"Prairie Spring" by Pete Dunne

In 2007, Pete and Linda Dunne of New Jersey packed up their RV and head west. Their destination was America’s Great Plains, the land stretching from Missouri to the Rockies and the Dakotas south to the Texas Panhandle and New Mexico. Their purpose: experience springtime on the prairie. 

Except there wasn’t much prairie left. But there were pockets, as often on state and federal park land as on the land owned by farmers. The story that results is Prairie Spring: A Journey into the Heart of a Season. Pete, a writer and an officer with the New Jersey Audubon Society, and his wife Linda, a photographer, traveled to sites in Nebraska, Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, and Montana. Pete writes as much about the people they meet as he does the prairie and its wildlife. Linda takes photographs, and she’s usually concerned with getting the light just right (at least, that’s as Peter tells the story).

 

Pete Dunne

They look for and find the sandhill cranes in Kearney, Nebraska; experience a foot-plus snowstorm in Pawnee Buttes, Colorado; and tell the story of the great grasslands, sodbusting, farming, and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. They attend a high school baseball game, comparing it to the mating rituals of the prairie chicken. They travel the same land seen by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in 1540 (like Coronado, they never find the seven cities of gold). They get caught in a sandstorm. 

 

They visit small-town restaurants and cafes, the ones that have survived the building of the interstate highways. They talk about the origins of soil conservation. They explain how a canyon is part of the prairie ecosystem. They get confronted by a farmer who believes that the Dunnes, like all other RV people, are there to dump trash on his land (they convince him they’re looking for birds). And they tell the story of the American buffalo, whose near demise because of over-hunting contributed to the prairie’s destruction.

 

Prairie Spring, first published in 2009, is in turn funny, poignant, informative, and eye-opening. The Dunnes concern themselves as much with the people of the region as they do with the natural environment. And they tell (and show) a story worth telling, about a region that has helped to define American history and culture.