A Prairie Pentecost
Leslie Harkema, Calvin College Class of 2005
Perspectives
Feburary 2006

"Here on the prairie there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning, nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or to delay. ...To me it seems rather Christlike to be as unadorned as this place is." I lift my eyes from Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004) to gaze at the landscape outside my car window. The wind hums noisily over the roof as my parents and I drive across Midwestern plains on our way to watch my sister run at the national track and field championships. Since we left Michigan, the terrain has subtly transformed itself into the Iowa that the Reverend John Ames describes in Robinson's book. I watch the breeze skim over the fields, uninterrupted by hills or woods. To me the unembellished flatness of the Iowan landscape seems unexpectedly exotic, a strange simplicity. The sheer expanse of the sky and the free rein of the wind over the fields make the land seem so vulnerable, so completely exposed to the heavens.

I feel somewhat vulnerable myself as I stare at the unobstructed horizon. Graduation from college only a few days behind me, I now face the world on my own. At the end of this summer I will move across country and start graduate school, pioneering into a new life like the settlers that inhabited these prairie plains years ago. I will be exposed to the winds of change, far from family and friends, forging a path into new territory. But for now I am driving through Iowa.

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