Taken from "Where the Sky Began," by John Madson, Chapter 3 "The Lawns
of God," pp. 52-53:

"Not even Rip Van Winkle could have slept for twenty years on a
prairie. The place for that is a deep glen that encloses a man in a
snug vessel of trees and hills, insulating him from the sky and wind.
A grassland crackles and flows with stimuli, charging a man to get on
with something. A prairie never rests for long, nor does it permit
anything else to rest. It has barriers to neither men nor wind and
encourages them to run together, which may be why grasslands men are
notorious travelers and hard-goers, driven by wind and running with
it, fierce and free.

Forests have surely housed many free and fierce people, but I somehow
imagine them as being preoccupied with laying ambushes in thickets,
worshiping oak trees, and painting their bellies blue. I could never
take Druids seriously. They're not in the same class as Cossacks,
Zulus, Masai, Mongols, Comanches, Sioux, the highland clans of
treeless moors, and trail drovers tearing up Front Street,
Grasslanders all.

There was a vein of wild exultation in such men. It wasn't just the
high-protein diet, nor even that some of those men were mounted—
although the horse people were among the wildest of all. I have a
hunch that it was the mood of the land, stimulating its people with
openness, hyperventilating them with freedom in a world of open
skylines and few secrets. Such Grasslanders never seemed to harbor
the nasty little superstitions that flourish in fetid jungles and dank
forests. Their superstitions were taller, their sagas and legends
more airy and broad, and running through their cultures was a level
conviction that they were the elite. While some forest people
retreated into the shadowlands, men of the open had no choice but to
breast the fuller world—and often came to do so with pride and even
arrogance. It was a sense that was transferred almost intact when men
left the land and took to the open seas, or learned to fly. They were
all part of the same—wanderers beyond horizons, children of the wind
who belonged more to sky than to earth, conscious of being under the
Great Eye . . ."

"The Lawns of God".....

Hm.....

And here I sit, hunkered under the trees.....like some primordial
proto-primate wondering whether its seed supply will withstand the
winter weather!

Choices. Everybody wants 'em.....but nobody is really happy about
what he does with 'em. What life really needs more of is do overs.