We live in a land of accidental monuments. Mostly, they were erected in the beginning of the last century and were not intended to mark the passage of great events. They were intended to be the beginnings of something. They dot the landscape in the form of leaning or tumbled down buildings surrounded by tree groves dying of thirst. Sometimes there are moldering corrals of rotten boards brought in by trains that no longer run. Sometimes the county road that once led to them is still passable. Sometimes those roads have been overtaken by what was pushed aside to construct them. Often there is only a depression that marks the root cellar where precious vegetables were stored for the few years that the dream survived.
The story of the monuments that haunt this land is long and complicated. It involves immigrants, droughts, blizzards, and Federal Government programs that ignored the nature of the land. It is a story that has been romanticized in every medium and whose true impact has been largely ignored. But there is not room here to tell that story. It is too sad to squeeze into a few paragraphs. The story I want to tell is simpler. It’s a couple dozen lines about last night.
Twenty years ago we built a cabin. With a little help we buried a water line and electric cable from an existing well to a concrete foundation we’d formed and poured and finished in the warmth of a couple spring days. On that foundation, we built a floor and laid up fresh milled logs that joined together in a nifty way that sealed the wind on the outside and the clean, fresh pine smell of the new wood on the inside. We nailed shake shingles on the roof, plumbed the bathroom, and installed the finest windows and doors we could afford. When we finished it was new and bright and as full of promise as a yearly colt. We were young and assumed that mortality was real.
Bear Butte was framed in the backdoor by design and from the tiny front porch you could see the finest sunsets in the world. It was a clever human structure that stood defiant in a land of constant wind, crushing snow, and violent fluctuations of temperature. But from any window, if you knew just where to look and if you looked closely, you could see the monuments of other human structures that once stood just as defiant.
It’s been twenty years and the cabin still stands but the promise has faded. There have been complications and no one lives there now. But last night, on a rare visit, those shake shingles kept an icy rain off my back one more time. The old wood burner strained to care for me like no one has cared for that cabin in years. The wind came up around mid-night and I could feel it slipping through the joints that had been so tight when the wood was yellow with youth. I rose to stoke the fire and it dawned on me that every dream of the future is new and unique. I came to realize once again that I am a creature of The Great Plains and, perhaps more so than any other place on earth, that time is the sandpaper of life and our monuments are built by the unsuspecting.
This essay by Dan O'Brien was originally published in November of 2005.
27 comments
Yes, we are all “passing through”. As Stan Freberg said many years ago, “we are all just penciled in”. ?
Six years ago, my husband and I moved from North Carolina to Wyoming. We had been horse packing in WY for over 20 years, and had fallen in love with the beauty of high desert, Rocky Mountains and magnificent wildlife. But as we made up our minds where to live, we drove across our great country camping and taking backroads for five years….often for months at a time. Having grown up on working farms in the east, we were saddened by the fallow fields and forgotten hopes lost in the gray, weathering houses and barns. We carry a beautiful memory of a huge, weathered barn in western Kentucky surrounded by hundreds of blooming hollyhocks. Those flowers are keeping the memories of better days. Thank goodness there are still some of us caring for the land and dreaming new dreams. Keep up your great work Dan, Jill and crew!
My father grew up with his brothers a thousand years ago homesteading a large piece of Minnesota pine forest, dotted with a dozen small lakes and interconnecting streams. The main cabin still exists and another family shares the shore of Star Lake and weaving their dreams among the pines. When I visited years ago I managed to find the cornerstones of an old barn that kept a black and white group of dairy cows from the howling winter cold. The stones were set in concrete and on their surface bore the scratched initials of my dad and his brothers. They are gone now but linger in memories like this one. Thanks Dan for shaking it to the top once again.
My grandparents built a cabin and barn in the LImestone area of the Black Hills in 1909 and the cabin has started collapsing in the last couple years. It is a beautiful monument to their tenacity and will always be home to our family.
A beautiful reminder of our impermanence, Dan. Here in Cuyahoga Valley NP our monuments take the form of stone foundations full of dried leaves, daffodils and crocuses where none should be and non-native tree lines running through the forest—marking old boundary lines.
We are all just passing through and the world will continue without us long after we are gone.
What an evocative writer you are, Dan. This piece has painted pictures in my mind this morning here in MA where winter appears to be passing us by, pictures I enjoy in place of the missed experience of snow, cold, and those perfect days of crisp air and clear blue skies. Keep these pieces coming, please.
By the way, I’d been thinking to suggest you offer buffalo robes and, lo and behold, now you are! While beyond my budgetary restraints, I am glad to see them for sale. I hope they sell well
Once again, you’ve shared a string of words that when connected in your unique way, sketch a picture painted with profound thought and deep introspection. Thank you.
Thank you for the lovely picture and meaningful words on this very foggy
day here in Wisconsin.
Please continue to share your reflections. Some days they keep me going.
beautiful phrase: “our monuments are built by the unsuspecting”
Nice thought on a bright and wintry morning. A dream of mine is to build a cabin like that at the south end of my property so that some day, when I can no longer maintain my residence high in the Black Hills, I can still have a place where I can come and experience all that I love about the area— especially in winter.
How timely this post is! Last week I traveled to New Mexico with family for a long weekend. As we traveled and I saw, once again, the remains of farms, homesteads, etc., I commented that I always wondered as I passed these monuments to our history what story each place secretly held. Thank you so much for these similar thoughts.
Thank you, Dan, for reminding us of our monuments of the prairie. I am thinking of my grandfather, born 125 years ago, and his father. Both were North Dakota homesteaders who had monuments of their own—unplowed prairie land, a vague hill worthy of its own name, and a sod shelter.