Granite, Grass and Bison in the Wichita Mountains

In southwestern Oklahoma the land runs flat and low for a long time before it admits what it is carrying. The Wichita Mountains come up out of the prairie without foothills, without warning—a string of granite humps that stop the horizon like a hand raised in the middle of a sentence. They are not tall. Tallness is not the thing. The thing is that they are there at all, rising out of dirt that goes on for miles in every direction, old rock wearing through the skin of the plains.

The official name is Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, and it is a refuge in the full sense. The mountains are old, and they have been worn down to their cores. The exposed rock is pink and rust-colored, stained by weather, split by frost, littered at the base with boulders that dropped away long ago and now rest in the grass like dropped cargo.

A visitor sees them first from a distance, a blue line on the horizon before the details resolve. Then the road bends, and the near hills fill the windshield, and the country changes from the ordinary Oklahoma flat to something older. The transition is not gradual. One stretch it is farmland and ranch land; the next it is all stone and open range. It feels less like arrival than like being let in on something.

Old Rock

In the quiet draws the granite lies thick among oak and red cedar. The boulders are rounded, stacked, balanced, with the sharp edges polished off by time. A trail follows the seam between one slab and another, and a person walking there hears the boots on stone and otherwise only the wind. The silence is not empty; it is the kind of quiet that has had time to settle.

Some of the boulders are as big as houses. They sit in the grass and hold heat long after dark. In the late afternoon a person can lean a hand against a warm rock and feel the day coming out of it, the stored sunlight going back to the sky. The heat is patient. It has nowhere to be.

This is a country of exceptions. The mountains make their own weather. Rain that misses the flats will catch the slopes. A stream that runs through the refuge may be dry all summer and running heavy after a storm. The draws are full of oak and red cedar, and cottonwoods follow the dry washes, so that in October the low spots glow yellow against the rust of the rock. The prairie and the rock are in a constant argument about where one begins and the other ends.

The Grass Country

Between the ridges, the prairie holds the whole thing together. The grass is short and thick, going blond by midsummer and staying that color into the first hard freezes. It is mixed-grass country, the kind that gets just enough rain to keep the trees out and just enough wind to keep the soil honest. The valleys open onto flats where the grass grows in mats and the granite shows through wherever the slope is too steep for dirt to hold.

The weather arrives from the west, and no hill in the Wichitas is high enough to stop it. Clouds build over the ridge and then spill over, dragging rain across the valleys in long gray veils. The sun comes back and lights the wet grass so the prairie turns the color of new copper. In winter the ground is bare and hard, the granite darker, the sky low. In spring, for a few weeks, the grass is green with an intensity that seems borrowed from elsewhere.

The prairie is not monotonous. It is only quiet. The grasses move in waves, and the color shifts with the hour. In the morning the tops catch the light and the ground stays blue in the shadow. At midday the whole valley goes pale and flat. In the evening the grass is red, then violet, then gray. The boulders mark the time by their shadows, short rocks and long rocks, a sundial that needs no numbers.

The Bison

Then there are the bison. They are part of the landscape, not simply on it. A herd moves across the grassland at its own speed, feeding as it goes, breaking the horizon into dark shapes. The big bulls carry their heads low, the beard thick under their jaws. The cows move with the calves close at their sides. They cross a road when the road happens to be in their way, and the cars stop. Nobody honks. Nobody rushes.

The bison are a sight, but they are more than a sight. Their presence changes the way the prairie reads. A grassland with bison is a thing at work. The animals graze, and the grazing keeps the grass short; the short grass keeps the soil at the surface; the soil holds the range together. Their heavy bodies push through the grass and make lanes. Their winter coats brush against the seed heads and carry seed to new ground. They are a form of weather.

People come to see the bison, but bison do not perform. They will stand with their backs to the road for an hour, grazing on a slope far off. The patience required is part of the point. The animals do not fill the silence for anyone; they belong to it. The best view may be the one caught by accident, after a person gives up and starts watching the grass, and the dark shapes resolve out of a draw and cross the road behind the parked cars.

In the evening the bison come up onto a high flat and stand in the last light. They do not graze then. They just stand, shoulder to shoulder, facing into the wind. The granite behind them goes dark, then almost purple, and the bison are black against it. A person watching from a distance gets the feeling of the whole country coming into focus at once—rock, grass, animal, sky—and the focus is not something any road or sign put there. It is inherited.

The Long Light

The Wichita Mountains are a place of long views and short attention to time. No one who has stood on a ridgeline here could mistake it for anywhere else. The prairie goes on to the horizon, the granite goes down into the ground, and the sky takes up whatever is left. The seasons move across the refuge in broad strokes: a green spring, a hot summer, a brief golden fall, a brown winter that is more honest than it is hard. The same roads cross the same valleys year after year. The same boulders squat in the same draws. The refuge is not trying to impress anyone. It has nothing to prove, and it is all the more itself for that.

Near the end of the day, the last visitors pull their cars to the shoulder and watch the prairie retake the light. The granite glows one last time, a deep warm red, then fades to gray. The bison are still out there, somewhere, moving slowly through the dark. The wind has not stopped. It never does. The hills will be standing in the morning, the same as they have stood for longer than anyone can say, and the buffalo will be up and grazing before the sun clears the first ridge. That is the whole bargain the Wichitas offer. Not a secret, not a destination. Just a place where the old land still shows through.

Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge

Photos: katsrcool, Larry Smith (CC BY 2.0); MARELBU (CC BY 3.0)