MCDOWELL CREEK, Kan. Kansas lost a remarkable and gifted person this year with the death of Joe Collins. I knew Joe as Kansas's foremost frog and snake guy, the author of Amphibians, Reptiles, and Turtles in Kansas. But he was much more than that. Amazingly, he created an illustrious scientific career for himself without ever graduating from college. He skipped the whole credential thing and simply started doing science. He published the first of his scientific papers when he was just 19; he was later to author over 300 articles and 28 books and co-author the Peterson Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians of Eastern and Central North America. In 1996, the governor of Kansas proclaimed Joe Collins "Kansas Wildlife Author Laureate."

Joe's career is an object lesson to young people who think they have to choose a boring field because it pays well and is therefore "practical." Sometimes just doubling down on what you love can be the most practical thing of all!

Joe's love of wildlife started early. As a little boy in Ohio, he spent as much time as he could with turtles, reptiles, and amphibians. Every day seemed filled with wonders as he learned more and more about his shelled, scaly, and moist-skinned friends. It hurt him, therefore, when he noticed something horrible about his own species: Behind the wheel, some people swerved to hit turtles on the road. Little Joe devised an ingenious revenge. He put the road-killed turtles back together but filled the shells

MCDOWELL CREEK, Kan. - Much of artist Betsy Roe's work centers on the contact zone between humans and other animals. Now Betsy is creating an outdoor installation at Bird Runner Wildlife Refuge, and this time that zone is a bloody one -- the place where animals meet our vehicles on the road.

Betsy! Why are you making us think about this? Roadkill? Yuck! Sad -- but what can we do about it? People aren't going to stop driving and animals aren't going to stop trying to cross the road. So why dwell on it? What's the point?

Betsy's art makes us think of one answer after another.

MCDOWELL CREEK, Kan. - "What do you do for entertainment out there?" my husband's friend asked him. Ron was traveling east to help his mother with a long drive and had stopped to visit an old friend in DC.

"The land is our entertainment," Ron replied. His friend looked blank. "Do you drive into town to go to movies?" he asked, as if he hadn't heard what Ron said.

Why couldn't he hear the answer? Perhaps he was in the grip of the old stereotype of Kansas as flyover country, the middle of nowhere. Or perhaps he had a concept of entertainment as a commodity, a pre-packaged experience for which one purchases a ticket. In any event, Ron was aware that he had a mentality that was not easily recognized by his city-dwelling friend.

When Ron came home, it became a joke between us. "What do you for entertainment out there?" we would giggle every time we found ourselves transfixed by something right outside our back door.

MCDOWELL CREEK, Kan. - After each recent rain, I have been up to my knees in our wetland, cutting cattails. I have been told that cutting below the waterline provides a good non-chemical control. A few cattails are great for wildlife, but if not burned, cut, or flooded, a small stand can quickly spread into a monoculture, sucking up available water and pushing out all other wetland vegetation.

Once I got over my fear of being sucked down into the muck and never heard from again, I enjoyed my task. I had a great pair of shears that allowed me to reach the base of the plants without too much stooping. I learned to use a mat of fallen cattails as a raft to stand on, like a wetland version of snowshoes. However, these "shoes" could suddenly tip, and then locomotion became a challenge -- a matter of extracting one foot from deep muck before the other foot lost its balance. Several times I had to hang onto uncut cattails to keep from falling; I did feel guilty when a few minutes later I cut down those very plants. Atonement (is it ever complete?) came in the form of a surge in biodiversity, with arrowhead, spike rush and smartweed taking hold in the cleared space, and frogs, snakes, and dragonflies moving in to fill the gaps.

MCDOWELL CREEK, Kan. - Bravo, Governor Brownback! I disagree with our Republican governor on many things -- the elimination of funding for the arts, the squeeze on education, the obstacles to voting (more on those policies in a future column).

But I applaud his stance on the Flint Hills. The Governor is using the power of his office to protect the Flint Hills and its highly productive but endangered ecosystem, the tall grass prairie.

During her time in office, Gov. Sebelius protected a small part of the Flint Hills (including Geary and Riley Counties) from wind development, and Governor Parkinson continued her policy. Sebelius called the off-limits area "the Heart of the Flint Hills." On May 6, 2011, Governor Brownback doubled the protected area, from 4673 to 10,895 square miles, an expanse now stretching to the Oklahoma border. He calls his no-go zone the "Tallgrass Heartland." It is not protected by law -- only by his (like Sebelius's and Parkinson's) high-profile request for voluntary cooperation. Such a gubernatorial call is a powerful shield, however, as life can be miserable for utilities or developers on the wrong side of the state.

MCDOWELL CREEK, Kan. - We burned pasture last Thursday. The breeze turned jumpy in the early afternoon. There were a few tense moments -- but in the end, the fire stayed where it was supposed to. There was even a gentle rain that evening that washed away the smoke. We felt so fortunate! Having lost our house to a prairie fire a few years back, we count our blessings when a burn goes well.

Yesterday we had snow, giving us an unusual sight -- blackened prairie covered with snow.

We watched the snow come down with a group of friends who had gathered in our living room to talk about books. Our friend Paul has started on a quest to read famous classic works that he missed in school. We and several others volunteered to keep him company on this journey, and yesterday was our first gathering.

MCDOWELL CREEK, Kan. - I'm so glad this wild winter storm didn't come in over the weekend, as I was able to drive to the Salina Art Center on Sunday and take in Stephen Vitiello's exhibition, "Tall Grasses."

Stephen Vitiello is a composer, electronic musician, and "soundscape" artist. He is known for recording the sounds of a particular place and using those sounds in his compositions. One of his best known works is "The World Trade Center Recordings," made in 1999. Two years before the destruction of the World Trade Center, he recorded the sound of wind around the 91st story, with city traffic in the background. He has also used the sounds of bells, firecrackers, planes, insects, and barking dogs in other works.

For his Salina installation, Vitiello recorded sounds on a ranch west of Salina. Being a fan of the prairie, I was eager to hear what an artist of Vitiello's stature had done with Kansas's signature landscape.

MCDOWELL CREEK, Kan. - Here at the Christmas season it is so wonderful to spend time with family and friends -- to share the beauty. But the season also makes us miss even more the family members who are not here. In particular, I miss my mother, who died in 2008.

I thought of my mom last week when the movie my husband and I were watching was interrupted by breaking news: "The Senate has repealed Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell." I felt a surge of exhilaration: We as a society were rejecting one more form of discrimination!

Still, I could not help but wonder at the euphoria I felt. It was as if I had been suffering from an ache I wasn't aware of until it went away. I guess I was discovering that the adage about "an injury to one is an injury to all" can be literally true. I had been painfully aware of the injustice of allowing gays to risk their lives for our country, to offer us all their gifts and talents, only to be dismissed from service if their identities were revealed. Now it was like the old joke: "Why are you hitting yourself on the head?" "Because it feels so good when it stops." By ending anti-gay discrimination in the military, our country had stopped hitting itself on the head. And it felt so good!

But my joy came also from my mother.

MCDOWELL CREEK, Kan. - Learning history is like reading a detective story--pretty soon you can't put it down. But history offers no final chapter where everything is explained. With history, the surprises just keep coming.

For example, I learned about one contentious burial here in my own community at the end of the nineteenth century that at first seemed a simple case of racism. In 1869, the Estes family migrated from North Carolina to McDowell Creek, where they helped to found the Briggs community.

They brought an African-American household servant and her daughter with them. The daughter grew up, married a soldier from the fort, and moved to New York, but the mother -- Delilah Estes, or "Lila," as she was known -- stayed with the family until her death in the 1890s. Joe Estes wanted Lila buried in the Briggs Cemetery, but the township board refused.

A fellow North Carolinian named Maxwell Ramsour -- who had provided the land for the cemetery in the first place -- contacted Joe and offered to bury Delilah on his own land. Ramsour's property adjoined the cemetery, and he dug a grave just outside the cemetery fence. That's where Delilah Estes was laid to rest. This solution did not soothe Joe's anger, however, and he immediately changed his own burial plans. "If Briggs Cemetery is too good for a Christian woman like Lila, then it's too good for me," he is reputed to have said. Indeed, when his own time came, he was buried in Fairview Cemetery, not Briggs Cemetery.

MCDOWELL CREEK, Kan. - What a fall it has been! One blue-sky day has followed another, with the warm sun calling us to spend as much time as possible out-of-doors and the cool nights making a couple of blankets feel just right. The prairie grasses are still billowing on the inland sea, still tall after a season of good rains. They are ghosts of their summer selves now, but zany ghosts that form wild chorus lines in the autumn winds and wear madcap colors -- ochre, umber, lavender, red, brown, gold, and rose. Who could experience the Flint Hills in the fall and not be moved?

I have different emotions about the political season. There are some candidates, Republican and Democrat, whom I am proud to support, such as Larry Hicks, Ben Bennett, Tom Moxley, and Chris Biggs. But other aspects of our politics make me sick.

It makes me almost physically ill when politicians stir up hot-button issues rather than discuss problems realistically. They make people think politics is simple -- a matter of angels and demons -- rather than what it usually is -- a mix of complexities, contingencies, and unknowns. Right now there are politicians demonizing "illegal aliens," Muslims, gays, "the regime," and of course the President himself in ways that don't connect up with practical solutions to any defined problems. Rather, the rhetoric is all about status -- an invitation to voters to join a virtuous "us" against a dangerous and degenerate "them."