"Calgary to Christchurch," Plains Folk #430 (Copyright Hoy & Isern)

It's been better than a decade since I decided to make the Great Plains of North America the subject of my life's work. Born and raised in the belt buckle of the plains, central Kansas, I came by this scholarly interest naturally, but not automatically. It wasn't until I started looking for a dissertation topic, and settled on the history of custom wheat harvesting, that I began to see the wonder in the commonplace things I had grown up with.

I was fortunate some years later to land at Emporia State University, where the Center for Great Plains Studies provided me with sympathetic colleagues--among them my erstwhile co-author, Jim Hoy. He and I started this column, Plains Folk, in 1983. We were dubious at first whether we could think of enough topics to keep it going. Well, this is column number 430, and about 200 of our earlier columns have been gathered into the books, Plains Folk and Plains Folk II, by University of Oklahoma Press.

Not everybody likes the column, of course. Although some editors say reader surveys show it to be quite popular, one told us he thought it was somewhat less interesting than the bowling scores. We sure aren't getting rich off it, but then we never expected to. I think that generally people feel about our column the way they feel about its subject, the plains, and that's fine.

It's hard to describe the satisfaction that comes from devoted study of the plains. It's something like this. I know that there are a lot of you who love your home communities. You go to the high school games, you worry about whether the new preacher is going to work out, you write letters to the editor of your home town paper, you man the booths at festivals. At 18 you drag Main and honk at your friends. At 68 you go to their funerals and turn your lights on as you take them up Main the last time. You have a place.

Now, academics miss out on most of that. Most of them move around a lot, and even when they stay in one place, they get caught in the town and gown thing. They are apart, and the truth is, most of them prefer it that way, or at least don't know any different.

To make the plains your life's work, though, is to have a home. The plains are a big place, but if you have the plains attitude, the love of horizons, they are a comfortable place. They become the more so as you learn more about them. You get to know farmers and ranchers and roughnecks and waitresses in Kansas and North Dakota and Oklahoma and Alberta, and you come to see that this whole continental region is made up of somebody's home community. Eventually, instead of feeling apart from any of them, you feel a part of every one of them.

At least that's the way I feel.

I've been lucky the past few years to be the guest of the government of Canada while working on the plains of that country. Now I've gotten luckier yet. By grace of a Fulbright fellowship, Lotte and I are heading off for six months to study the plains--the tussock grasslands--of New Zealand. This Fourth of July I'm supposed to sing cowboy songs at Canterbury University in Christchurch. Since I've already sung in Calgary, Alberta, I've gone about as far as I can go in latitude--Calgary to Christchurch.

I'll let you know how it comes out in column number 458. In the meantime I've stockpiled Jim with a pile of columns.

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