Featured Nonfiction

• In Praise Of The Plains

  Sarah Fawn Montgomery

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  In summer, Nebraska skies splinter, lightning wrecking the blue dome, splintering it to shards. Storms come on sudden, though the birds know and take to skies in a cackle, wings beating warning. At first, storms seep in yellow at the horizon’s edge before blackening the afternoon, barometrics pressing down, and a funnel forms, twisting like a child’s cartoon tangle angling towards town. Sirens wail, hail dents car hoods, a tree goes through the ceiling, nature overtaking the living room, dripping wet and verdant. And visible through the branches and open ceiling?—a fearsome sky wracked with fire.

  When I moved to the Great Plains from California’s central coast, where the shoreline dips like the dimple of a lover’s flesh, the estuary foggy and safe, the weather moderate, I was fascinated and terrified. On the coast, summers were temperate, peaking in the 80s, night lows sinking to the 60s, and rain ruined the beach for picnickers, who soaked up sun on Sunday, their deepening tans the only indicator the earth was turning, that the sandy moment was not the center of the universe. Kelp washed in with the waves, great undersea forests easily uprooted to line the beach with their briny smell, and ice plants dotted the sand with their succulent flesh and bright flowers, though why they were named for a cold that never came, we did not know. Winters, too, were mild, reaching lows of 40, highs in the 60s, sometimes the 70s, and picnickers still lined the beaches, wrapped in blankets as they fed gulls bits of bread, surfers still paddling out on the waves still rushing in. Always, the weather was constant, controlled, in part, by the tides lapping easily at the shore.

  It was easy to love this place, a benign landscape designed for leisure, a charming backdrop for the seasons of your life, captured in photos shared with the caption #blessed. To love something that serves your pleasure is not difficult—doing so is to love ease, comfort, perhaps control. California, as far as we were concerned, existed solely to be beautiful.

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