A Sod Wall on the North Dakota Prairie

The sod wall stands at the northwest corner of a house that is no longer a house, knee-high along the north face and a little higher where the two faces meet. It is the last uninterrupted run of a building that has otherwise gone flat. The wall is made of the ground it stands on: the prairie till around Wishek, North Dakota, in McIntosh County, gravelly and dense and held together by the roots of wheatgrass and little bluestem and buffalo grass.

That root-bound ground was cut in strips, and the strips were laid up like brick. A breaking plow, drawn by a team, sheared a ribbon of sod a few inches thick off the unbroken prairie, rolling it over in one long piece of matted earth. The ribbon was cut into lengths and carried to the corner where the house would go. Each strip was laid flat, grass side down. The next strip was set against it, the seams staggered the way a masonry wall staggers its joints, and the courses were stacked two strips deep. No mortar went between them. The sod was the bond — the cut roots fuzzed against the roots of the strip below, and the weight of the courses above held the courses below tight.

The wall says what the claim offered the family that built it: no timber, no stone, no fence rails. Just the ground. They cut the building out of the ground and carried it to the corner in their arms. The wall went up in one summer, because a house had to stand on the claim to hold it, and the family moved in before the frost.

The inner face was whitewashed, and the lime has paled the inner course, so the wall is two colors: the gray-brown of weather on the outside, the faded chalk of lime on the inside, where the white was brushed on thick and flaked down into the joints. Where the outer face has been cut by wind and rain, the line of the plow share is still plain — the smooth face where the blade ran, and below it the underside of the strip, root ends showing. Rain does not run off a sod wall. It soaks in and is given back slowly, darkening the inner face for days after the storm and then drying to paleness again.

Frost has done the most to the wall. Each winter a little more of the top course loosens, each spring the loosened sod crumbles and spreads at the foot of the wall. Cattle have rubbed the corner until it is rounded. Where the grass of the top course has grown out, it hangs over the face in a curtain, and behind the curtain the sod is damp and dark, holding its courses.