A Day for Jim, and a Tallgrass Prairie I Didn’t Know I Needed

My Uncle Jim died on May 10, 2024. He was my mother’s youngest brother and my favorite uncle, the one who called me “neicelet” from the time I was small enough to fit the diminutive and kept calling me that long after I didn’t. He was smart and funny in a way that ran in our family on the good days, and he was steady in a way that didn’t always. After he retired he bought a bigger boat and spent years sailing it up and down the East Coast, living on the water. That was Jim.

In June I drove out to Oklahoma to spend a day with my cousin David. David is Jim’s only son, and at this point, other than my brother, who I don’t talk to, he’s my only living immediate family. We didn’t have a service to go to. We had each other, and we had a day, and we decided that was enough.

We called it the Day of Jim.

The Lake

David wanted to start at the lake where he and Jim used to sail when David was a kid; Scotty’s Cove at Grand Lake O’ The Cherokee. David gave me directions and I drove. That’s most of what I remember about the morning: David in the passenger seat, telling me where to turn, and the two of us talking about his dad. We told the kind of stories you tell when someone’s just gone. David remembered the boat. He remembered being small on the water with his father. I remembered a man who called me neicelet and meant it.

The Detour

By early afternoon we were back in the car with no real plan, which is how the best parts of any trip happen. Bartlesville was nearby. Pawhuska was nearby. And Pawhuska, y’all, is the entire reason the Pioneer Woman exists as a tourism economy. Ree Drummond’s Mercantile is there. The Boarding House is there. The bakery, the deli, the merch store, the whole machine. I’d been wanting to see it for years, partly out of genuine curiosity and partly out of food-blogger morbid fascination. We pointed the car at Pawhuska.

Reader, it was Sunday.

I had completely forgotten that on Sundays, Oklahoma closes. The Pioneer Woman empire, which on a Saturday hosts thousands of tourists and runs at full tilt, had pulled its shutters down and gone home. We walked up and down the main street of a town built almost entirely around one woman’s brand, and it was a ghost town. Empty sidewalks. Locked doors. A few pigeons. We took a couple of pictures because we’d driven all that way and couldn’t quite believe it, and then we got back in the car.

I’ll be honest with you: I was a little disappointed. Not devastated, just deflated. We’d done the lake, we’d done the stories, we’d given the day what it needed, and now we were just driving home with the air leaking out of it.

That’s when I saw the sign.

Welcome to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve.

I looked at David. David looked at me. Neither of us said anything for a second, and then we both just nodded, and I turned the car.

The Place

Here is what I did not know when I turned that wheel.

The Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve is the largest protected remnant of tallgrass prairie left on earth: 39,650 acres owned by The Nature Conservancy, plus several thousand more leased. Less than 4% of the original tallgrass prairie is left. The rest of it, that vast inland sea of grass that once covered the middle of this continent, is gone. Plowed under for wheat, corn, and soy. Built over. Paved. Subdivided. The thing I was about to drive into was the last meaningful piece of something that used to be one of the great ecosystems of the planet.

I didn’t know any of that yet. I just knew I’d seen a sign and turned.

The first thing you understand on the Tallgrass is the sky. There’s a reason every prairie writer reaches for the same metaphor; it’s because there isn’t a better one. The sky goes on. The horizon doesn’t end where you expect it to. Your eye keeps reaching and the land keeps offering. After a while you start to feel small in a way that isn’t bad. It’s a relief, actually. A correction.

The second thing you understand is the wind. It isn’t gusty or dramatic; it’s a constant low murmur, a sound that’s been moving across this land for longer than any of us have been here, and you can hear it the moment you turn off the engine. Underneath it, the grasses rustle. Not loud. A papery whisper, thousands of stems brushing against each other at once. Birds. Grasshoppers ticking away somewhere out of sight. Now and then a bison snort that carries farther than you think a sound should carry. What there isn’t, anywhere, is human noise. No traffic. No HVAC hum. No distant lawnmower. The wind and the grass fill the space where all that other sound usually lives, and you start to realize how loud the rest of your life is by the absence of it here.

We pulled over at a turnout. We got out of the car. We didn’t say much.

The Bison and the Cow

A few miles in, we came around a bend and there they were. A small herd, blocking a gravel road that ran off the one we were on; we couldn’t drive that road, so we pulled over on the shoulder and got out with the zoom lens. The signs at the gate had been clear enough about the rules of engagement. BISON ARE DANGEROUS, KEEP YOUR DISTANCE. LOOSE BISON. A yellow diamond with a bison silhouette that I genuinely thought was charming. The Tallgrass has approximately 2,200 wild bison, one of the largest conservation herds in North America, and they roam the preserve more or less as they please.

We watched them for a long time from a respectful distance. They were not impressed by us, or by anything else, which is part of what’s wonderful about them. They had decided the road was theirs that afternoon, and the road was theirs.

A little further down the road, a jackrabbit froze in the tall grass next to the car, ears up, looking us right in the eye. He held that pose for an absurd amount of time, then took off in the way jackrabbits do, which is to say, like a small grey rocket. I have never been so charmed by a rabbit.

And then, on a gravel county road threading the preserve, we came around a curve and there was a cow. Not a bison. A regular old beef cow, beige and wide and entirely unbothered, blocking just enough of the road that driving past would have been a bad idea, looking at us the way cows look at you when they are trying to decide whether you are worth their attention.

Reader, we sat there for twenty minutes.

I was driving a rental. I was not about to honk. I was not about to wave my arms out the window. The cow had the bearing of an animal who had been challenged in his life and won, and David and I sat in the car laughing about what would happen if he charged us. What does a rental car company do when you tell them a bovine of unknown ownership took offense to your Camry? Is that comprehensive coverage? Is that an act of God? Is a cow an act of God in Oklahoma?

He eventually moved. Not because we asked. Because he was good and ready.

That’s a Tallgrass moment. The land sets the pace. You don’t.

What Got Lost

Here’s the part I’ve been working up to.

The reason the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve exists as a “preserve” is because the thing it preserves is almost completely gone. At least 142 million acres of grass once stretched across the land that became the United States, from Ohio to Kansas, southern Texas up into Canada; nearly a third of what became this country. The reason this particular piece survived is, almost entirely, geological luck. The hills here sit on so much limestone and sandstone that it’s hard to walk this ground, let alone plow it. No plow ever made could break this sod.

Everything else got broken.

We talk a lot, in food writing, about the loss of biodiversity in what we eat. The handful of corn varieties that replaced thousands. The Cavendish banana that replaced the Gros Michel. The supermarket tomato that replaced everything. But we talk less about the loss of the landscape that food came from. Tallgrass prairie wasn’t just grass. It was hundreds of plant species, deep-rooted, fire-adapted, drought-resilient, holding soil in place and sequestering carbon and feeding migratory birds and pollinators and the bison that fed the people who lived here for thousands of years. And it was tended. The people who lived here burned the prairie on purpose, regularly, to bring up tender new grass and beat back the trees and brush that would otherwise swallow it. The prairie was managed. It just wasn’t managed by people who looked like my ancestors.

And here’s the part that sat heaviest with me, the part I want to be honest about, because I’m in Pawhuska.

This is Osage land. The Tallgrass Prairie Preserve is on what used to be the Osage Indian Reservation. The town we’d just walked through, that deserted Sunday Pioneer Woman ghost town, sits in the middle of what was, a hundred years ago, one of the most violently dispossessed pieces of land in America. Osage headrights, the title to the oil and minerals under that ground, made the Osage almost overnight some of the wealthiest people in the world. If you’ve read Killers of the Flower Moon, or seen the movie, you know what happened next. The murders. The systematic theft. The federal “guardianship” system built to bleed that wealth away. That is the ground I was standing on when I started to feel sad about a vanished ecosystem.

Both things are true. The prairie is mostly gone, and the people who tended it for generations were murdered for the oil underneath it. The Tallgrass Preserve sits at the intersection of those two losses. To its real credit, the Nature Conservancy has been working with the Osage Nation on bison stewardship and herd management:

“The Nature Conservancy in Oklahoma is proud to partner with the Osage Nation in support of their bison herd, sharing key learnings and best practices from over 30 years of herd management in the area.” — The Nature Conservancy

And the Osage have been buying their land back. In 2016 the Osage Nation purchased the roughly 43,000-acre Bluestem Ranch from Ted Turner, and the work of reclaiming Osage land has continued since.

The Drive Home

But you have to know where you are. That’s the deal with this kind of country. You have to know where you are.

David and I sat with it. We didn’t talk much on the way back. There wasn’t anything to say that the prairie hadn’t already said for us. We’d come out for Jim, and the day had given us Jim, and then it had given us something else: a horizon big enough to put our small grief inside of and have it still feel held.

I keep thinking about that. About how the day I built was about a man I loved, and the day the prairie gave me was about everything I didn’t know I’d lost. About how loss has a kind of fractal quality to it, where the small private griefs sit nested inside the large public ones, and sometimes a piece of land will let you feel them both at once without making you choose.

Jim would have loved the Tallgrass. He liked big horizons. He spent the last good chapter of his life on a boat looking at one. I think about him out there sometimes, on the water with David, and I think about David and me on a gravel road in Osage County, waiting on a cow, and I think those things belong in the same story.

The Day of Jim ended at sunset somewhere on Highway 60. I drove David home. We hugged. I drove back to my VRBO. And the next morning I flew back to Georgia, with a memory card full of bison and prairie and a cow with attitude, and the kind of full chest you get when a day has done what a day was supposed to do.

I don’t know when I’ll get back out there. But I know I will.

P.S. If you ever go to Pawhuska, do not go on a Sunday. I cannot stress this enough. Or do, and find your own prairie.

P.P.S. The Pioneer Woman thing turned out fine, by the way. We went back through town on the way out and got photos of the murals and the storefronts. I’d still like to see the Mercantile open someday. But honestly? The closed Sunday version, with the wind moving through an empty street that exists almost entirely because of one woman’s recipes, was its own kind of food-blogger field trip. Ree built that. Whatever you think of her politics or her brand, she built that, and the town runs on it.

P.P.P.S. The cow won, in case there was any doubt.