By John Weiss

Post-Bulletin, Rochester MN 

Growing up amidst the trees and lakes of central Minnesota, I came to southeast Minnesota and found goat prairie on the bluffs and tallgrass prairie to the west.

It was, at first, a mystery -- wide, empty, the wind blew with abandon.

But there was a mystique about it. For one thing, it was rare. While it once covered much of Minnesota, Iowa and states to the west, nearly all is now farmland, roads and cities. If it was an animal, it would be on the endangered species list.

Then I looked closer at the flowers and grasses, learned more about its rich history, walked amidst the grasses, laid on my back and looked up through a web of bluestem.

It took me many years in the heat and cold, wind and calm, but I became passionate about prairie.

There is a shortcut, however, to some of the feelings you get.

University of Iowa Press has printed "Enchanted by Prairie," with photos and much of the text by Bill Witt and an opening essay by Osha Gray Davidson. It's a good introduction to prairie.

The photos are beautiful, showing many of the best flowers and grasses at their dawn and dusk finest. All are good, a few are excellent. They will give you a hint at the wonders and mystery of prairie that has enticed and repelled people for centuries.

The book begins with Davidson's essay "Hawkeye's Whistle" that gives a nice historic look at how some famous writers, such as James Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau, talked about prairie and wild places.

The better essay is Witt's at the end of the book. He begins: "This book is not meant to be a study of prairie plants. I have tried to shape it instead as a meditation on place, on how the experience of prairie affects when we walk."

It tells the wonderful side, the joyous side.

Like any natural system, however, prairie is not always glorious sunrises, dew on grass and butterflies.

The pictures can't show how hot that prairie can be in summer. One day, when the air temperature was 89 degrees, I put a thermometer at ground level of a goat prairie. It hit 120, the highest it could go, and wanted to go higher.

I've been on goat prairie in winter when the wind wants to rip your face off.

If you walk up a goat prairie, wear good boots because it's rocky, steep and hard on legs and ankles.

But giving that complete picture of prairie is not why Witt wrote the book. He wants to give people a hint at the beauty that is out there, the mystery, he wants you to become passionate too.

He ends the book: "Native prairie inspires us and feeds our hunger for enchantment. Ultimately, it challenges us to restore the spiritual carrying capacity of our earth.

"If we accomplish that, everything else will follow."

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