America, Peeling

Now the face of all the land is changed and sad. The living creatures are gone. I see the land desolate and I suffer an unspeakable sadness. Sometimes I wake in the night, and I feel as though I should suffocate from the pressure of this awful feeling of loneliness.
-Anonymous (Omaha), Native American Testimony

You can't stand the Illinois landscape, especially after harvest. The harvesting machines leave behind huge ruts, chewed-up corn stalks. Raw earth. Once, tall grasses covered this land and buffalo stomped through the brush. Now the prairie, divided-up, mowed-down. During the growing season, corn swallows the land; a flood rushing in, and you wonder what things get swept away. (Birds, cars, small children.) You dream that the corn conceals treasure—gold coins or mermaids or shipwrecks—but harvest season turns up the earth, and there’s nothing. Just the barren land, stretching out in every direction. Flat, windswept. And within your mind, the same expanse.

The red man came—
The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce,
And the mound-builders* vanished from the earth.

The gopher mines the ground
Where stood their swarming cities. All is gone—
All—save the piles of earth that hold their bones.
-William Cullen Bryant, “The Prairies”

Sometimes you see a bird soar low over the road. As it plummets downward, you realize you’re watching a cornhusk float on the wind. But how the husk seems like a broken-winged bird. The land plays tricks on you. How does this happen, your mind churned-up, tilled? (And what crop is worth this reaping?) In the distance, houses look like burial mounds. You think of the mound builders, Cahokia. One civilization gives way to the other—so the pioneers said. But there are always relics left behind—pottery, scrolls, mounds. It's local custom to go searching for arrowheads in the fields after harvest. One morning you find an arrowhead in the ditch.

Is Grace’s Honeycomb a Comb of Stings?
-Edward Taylor, “The Soul’s Groan to Christ for Succor”

Attempting to find romance in the landscape, you drive down a country road with your boyfriend. Then park in a copse and walk down to the field. There, beside the corn, you have a picnic, watching the sunset. Bugs, heat. Red welts cover your legs the following morning. “Pesticides,” your mother whispers. Worried about cancer, you end the relationship.

[The] Central States of the United States are like unto the heart of America, and the heart is connected with all the organs and parts of man. If the heart is strengthened, all the organs of the body are reinforced, and if the heart is weak all the physical elements are subjected to feebleness.
- Abdu'l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan

In 1848, President James K. Polk announced that gold was found in California. We were fated to be, for a while, a nation of gold-diggers ("manifest destiny"). During growing season, the fields contain promise. You can’t see over the corn tassels, the gold. Anything could be out there. (Adventure, romance, money.) Harvest takes away that hope, reveals the great distance between you and everything else. The space troubles you; it can’t be filled. And there's nothing to break the wind. Windows rattle in their frames and unlatched doors swing open. One evening, you collect mail from the mailbox. The fierce wind tears the mail from your hands, scattering letters and bills across the muddy fields.

You think of pioneer women and pray for their strength. The strength to drag your twisted body through a windswept field, though the barn looms overhead, trapping you in the landscape. The strength to wear a pink dress, though your hands are calloused, your teeth yellow. And you come to represent the human spirit—isolated, insignificant, but struggling anyway. (It’s only a painting.)

The same patient fields, until a dead woman.
-Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

You can’t walk through a cornfield. The ruts twist your feet, cast you down. So you crawl—the only way through this land is crawling. After a while, you’re tired. You want nothing more than to stop, lie down in the soil. Rest. But if you succumb, the land will feed on your body. The land will reap you. Your father says, “Three acres of intact prairie grass still exists, growing out of an old pioneer cemetery. Feeding off their bones.”

Many times hath Satan troubled me concerning the verity of the Scriptures, many times by atheism how I could know there was a God; I never saw any miracles to confirm me...That there is a God my reason would soon tell me by the wondrous works that I see, the vast frame of heaven and the earth, the order of all things, night and day, summer and winter.
-Anne Bradstreet, To My Dear Children

The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those, which were once the devil's territories...the devil thus irritated, immediately tried all sorts of methods to overturn this poor plantation.
-Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World

You spent your childhood in Michigan, where places were named Iron Mountain, Copper River. Where the mines were. (How can you say mine?) There, people still remembered how rivers flooded the mines, sucking miners into manmade caverns. Nature was beautiful, but menacing. The forest around your own house captivated you. A strange presence in the shadows. ("I heard vision quests were held on this land," your father said. "It's a powerful place.") Sometimes wolves came into the yard, staring at the chicken coop. And that garbage can filled with bird seed, a bear knocked it over. One month, you weren't allowed to get the mail, on account of the mountain lion. Wild things trammeled the rose garden and nested in shutters. How did you ever think to claim that land? How did you call it mine.

Is this the land you Fathers loved,
The freedom which they toiled to win?
Is this the earth whereon they moved?
Are these the graves they slumber in?
-John Whittier, qtd. by Frederick Douglass in My Bondage and My Freedom

*During the 1800s, many pioneers believed that the common burial mounds were built by the “mound-builders,” an ancient, gentle race of people that was massacred by the American Indians. (This theory was used to justify the mistreatment of Indians.)

(all content Copyright National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States, 2000-2003, do not use without permission)