Spiritual sister of the English moorlands
Running through the largest remaining tracts of tallgrass prairie in North America
While I was back home in Kansas last week for Thanksgiving, I was struck anew by how much I love the landscape where I grew up.
We went for a run late Wednesday in a cold almost-drizzle, and in the diffuse, gray late-afternoon light, the colors in the fields were at their most striking: many shades of gold and brown, obviously, and some green remained, but also deep reds, and blackish purples. In the false dichotomy that is “Austen girlie” or “Brontë girlie,” my preference may be for the gentler Austen sensibility of the drawing room and quaint southern English countryside. But I feel more of a kinship with the Brontë sisters. In my imagination, the Kansas prairie—and the Flint Hills, specifically—are spiritual sisters to the moorlands in the north of England where the Brontës lived and where many of their novels are set. This feels especially true in the winter, when I’m most likely to visit.
On Sunday, my parents dropped us off in Bushong, Kansas, a ghost town about 15 miles north of our house, so that we could run 7 miles west along the Flint Hills Nature Trail towards Dunlap, another ghost town, which was once home to a large population of Black Americans recently freed from slavery. (As I’ve previously written in this newsletter, although several dozen people still live in Bushong and Dunlap, the definition of a ghost town includes locations “faded greatly from [their] peak.”)
West of Bushong the trail cuts through some of largest remaining tracts of tallgrass prairie in North America, stretching as far as the eye could see like a rumpled red-gold blanket. The wide path is lined by all kinds of scrubby flora, like common milkweed, which is beautiful even when dry, brown, and crispy. One bush was covered in bright marigold-colored berries of some kind. In one section of trail that cut through a hill, large, fluffy seed pods—they looked like a cross between tumbleweed and dandelion seeds—had collected in yellow drifts along the side of the path. The wind caught a few of the floofs and blew them across my path.
We ran by a hawk perched majestically in a tree, and by the skeleton of an opossum, splayed out on the soft, fine gravel. We didn’t see anyone else on the trail—at least, not until we bumped into my dad shuffling towards us, making sure we were okay. (I ran without my phone because I hadn’t worn anything with good pockets, and only began to regret this somewhat halfway through the run when I imagined my parents getting a flat tire and being unable to pick us up on a remote stretch of road with almost no traffic…)
When we passed a very much alive opossum, I borrowed his phone to snap a picture.
Reading list
Extremely related: How’s the Great American Rail Trail coming along, anyway? (Rowan Moore Gerety for the New York Times; hat tip Peter Gamber)
All together now: Could outdoors enthusiasts of all stripes band together to win new public land protections, even in a “drill, baby, drill” Trump world? Time will tell, but the Gunnison Outdoor Resources Protection Act (GORP!!) is something to watch. (Zoë Rom for Inside Climate News)
This peach was carried on the Trail of Tears and survived. Now it’s threatened by climate change. (Taylar Dawn Stagner for Grist)
I am still chugging away on my Long Trail journal. I want to write and edit the journal as a whole before I start publishing, instead of sending it out in bits and pieces as I go, as I’ve been doing with my more recent trail journals. I’ve found that writing the later entries has reminded me of things that happened earlier in the hike that I want to go back and add in.
As much as I would love all 1,000+ of you to read it, most of the journal will just be for my paid subscribers, as a thank you for their steadfast support. If you’d like to join that small cohort, it would mean a lot:
I live in Leeds, West Yorkshire, so Haworth is reachable by train for a day walk. Jessica, if / when you are next around here, do get in touch. I'm not walking far now, still less running, but perhaps a coffee: https://theoldparcelsoffice.co.uk?
I am so impressed by the Brontë sisters' guts and stamina. As you probably already know, frail as they were, every time they travelled away from Haworth they had to walk (3?) very exposed miles to and from the railway station at Keighley, wearing heavy but not at all waterproof clothes. Happily, I believe their luggage would have been transported by a man with a cart, which would not be an option nowadays.
Imo Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are two of the very greatest novels (maybe the greatest?) in the English language. I re-read J E over and over. W H is so dark, I can only bear to read it from time to time. But it haunts me.
Beautiful pictures!! My love of Kansas sunsets and the Flint Hills run deep - I don’t think most people realize how gorgeous it can be