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My relationship to place begins with a command to leave it. “You’re not gonna farm,” my dad told me. “You’re going to college.” Where was college? Not anywhere close to our Moulton Township farm, Murray County, Minnesota. It was someplace, probably in a city. To a seven-year-old kid, “college” was nondescript, an abstraction.

This instruction was part of a planned attack on my dad’s part to detach me from the small farm that was his passion, and then his ball and chain, and then his heartbreak. “When you get married, move away from here, never look back,” he said. And finally “Leota—that’s a cult.” Leota was the tiny town that was always cast as one thing: too small, too gossipy, too confining.

The Midwest is supposedly an easy place to leave. Many are the stories of young men and women who grow up on the farm and move to the city where their work ethic is valued and harnessed by industry. The stories of city people that move to rural places, by comparison, are viewed as anomalous, an exception to the rule.

Maybe leaving the Midwest is easy in its generic form. If we take the Midwest to be “flyover country,” a huge swath of countryside that’s monotonous, in which everything is the same (it’s not).

But for me, it’s not the Midwest in general that’s at the center of the question. It’s that small Moulton Township farm, above a half-mile stretch of Champepadan Creek. I started walking that creek as a kid, noticing its slow, silty parts and its quick gravelly parts. Noting where I saw crayfish and minnows and once even a perch. Observing where the tile lines came in and where there were still wet spots. I still consider the time I surprised a beaver and saw it swim the length of a pool as contact with mystery. Today, there are still beavers in our branch of Champepadan Creek, making a mess of things, meaning I’ve known the strand of beavers there going on forty years. That’s relationship.

As I grew older, it became less acceptable to walk the creek as a pastime, so I started carrying a gun, hunting pheasants—just another way to keep walking the stretch of land, that became in a very true sense of the word a friend.

I still have a stake on the small farm I grew up on, even though I don’t live on it or make my living from it. I know this is not normal. I understand that I can afford to have a view of the farm much like Thoreau, who went through a process of viewing and buying a farm he admired. His primary goal was to buy that farm to preserve it. “I was in haste to buy it,” Thoreau says, “before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made any more of his improvements.”

I’ve seen our farm “improved” over the years: the creek straightened, lush waterways tiled out and then farmed completely through. These changes made sense economically. They made it less of a place.

But I’ve also seen thoughtful, relational moves. My nephew farms the land now. And he doesn’t push the land like he might. He makes choices that are creative, even playful. He put the waterways back in. After the wet spring of 2018, he cut his losses and used a government program to sow the land in turnips—turnips! That fall, cows plodded across the fields pulling up and then chomping on the overgrown tubers. “That ground is going to be just as soft and aerated as you can imagine!” Austin’s dad told me proudly.

Then, this year, I heard that he had enrolled part of it in a wildflower program. While hunting this October, sure enough, I broke through a wall of corn—record setting corn—into an open space, a late wildflower blooming at my feet.

I have at least two colleagues—mountain people, hiking people—who feel very alienated from the northwest Iowa landscape, a landscape very similar to the one I love. Go walk it, I want to tell them.

Walk what?

I was never so offended as to hear a prairie connoisseur say about my part of the Midwest, the tall grass prairie, that there “was no there there.” The writer was borrowing a line from Gertrude Stein, who returned to her hometown of Oakland to find it less of a place.

But who was I kidding?

The dominant feature of the Midwest is the Jeffersonian grid, the landscape broken into 5,280 foot squares that could in turn be easily broken into 160-acre quarters that yeoman farmers could make their own. Thus, the dominant feature of the Midwest is its salability. Most of that wide open space of Middle America that was so daunting to the founding fathers is now privately owned, most of it has been utterly changed.

The original tall grass prairie in Sioux County, for example, is 99.9% gone, transformed into corn and soybeans agriculture. Take any landscape in the world and remove 99.9% of it and tell me it wouldn’t be thought of as abomination. Brazilian rainforests. Appalachian hard woods. Paintbrush desserts. All of it now farmed in perfect squares, one tenth of one percent left in some random corner where no one sees it.

Today, like it or not, the Midwest is an industrial landscape. Walking in it—in the countryside—is akin to walking in a big box store section of a city: you could do it, but why would you want to? Also, it’s technically privately owned so you could get kicked off.

There is, of course, a cheat code to get to the land that has some wild to it, some character: a gun. I find access to the land as a hunter. What waterway or soil bank would be good to walk and who owns it? Who can I talk to get onto it? This takes me to some interesting places. There’s some Pheasants Forever land west of the town where I live that has the best big bluestem stand I’ve ever seen. But it’s not comfortable to walk in a wild place where you’re the only one without a gun.

As a young man, I once wrote an essay that began, “God has laid the prairie chicken on my heart.” I had been reading about prairie chickens and their bulbous, libidinal .

This particular fascination was part of a much longer process of reseeding my imagination about the place where I lived. Our Moulton Township farm was flyover country until I came to know something about it. The sweet clover sowed in the 1980s by the Conservation Reserve Program led me to the original prairie grasses in roadside ditches. Following the creek itself eventually led me to the Dakota name for it, the Champepadan. And finding out that the pheasants I hunted had the United States led me to the native prairie chicken, a way to imagine my way into what the landscape was and might be again.

Once, in my lifetime, a prairie chicken was spotted in the county where I live, . It was an anomaly—but it could also be a harbinger. Of what’s to come.

Consider this essay another call to make the Midwest a place where there’s some there there by remaking the prairie—a prairie that’s walkable. What would it take? Five walkable acres in every section? 6.4 acres, 1% of each section? Someone, maybe someone in Dordt’s very own environmental science or biology department, probably already has a good measure in mind.

We can do it, you know. “We can live any way we want,” Annie Dillard says in the essay “Living Like Weasels.” We can stitch together pieces of the tall grass prairie from Canada to Mexico, not only a wildlife corridor but a human one. If we don’t want to be flyover country, if we want to put some here here, the place to start is with prairie.

And with reseeding our imaginations, to consider what was, what is, and what might be again.