NINE-MILE PRAIRIE

Now to get to Nine-Mile, you cross Interstate 80, pass new housing developments and apartment complexes, turn west on Highway 34, pass the Kawasaki factory that employs over a thousand people, pass the north side of the Lincoln Municipal Airport, pass fields planted with corn or soybeans, pass a Casey's convenience shop, an RV storage site, a pallet manufacturer, and turn west onto Fletcher Street. Seventeen years ago, I was eager to match names in the field guide to the plants that I saw and to learn the characteristic grasses and forbs and thus, the boundary lines between the different types of prairies - tall, mixed, and short; upland and lowland. Now I'm less interested in names and divisions than in learning how the prairie works, both as individual plants and as a whole, and how a prairie landscape works on my body, mind, and soul.\n What Weaver and Clements were grasping at when they described prairie as a single organism is the living unity they saw there, "each part interdependent upon every other part," as they wrote in Plant Ecology.