As I drove across the prairie, I saw the corn fields, tall and ripe. I saw the fabled waves of grain, the endless tides of amber wheat. I saw the plains unfold, down miles and miles of blacktop road. Returning to the landscape of my childhood, I leaned my head out the car window to breathe the rich, thick prairie air. Home, I thought. Home. And then I sneezed.
And sneezed and sneezed again, great honking noises like Canada geese. Hay fever, of course. The dust in the air, the wheat chaff, the plant matter kicked up by the harvesters, the compost mold of the cut grass: The annual allergies of the prairie fall, virulent cousin to the annual allergies of the prairie spring, descended on me as I made my return to the flatlands of my youth to start the new academic year. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Keats wrote to Autumn, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun. Close bosom-friend of the over-the-counter pharmaceutical industry is more like it. Season of sinus headaches and bleary eyes. Season of the itch.
Over the past decade or so, I have grown increasingly fascinated by the ethical and epistemological changes brought on by 40 years of the computer revolution. And when South Dakota’s computer-oriented state college, Dakota State University, offered me an opportunity to start up a little think-tank dedicated to the issues, I seized the chance—packing up some books, some tweed jackets, and some boxes of chalk to drive across to the school in a small town east of the Missouri, out on the prairie.
I should have packed up some pseudoephedrine. The books proved inconsequential for the new work. Few faculty in America today wear jackets and ties. And chalkboards have all been replaced with whiteboards, the old chalk-dust air exchanged for the sickly sweet odor of the markers’ methylbenzene. But my real mistake was not preparing for the allergies.
I knew better. I had grown up in Pierre, on the edge of the prairie, and much of my childhood was spent in semiannual bouts of misery. “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child,” Gerard Manley Hopkins titled one of his most famous poems. You remember it. Márgarét, áre you grieving / Over Golden-grove unleaving? the poem begins, and I was grieving, most of those seasons. Grieving the annual prairie bloom and annual leafmeal decay. Hay fever—that’s the real blight man was born for.
For years after I had moved back east for college, and then graduate school, and then work, my grandmother would write me letters telling me that this or that house down the street from her in Pierre was for sale. And I always laughed, thinking how miserable I’d be. How broke, for that matter, since there weren’t a lot of jobs in my areas of interest available on the high plateau of the northern plains.
Besides, I felt I had put in my time on the prairie, paid my dues as a child, and I swore that if I ever went back to South Dakota, it would be to the pine and spruce forests of the Black Hills on the western edge of the state, rather than the farmland east of the Missouri. It’s out on the prairie that the summer temperatures rise above 100 and the winter temperatures drop to 20 below. It’s out on the prairie that the springs and falls are redolent with allergens.
Still, somewhere along the line, I had forgotten about the effect. A good while ago, we bought a summer house in the Black Hills, and eventually we moved in year-round. My commitment to the state increased as we brought up our daughter to be a South Dakotan. So when opportunity came to help the state and indulge my new interests, off I drove to a small east-river prairie town to teach a little, write a little, and try to think deep thoughts about cyber-ethics and the computer revolution.
And sneeze. And rub my dry eyes. And wheeze and cough and snort and scratch. And spend a small fortune on the over-the-counter hay-fever remedies that pack an entire aisle of the local drugstore. That should have been a warning, yes? A reminder of my youth. But I had missed all the signs, forgotten all the old memories, and now, returning to the prairie, I find it all come roaring back. I find it coming home.
Are these our great plains, visitors ask, ripe with corn and rich with wheat? Are these, they ask, the amber waves? The fields across the flats of America’s middle west, like the dancing floor of ancient giants? Why, yes, I tell them. Yes. Achoo.
