Every once in a while, I take a look at AM Radio’s profile picks and check out the installations. While The Quiet and The Far Away stay as permanent exhibits of his amazing skills in environment building, other temporary installations come and go. I stopped by Surface – a wide open prairie after the hay has been cut and baled and the field is in the process of being burned. The prairie installations he creates always give me a sense of home even though I was a stump-jumper, one of those who grew up in the beautiful Northwoods that border the Red River Valley.

There could be no greater emotional contrast than the close, nestling comfort of the forest and the chill, indifference of the prairie vastness. Every time we went to the doctor, the vet or to a larger grocery, we left our forest cocoon for the immensity of the plains. Perhaps because our house was right in the middle of the forest, not in town, that contrast always made me feel very much like a tiny insignificant organism in a near infinite ocean of wheat. Going to visit my sister, there is a small embankment that is the eastern shoreline of the prehistoric Lake Aggassiz that is the true sea of grass that makes up the Red River Valley. The enormity of that vast flatness will always take my breath away. I think if I had actually lived in the Valley I would have succumbed to prairie madness because I prefer the comforting close coziness of the forest, but many in my family live in the Valley and love its never-ending horizon.

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