Prairie Mountain

Today I am at my parents' house in North central Iowa. It is the farm I grew up on, surrounded by miles of cornfields and prairie. As I drove up to their house last night, my car filled to the brim with my cats and their belongings, a kayak strapped to the roof, my anxiety high from a day of trying to pull my shit together and learning how to secure a boat to my little Ford Focus all by myself, I couldn't help but feel awed at the tranquility of their big, old farm house, the familiar, long driveway (that is now paved but was a duration of loose gravel for most of my childhood), the rows of tall, looming evergreens that my dad had planted when we were small, and the nostalgic, comfortable images of grain bins, the barn, the shed, farm machinery, and various animals squawking and braying to announce my arrival.

Their house is West of town, so as I approached the farm around 8:30 pm last night, I could see the sun, huge and orange, lazily lowering itself into the horizon. My sister, who is living at home now and working on the farm, had recently said to me, "Do you know what I notice about Iowa? The sky--there is so much color, and there's always a little pink in it, and you can see forever."

And as I watched the sun slowly, slowly settle herself into the head-high rows of corn, then sink amidst the crop, and then disappear into the endless horizon, I saw what she meant. It was beautiful.

Later, after a jovial dinner with all five members of my family (which included ridiculous banter about the donkey, a thoroughly detailed narrative about the lives and character maps of the roosters, and the inevitable plays on words that describe all the animals--"The cocks are chasing the ass again! Ha, ha, ha, ha"), I stepped outside to unload my car.

There were fireflies blinking everywhere! And I glanced up, and there was Cassiopeia, Orion, and all the late summer constellations, brightly gleaming above my head.

There is a lot of charm to this place.

And then, this morning, I woke up to the sound of roosters crowing, the lone donkey braying, and my mom's cat chatting with my two cats through a closed door. I came downstairs and looked out the window, to the South. To the North, the East, and the West, you can see for miles. You see nothing but rows of corn, soybeans, or prairie. You can see a blanket of unending sky, unfolding in all directions, whatever weather it holds taking it sweet time as it makes its way across the enromous palette of flatland.

To the South, however, you see something different. You see crops, you see miles of land, but in the center of the horizon, you see another, strangely misplaced vision.

You see something that looks like a mountain. A mountain?

Yes, a mountain. And it's a growing.

Each time I come home to visit my parents and marvel in the simplicity and beauty of the nature that surrounds them, I notice the mountain to the South, and how it gets a bit taller, a bit fatter.

That "mountain" is a giant landfill that acquires trash from all over the midwest. Less stringent disposal rules and cheaper taxing on dumping in Iowa keep Minnesota garbage spilling over and onto the mountain that lives just a couple miles South of my parents' house (70-100 truckloads from Minnesota arrive daily, according to my dad. He calls Waste Management Systems the Mafia of Garbage--"Google it, Liz, you won't find anything. They're the Mafia.") There was a big uproar about this practice a few years ago, including a write up in the Star Tribune about the landfill just outside of Lake Mills, IA, but apparently nothing has changed. (When I was a first-year in college, my choir director said, "Oh, you're from Lake Mills? I just read about the landfill there!")

So the ungarnished, natural beauty of rural Iowa is interrupted. Garnished, if you will, by pepperings (er, dumpings) of out of state trash, inevitably seeping into the groundwater and nutrient-rich soil.

My sense of awe in the infinite sky and the miles and miles of prairie is disturbed by a mountain of trash.

My enchantment with the loveliness and fresh air is also disturbed by the sound of a low-flying plane outside, right now, at this very moment, spraying fungicide on the crops. "It's crazy out there right now in the farming world," my Dad said to me this morning, when he told me about the pesticide plane. "Farmers are doing everything they can to make more money. Get rid of the aphids, get rid of the fungus, they increase productivity--and they'll make more money."

That lazy sun setting softly into the horizon last night sees all of this. I wonder if her heart breaks, like mine does, at the sound of fierce streams of pesticide, or the vision of a completely unnatural mountain growing by leaps and bounds in the middle of the cornfields and native wildflowers. (And don't even get me started on GMO corn. On Monsanto. On the ethics of hybridization. On hog farms. Among other things.)

Yes, it is beautiful here. And we are completely destroying it, one truckload of trash at a time.