--- title: A Lament for Readers (of Landscape) date: 2026-09-14T06:00:00-05:00 author: Jennifer Vermeer canonical_url: "https://www.dordt.edu/in-all-things/a-lament-for-readers-of-landscape" section: In All Things --- [ View All Articles](https://www.dordt.edu/in-all-things) [Essays](https://www.dordt.edu/in-all-things?category=essays) Sep 14, 2026 # A Lament for Readers (of Landscape) By [Howard Schaap](https://www.dordt.edu/people/howard-schaap) Our pursuit of efficiency and utility can make us less attentive to the beauty of creation. As Christians, how might we become readers of the world again—recognizing creation’s goodness, grieving its losses, and bearing faithful witness to its beauty? ![](https://d3evso2dxyohou.cloudfront.net/generalUploads/iat-lament-for-readers.jpg?mode=crop&pos=center-center&w=66&h=57&f=webp&c=e7073a00&v=bf8af6d1e5749797df447ca5108ee7492e5cd3f45178c57fd9fb9dba39887791) ![]()“If you want to *see* where you are,” Wendell Berry wrote thirty-five years ago, “you will have to get…out of your car, off your horse, and walk over the ground. On foot you will find that the earth is still satisfyingly large, and full of beguiling nooks and crannies.” It’s hard to walk the world in the landscape where I live, the former tallgrass prairie, which is 99.9% transformed and privately owned. So this summer, with the need for exercise showing up in my labs and a left knee missing half its cartilage, I took to a bike with two goals: to improve my health, and to test Berry’s hypothesis on a bike. Would I find the world satisfyingly large at bike-speed? And would I be able to bear witness to the procession of whatever leftover prairie plants still lurk in the ditches along a road I have traveled all my life? The results were mixed, even though my notes ballooned to 4000 words. Here’s the TL;DR version. ![](https://d3evso2dxyohou.cloudfront.net/generalUploads/iat-lament-readers.jpg?mode=fit&pos=center-center&w=57&h=65&c=941351ec&v=50e294308822178e6ed1124e9245ec192a21c81a1ee6a78a404f61d91ff2c498) On my first couple of trips, I was just worried about getting up to pace and not becoming a bug on a windshield, so I couldn’t really see anything. Then, as I began to settle in and get my breath, I found I *could* mostly see plants at speed. Here were prairie roses in pink and magenta. There was goat’s beard and buffalo burr. In the lee of one farm place, the bright purple of blue vervain with its slow burn up a long stem. At speed, though, I couldn’t tell what the dwarf grass was growing at road’s edge or what the small white trumpets were that haunted one soybean field. I had to in fact get off my bike and walk the world, only to find that the grass was last season’s redtop and the delicate trumpets were bindweed. As for fauna, I jumped a pheasant hen and scared a red-tailed hawk off a no-passing sign and glimpsed a yellow and black bird I couldn’t name, not finch or yellow-headed blackbird. Maybe, an internet search yielded, an evening grosbeak? Which would have been a revelation indeed. At a certain point, I had biked the road enough for observations to merge into aphorism. Flat is not flat. Hills are not hills. Turns out, on the supposedly flat prairie, my route was all uphill going out and all downhill coming back. (No, not uphill both ways, though somehow against the wind both ways). The final hill that took me to the peak of my ride was a case in point. After cresting that hill, I had a short downhill coast to the T intersection where I turn around. Coming back up that hill, on a landscape that tilts all the way, you realize it’s not the same hill, that it’s much easier coming back. > Maybe what I lament is the lack of readers of the landscape, that as we drive through the countryside, we so often fail to get out of our cars to actually see “the beguiling nooks and crannies” of the world. And grass is not grass. I started my rides before the ditches were cut in high summer and before the coming of big bluestem, the signature tallgrass species, which shoots up in late July. But after the ditches were cut, the prairie species that had been accumulating, which may have reached twenty (20) in a landscape that could have had ninety (90), were reduced to less than ten (10): corn, soybeans, smooth brome, queen Anne’s lace (invasive), Canadian thistles (invasive), plus the reemergence of goat’s beard. In ten miles of ditches, I saw five total plants of big bluestem, a plant that would once have been a hallmark of the place. In the tri-culture that dominates my ride, it’s not clear that corn and soybeans, if not preferred by humans, would repopulate themselves. Smooth brome (a sod-forming grass compared to the clump forming grasses of the tallgrass prairie, including big bluestem) would presumably crawl across the landscape and carpet it. Does that make smooth brome the most insidious of the plants before me? Or Canadian thistles, which were starting to seed, and which farmers are bound by law to cut or spray? A generation before Berry, Aldo Leopold famously said that an ecologist “lives alone in a world of wounds.” I’m not an ecologist, just a hobbyist. But the great reduction of diversity in the landscape before me is shocking. Imagine saying of an Appalachian forest that it was 99.9% gone. Berry is also famous for saying that we cannot love in the abstract but that we must have “particular love for particular things, places, creatures, and people, requiring stands and acts, showing its success or failures in practical or tangible effects.” ![](https://d3evso2dxyohou.cloudfront.net/generalUploads/iat-lament-readers-2.jpg?mode=fit&pos=center-center&w=57&h=65&c=a8b018f9&v=eae2179d68aa44c723d43544465cea1d2afcc329b60fcd05c4309e2d1d8ac609) What does lament mean in the former tallgrass prairie? I recently heard someone discuss lament as something distinct from despair, that lament implies belief in a God who is listening. But a lament for tallgrass is akin to a child crying out to a parent who has let them learn some lesson the hard way. “God, why did you let us do this?” seems a strange kind of lament. In the case of the tallgrass prairie, we very much get what we pay for; what we have paid for is a highly controlled, highly productive (in one specific direction), machine-oriented landscape. But there’s lament to be heard in the landscape itself. Or rather there’s an absence of voices, a choir of a thousand reduced to a trio, a symphony reduced to a three-piece band, a color palette reduced to three not even primary colors. In Gerard Manley Hopkins’ most famous poem, “God’s Grandeur,” he paints in just a few lines a picture of industrial Britain. “Generations have trod, have trod, have trod,” he writes. “All is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil;/and wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell.” But, says Hopkins, “…for all this, nature is never spent;/ There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Especially before the ditches were cut, it felt like possibility lurked in the soil. The counter-colony of prairie roses that made me catch my breath. The brilliant glimpses of purples and golds. The hope that big bluestem would shoot up and offer the world its warm summer wine. Following Hopkins, it is possible to imagine that the seeds for tallgrass remain somewhere in the soil underneath all that corn, waiting to be revealed. > But there’s lament to be heard in the landscape itself. Or rather there’s an absence of voices, a choir of a thousand reduced to a trio, a symphony reduced to a three-piece band, a color palette reduced to three not even primary colors. But there’s another absence to the scene. Maybe what I lament is the lack of readers of the landscape, that as we drive through the countryside, we so often fail to get out of our cars to actually see “the beguiling nooks and crannies” of the world. “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to see it” isn’t a philosophical conundrum, it’s a tragedy. If an evening grosbeak appears on the prairie and no one is there to see or even to imagine the possibility of it, something is lost—or at least, some glory is not named. If I fail to see the lone pure white prairie rose along Highway 1, then it’s what Roland Barthes calls *lector absconditus*, the disappearing reader. Creation needs a witness. We’re that witness. Read the end of Job where God loudly answers Job’s laments with, “But *look*.” And of course, faithful readers remain. My sister who is restoring her yard to native prairie and had an entomologist visit to number the rare insects that are returning. A naturalist I met on a prairie walk who is the only person in the world to have photographed a rare prairie bee. The farm wife who uses apps on her phone to help name—in the tradition of the first naming of creation—unique plants and birds and bugs. We live in a time of economic determinism, cynical pragmatism, decimating efficiency. These are days of disappearing plants, animals, whole biomes. I lament that loss, the absence that it leaves in our lives that we don’t even know we are missing, and all the unwitnessed beauty of the world. And I pray for the sons and daughters of God who will be raised up to read that beauty, to testify to it, and to stand for it once again, maybe for the first time. ## Related Articles [### A Stewardship of Land and Creatures Agriculture is often seen as simply a means to produce food and resources, but it’s much more than that. It’s a calling to tend to the needs of creation in a way that allows all of it to thrive and give glory to God through its flourishing. Learn More ](https://www.dordt.edu/in-all-things/a-stewardship-of-land-and-creatures) [### The Antidote to Busyness Society seems to glorify busyness, often equating it with productivity and success. But what if we took a step back and considered how we choose to fill our lives? Learn More ](https://www.dordt.edu/in-all-things/the-antidote-to-busyness) ## Get the Newsletter Subscribe to the In All Things newsletter to receive biweekly updates with the latest content. ![](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==) ![](https://d3evso2dxyohou.cloudfront.net/generalUploads/i-pGGqLGs-X3_2024-11-13-195007.jpg?mode=fit&pos=center-center&w=50&h=50&c=bc00656c&v=e62248e5eafc8148fb71cd9e499265bf439690ef7d9aed43b8b6fbdad8b7d04a) ![](https://d3evso2dxyohou.cloudfront.net/generalUploads/people/68a815bbc31d5979096.jpg?mode=crop&pos=top-center&w=25&h=25&f=webp&c=84d5331b&v=a0420816b95e859747b9c54b126fd6249bda06e3cf50085db13cb55da8ee1e79) ### About the Author Howard Schaap **Howard Schaap** serves as professor of English at Dordt University, teaching courses such as Advanced Nonfiction Writing, Multicultural American Literature, and Environmental Literature and Ethics. His writing often centers on the intersection of place and faith. Recent essays include [“How Reading Calvin’s Institutes Made Sense of a Glioblastoma”](https://reformedjournal.com/2025/09/08/calvins-institutes-flexing-and-a-glioblastoma/ "https://reformedjournal.com/2025/09/08/calvins-institutes-flexing-and-a-glioblastoma/") in *Reformed Journal*, and “[The Place of Imagination in Being Placed](https://www.dordt.edu/in-all-things/the-place-of-imagination-in-being-placed)” in *In All Things*. He presented the academic paper, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Faith: Augustinian Spiritual Writing and Meghan O’Gieblyn’s *Interior States*,*"* at the Midwest Regional Conference on Christianity and Literature at Wheaton College in 2023. His first book, *[**Brooding Upon the Waters**](https://slantbooks.org/books/brooding-upon-the-waters/ "https://slantbooks.org/books/brooding-upon-the-waters/")*, explores place, history, and faith through stories of farming, fishing, and failure in America’s lost landscape, the tall grass prairie of the Upper Midwest. [Learn More ](https://www.dordt.edu/people/howard-schaap) --- [Next Article ![](https://d3evso2dxyohou.cloudfront.net/generalUploads/iat-911.jpg?mode=crop&pos=center-center&w=56&h=33&f=webp&c=9e5cdb77&v=638d31e5f54267443d727aed730c155ec046b90a81f72c689f85b233ee6a93dd) Essays Sep 11, 2026 ## 9/11 and the Task of History By Donald Roth How can a pedagogy of lament reshape the way we engage history, moving beyond facts to foster deeper connections across generations? Read More ](https://www.dordt.edu/in-all-things/9-11-and-the-task-of-history) [ ![]() ## In All Things View Articles ](https://www.dordt.edu/in-all-things)