Letter No. 8: Home

There aren’t many places where you can pull off the interstate and find an entire town hidden in plain sight.

A small sign near Greycliff pointed toward a prairie dog town. I had driven past it before, but this time I decided to stop.

The afternoon was hot. The thermometer read 101 degrees. From the parking area, the prairie looked almost empty. Dry grass stretched toward the distant hills. Hundreds of small mounds interrupted the landscape, each one just high enough to catch the light. They looked less like burrows than little rooflines scattered across the prairie.

Not a single prairie dog was visible. I wondered if the heat had driven them underground.

For nearly a minute, nothing happened.

Then I heard a whistle. A few seconds later another answered from somewhere farther away. Then another. The calls moved across the prairie in no particular hurry, as though a conversation interrupted by my arrival was slowly finding its way back.

Is it clear?

Only then did the town begin to move.

A small head appeared beside one mound. Then another. Within a minute, the prairie had changed completely. Prairie dogs stood at the mouths of their burrows. Others hurried from one mound to the next. A few remained upright, quietly watching while the rest of the town resumed its ordinary business.

Two young prairie dogs tumbled together in the dirt. I laughed. I wondered if they were brothers. Without a doubt, they were cousins at minimum.

The longer I stood there, the more curious I became. Did they prefer cool mornings to hot afternoons? Did they enjoy the rain? What happened here in the middle of winter? Did the town become quiet beneath the snow? I realized I had spent years driving past prairie dog towns without ever wondering what it was like to live in one.

What surprised me most wasn’t the prairie dogs. It was the town itself.

From a distance, everything had looked barren. Now I could see streets I hadn’t noticed before—not paved streets, of course, but familiar paths worn between neighboring homes. Adults came and went without hesitation. Youngsters wrestled outside their doors. Someone always seemed to be keeping watch. Every mound had looked identical when I first arrived.

It only looked that way because I was too far away—and because I hadn’t waited long enough.

From where I stood, every opening in the ground seemed exactly the same. The prairie dogs didn’t seem to think so. Each one knew where home was.

As I walked back toward where I had parked, I looked across the prairie one last time.

To someone passing on the interstate, it would still look like an empty field.

I know.

For years, that’s all I ever saw.

Until next Sunday…

George

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