising up hundreds of feet, and just when you think you’ve reached the highest, another rise, and another.  

It’s not that they don’t have anxieties. They worry about protecting their land and livings. They are duty-bound to the natural life – from the inch-long burying beetles that make a home there to the tall whooping cranes that cut through the overhead skies on their 2,500-mile migrations -- and the domesticated animals that roam there. To the delicate sands and grass, and what lies deep below, the Ogallala Aquifer, with its sky blue waters that bubble up in low lying areas and form impromptu pools.

They talk about their land and work and their responsibilities to both with fire and dedication. 

I was decades old when I discovered the Sandhills, but I’m grateful I finally did. This sojourn to this place has given me a needed mental shelter in the coronavirus tempest.