Chapter 47

Gravity Always Tells the Truth

Edna Parker pulled on the yoke of her Cirrus SR20, leaving Waterloo and the last meeting of the day behind. She banked the small plane east toward the bulge on Iowa's Mississippi coast where she would then point it south toward Saint Louis and home.

The two strands of the Wapsipinicon passed beneath as her fingertip pressure on the controls wound the altimeter upward. Below, in one eye sweep, she could count dust trails of seven, eight, nine combines. Residue -- husks, leaves, stalks and corn cobs -- spun off the backs of the slow moving harvesters. The dust plumes floated west over rows both standing and churned into little yellow postage stamps of grain, one pasted atop each machine.

Something about that meeting...what was it? Edna Parker pondered. She withdrew her long legs from both rudder pedals at once to get comfortable. Gray hair, manageably short, framed an outdoorswoman's lined face. Wraparound aviator glasses shielded gray-blue eyes. Like many directors on corporate boards, Edna was beginning to pay more attention to what her executives were telling her. Not that she hadn't before -- she had always taken seriously her responsibilities toward the family's money, to her mother, her aunts, her grown children, grandchildren, and suddenly, great-grandchildren. Yet, lately, she also looked elsewhere than at the numbers in spreadsheet forecasts of highlighted rows and columns. Now, she asked herself, what is this muted powerpoint not presenting?

Bill Vine was a little tic off in his delivery today. That was it. Why?

Letting that thought steep for awhile, Edna settled into further into her seat and leveled off at plan altitude. She squinted across the ridge ahead at the twin treelines of the Maquoketas as they paralleled southeast to the big river. She let herself play for a moment at the childhood game her father had taught her as they flew up this way and back years ago in the Piper Apache. Today, that name seemed out of place, yet the excitement in her dad's voice as he shouted about the land before settlement seemed to modulate in the steady hum of the engine. He would hold the stick between his knees and gesture with both hands to get her to imagine unspoiled prairies lying between long green paths of timbered river bottoms, dotted here and there with oak openings on savannas that stretched beyond even their high horizon.

The game was harder to play these days. Perhaps her adulthood -- the continually hard choices rising from running a family foundation in unrosy times -- restrained it. The black rectangles and flat sided, grand piano-shaped ponds, the regular rows of waste lagoons below were all now harder to mentally alter into free and meandering wetlands and boggy places with tall grasses and shrublands thick with birds all around them.

Less than a tenth of a hundredth part of the Iowa prairie itself remained today. That thousandth lay scattered in tiny gems, in the edges of cemeteries, remote section corners, old rail line right of ways, in a few guarded forties. The rest was gone, never to return. Sure, the prairie and wetland restoration movement was gaining momentum, thanks to Neal Smith and many others.

Yes, there were more and more places where a person could walk below the brow of a little ridge and stand among big bluestem and indiangrass with forbs at your feet, and with both eyes wide, look through the tall seedheads at pale gray prairie sky. You could let millennia fall away and expect to see a hundred thousand bison blacken the prairie like a slow swarm of huge ants if you'd just walk over that ridge.

William Vine was nervous, Edna suddenly realized. What was it? What had he not said? She thought hard, yet she just could not quite get it. There was something in the line of his mouth when the finance guy talked that Edna couldn't shake.

The Cirrus almost flew itself as Edna leaned south to cross the Mississippi into Illinois airspace. She settled on the new course and counted the ribs of the small rivers hinged to the backbone of the continent. Each one carried the diminished waters of a dry summer, here and there with rippled by little crests of higher water from a spotty wet fall. Gravity gathered them all into the nexus, into the cradle of Midwestern civilization, toward the heart. Gravity does not lie.

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Next... Chapter 48.

Thanks for these resources:

Prairie Rescue 2003; Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation

Iowa's Wetlands and Riparian Areas, Iowa State University

Iowa Prairie Network

Cirrus Design, Duluth, MN

New Piper Aircraft

The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 47 was written and edited by John Gabbert.

Upper Mississippi Basin Stakeholder Network and The Upper Basin Chronicles © 2003 Saint Mary's University of Minnesota. Your comments are invaluable. Please email feedback to (mailto link) The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 47.

The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary's University of Minnesota.