"to have known the land when it was whole and sprawling and rich and fresh"

Rick Bass, in his book of novellas The Sky, The Stars, and The Wilderness (which I will review in a later blog), prefaces the same-titled third of the stories with the following wonderful citation:

"Of all these passers-through, the species that means most to me, even more than geese and cranes, is the upland plover, the drab plump grassland bird that used to remind my gentle hunting uncle of the way things once had been, as it still reminds me.  It flies from the far northern prairies to the pampas of Argentina and then back again in spring, a miracle of navigation and a tremendous journey for six or eight ounces of flesh and feathers and entrails and hollow bones, fueled with bug meat.  I see them sometimes in our pastures, standing still or dashing after prey in the grass, but mainly I know their presence through the mournful yet eager quavering whistles they cast down from the night sky in passing, and it always makes me think what the whistling must have been like when the American plains were virgin and their plover came through in millions.

To grow up among tradition-minded people leads one often into backward yearnings and regrets, unprofitable feelings of which I was granted my share in youth --- not having been born in time to get killed fighting Yankees, for one, or not having ridden up the cattle trails.  But the only such regret that has strongly endured is not to have known the land when it was whole and sprawling and rich and fresh, and the plover that whet one's edge every spring and every fall.  In recent decades it has become customary --- and right, I guess, and easy enough with hindsight --- to damn the ancestral frame of mind that ravaged the world so fully and so soon.  What I myself see to damn mainly, though, is just not having seen it.  Without any virtuous hindsight, I would likely have helped in the ravaging as did even most of those who loved it best.  But God, to have viewed it entire, the soul and guts of what we had and gone forever now, except in books and such poignant remnants as small swift birds that journey to and from the distant Argentine and call at night in the sky."

--- John Graves, Self-Portrait with Birds