Pay Heed to the Prairie

By Hugh Sidey

Hear the language of the prairie wind. The muffled groan of a forgotten and rusted windmill. The taut, thin cry of a young hawk at a thousand feet poised on invisible thermal crests. The worried whispers of hundreds of millions of stalks of corn, ear to fat ear, leaf on leaf. It all says more in ten minutes about beginnings and endings, about hopes and disappointments than Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale have said in a year--a loud, loud year.

Angry shouts from Washington and Moscow, arguments between Republicans and Democrats, thunderous political conventions, ear-splitting Olympic extravaganzas, mines and missile attacks, noise and people and people making noise. The beaches are filled and the forests infiltrated, and even the high mountain passes have traffic jams of mobile homes. So come to the prairie and listen. Nobody goes there in August--except grasshoppers and God.

Strange how the pressures of the world seem to have cropped out in the center of the country. The fecund fields of Adair County, Iowa, yield more corn than anyone can sensibly conceive (5,308,000 bu. made up of at least 400 billion individual kernels, any one of which makes a good chew for a boy doing nothing but hiking in the sun and tasting the earth's power). That is corn coveted by the adversary, the Soviet Union. Corn that would feed the hungry of Bangladesh if they could only get it. Corn that is so abundant that much of it is packed away and stored and sometimes rots. Corn that is crushing the very genius that produced it.

But beneath those miracle plants the precious mantle of topsoil is washing away, some 13 tons per acre every year. The experts say a tolerable limit is a five-ton loss. So if nothing more is done, in less than 50 years the great resource on which rests our national strength and confidence will begin to ebb. And we could lose more than that, says Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington. A thousand years ago, the Mayan civilization in the Guatemalan lowlands disappeared in a few decades after 17 centuries of development. Modern analysis found that this agriculture-intensive society collapsed when the topsoil ran out.

Pay heed, Reagan. High interest rates, which these folks link to the huge federal deficits, have brought bankruptcy to more farmers than at any other time since the Great Depression. Families, after generations on the same land, have given up and drifted off to the melancholy ranks of the rootless. Pay heed, Mondale. The last thing they need is another tax increase on top of real estate taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, Social Security taxes. And stores that long ago lost their merchants have filled up with Government offices where the personnel never seems to dimmish, and their pay always seems to go up, never down like those who try to create the wealth and risk all they have and never go out on strike.

Out here on the prairies, they still communicate with the Soviets about growing food, and they wonder what is wrong with the big politicians that they cannot manage to talk about preventing nuclear disaster. International trade is for the moment a lot more important than school prayer and the ERA. The Pentagon's excesses and all the saber rattling around the world are a curse in a place whose whole reason for being is to enrich life every year with plowshares, whose profound joy is to bring sun and earth together and to nurture a golden bounty for all people, without which there can be no peace.

Listen to the prairie wind. Sometimes angry, but more often not. Mostly the harbinger of gentle though inevitable change, a soothing companion, a bearer of wisdom in the last days of August when God does his work alone.