It was an endless expanse. I had never seen anything like it. Corn and Soy fields stretching to the horizon, broken by little country roads, and thickets of deciduous trees. After a hard winter, with snow blanketing the plains, frost covering trees, branches, and twigs, I watched it in a moment of pause, on a golden summer. The prairie winds swept prairie grass, with the silence broken by the solitary trill of a Redwing Blackbird perched on a goldenrod. The horizon was shallow, and green fields quickly gave way to a wide open sky, with cotton wool puffs of cloud drifting lazily across the azure sky. I stood and stared, entranced.
This was the land of Frank Lloyd Wright. My childhood hero when I grew up in foreign lands. Although a great admirer of this architect, I had never fully understood his prairie style of architecture. Until I saw the prairies. Until I saw the great flatness, and the vast sweep of the landscape. And then I understood his flat homes, hugging the landscape, with their wide sloping roofs, organically rooted to the soil. I had recently arrived from India to the University of Illinois. I was an engineer making the great leap into neurobiology. And Illinois was my first real experience of America and the Midwest.
And over the years I grew to love it. It became home. I could never get enough of those cold clear nights with Orion glittering in the sky, the air so still and the night so silent, that all you heard was the swish of the occasional wheels, as a car swept silently over the snow-packed street. I would sit outside, and look up at the giant oaks, maples and sycamores, the characteristic signature of the American Midwest. Their branches bare, intricate, delicate, covered in frost, silhouettes against a white snow-laden sky. Unmoving in the cold still night. Everything was still. And I would sit as Winter changed to Spring, and Orion gave way to the glorious Summer Triangle. And then, the bare trees would be transformed, their leaves a young soft green. And the cardinals would burst into song.
I would sit, drinking hot tea, year after year, an engineer struggling to become a biologist, against this constant backdrop of the changing seasons. The seasons changed and yet nothing changed. Nature worked on much longer time-scales, engineers on much shorter. On summer evenings, I would lie on the grass, the sky opening up from a circle of sycamores, maples, oaks and beeches. I would watch the Nighthawks in flight, mouths agape to vacuum insects, their wings outstretched. Open, flat, with the characteristic bar on the wings, and then, closing as they dived, to produce a boom. They were lovely birds to watch on a late afternoon in high summer. Graceful, and superbly designed to perform their function.
And afternoon gave way to dusk and the evening, and to the Summer Triangle. The first stars to appear overhead as the darkness gathered. The Summer Triangle! The loveliest object in the Northern summer sky. Vega in Lyra, Deneb in Cygnus, and Altair in Aquila. Glittering jewels, emphasizing all that lay beyond this precious earth, and all that lay around me.
I would lie for hours, watching the stars wheeling overhead, the diffuse milkiness of the Milky Way spreading like a misty veil across the Midwestern sky. I would hear the call of a Great Horned Owl, and close my eyes. And feel the gentle wind whispering across the grass. Upon a time, this was among the great grasslands of this world.
The spring and summer days were endless. I would walk through the last remnants of the tall grass prairies, scattered among railroad rights-of-way, or recreated. There were few virgin prairies left. But, life as it was back then, thrived wherever it could, asking humans for nothing more than a chance to survive. The goldenrods tall and vigorous, wild strawberries, flaxes, coneflowers, and Black-eyed Susans. And the ever present native sunflower. They reared their heads, pretty as ever, and ever so hardy. Binoculars were ever raised to catch an unusual warbler, a vireo, a kinglet. And ears peeled to hear the rat-a-tat of downy woodpeckers and flickers. And always, as if to emphasize that beauty is simplicity, there was the trill of the Redwing Blackbird, wings outstretched, a flash of red and orange, producing the loveliest sound of summer. Illinois is a lovely land, a blessed and fertile land. Summer or Winter, it is heaven. Its simplicity has a beauty that comes out of being itself.
I miss Illinois and the years I spent there. Texas is lovely and it has such great beauty. But Illinois was my first love on coming to America. It was here that an engineer became a biologist. It was here that I learned to love nature, and to listen to it. It is still without compare.
