Having recently left the mountains for the first time in a long time to live in eastern Colorado Springs (love makes a girl do crazy things), I realize I had forgotten what richness is the plains. My family lived on the mixed-grass prairie when I was younger, and as a teenager I loved how the sun turned everything to pure gold in the late afternoon, just before it sank behind the peak.
However, things have changed. Places I used to think were uncross-ably vast and desolate are now hidden under street after street of new homes and shopping centers. The name of the dry arroyo where my horse threw me once is lost, renamed something more generically elegant with a better resale value. Not a neighborhood, but a community.
Even ancient Sand Creek, historically temperamental, always unreliable, and frustratingly needed seems to be bogged down with new drainages, culverts, runoff and other "enterprises".
Still, between the new driveways, Wheatgrass, needle-and-thread and bluestem refuse to let go of the sandy soil. In a few square waterlogged feet between the alley and a sidewalk just down from my house, cattails and rushes thrive. A man-made flood control zone across the street has become a veritable marshland refuge for red-winged blackbirds. A fox hides in the cottonwoods, eyeing the neighbor's cat. Coyotes take advantage of the concrete trail system, gibbering like maniacs well into the morning. Grama grass pushes up through the unkempt sod of my lawn.
Rediscovering these grasslands now, I am impressed with their resiliency.
Driving home at sunset, even the streetlights and the new hospital on the hill can't change the scope of the plains, their undeniable bigness. The prairie must be described in terms of fabric... swathes of golden green grass, rolling and folding in on themselves in the ever-present wind. The sky like a brilliant blue curtain, cascading down to meet the still earth; cotton clouds arcing across the horizon and becoming towers of silver thunderheads in the afternoon heat. It seems like the best-laid plans to make a mark on this place will be laughable in such a landscape.
A Pronghorn won't jump a fence, but she will squeeze through it. I thought that all might have been lost for this place that I used to call home and now will make my home once again, but I was wrong. The fence is just big enough, and I have hope.
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