You need either to be willing to experiment or have some knowledge beforehand to turn down the path that leads to Jane Koger’s house on the prairie east of Matfield Green, Kansas.

It’s just two tire tracks lined with rough gravel that wind to the top of a hill, follow a contour, and then slowly curve down to her home. There’s no mailbox, no power lines. To the casual eye, there is nothing there.

Except there is. And that is exactly what Jane wants people to understand. You have to look closely at a prairie, but you need a larger view, too. Understanding requires different viewpoints.

“I’m not kidding,” Jane says of her isolated abode,” I got a letter from the Jehovas Witnesses complaining that they couldn’t find me, but they wanted me to know that they had some very Good News they wanted me to know about.”

She’s isolated all right. From her driveway it’s eight miles of gravel road through prairie before pavement, and then a few more miles to any community. But she is intentional in how she chose her isolation, and in how she manages to balance it with her vibrant chosen and circumstantial community. She’s alone, but not lonely.

Jane grew up in Chase County, the fourth or maybe fifth generation on her mother’s side in the county. Having lived further west in Kansas for some years, she and a sister wanted to move back to the Flint Hills. They bought a parcel of land that her house now sits on. During the paperwork required to make the purchase, Jane’s aunt, who was working on the abstract, made a discovery. “My aunt called me and said, ‘Jane, do you know that your great-grandmother homesteaded this land?’” That had been in 1870. Jane’s purchase took place in 1979. In between the family had sold the land. Jane had no idea that the land she was purchasing was once owned by her family.

That is how her life has evolved. She hasn’t been given things. She’s found what interests her, experimented with ideas, and found a way to do the things she wanted to do, sometimes flying in the face of convention.

“This is a business,” she says of ranching, “where the son does things the way the dad did…for a hundred years. My dad wasn’t a cowboy. He was a businessman, making his business off the ranch. I knew I could try ranching. I just had to be smart enough to do it.”

She knew she didn’t have the brute strength some cowboys had, so she had to figure out different ways of working. “About the time I started ranching they stopped making those square bales of hay, which I couldn’t move, and started making the round bales, which I could move with the help of a truck. All I had to do was work a switch.”

Ranching has been her life’s work, but it is only part of a larger picture. “I’d like people to think beyond the cow,” she says. “America…we can produce as much as we want. That’s not the problem. As a society, we are at least five generations away from the land.” We’ve lost sight of the larger picture, of our connectedness. Quite an insight from someone so remote.

“Here’s the bottom line – you don’t go for a pasture, you go for a prairie.” A pasture is homogenous, cultivated to grow just one crop. A prairie is more diverse, encompassing all the interconnected life of a place. “I had a university come out here and do a study. There were fifty-six species of butterflies here. I’m thinking if I can manage for butterflies and pollinators, the Big Macs are going to be all right.”

When Jane goes outside, she sees a symphony on the prairie. In fact, she once did exactly that.

When a John Deere tractor she was using ran out of fuel and a friend came over to help, the friend asked Jane what she would like to do with her land. “I’d like to have an orchestra come play on my prairie,” she answered. There was a pregnant pause. The friend said, “I might know some people.”

In 1994, thanks to help from both her local friends and friends from Wichita, Lawrence, Kansas City, and St. Louis, Jane staged a symphony on the prairie not 100 yards from her modest driveway. It was June, after the threat of spring thunderstorms and before summer’s heat. “When that baton went up at 6:00, that baton there on my fireplace, that was all I wanted. I just wanted to see if it could be done.”

It was a mingling of Jane’s acquaintances, the theater friends from the city who love to come to the country, and the country folk who would never leave work at 3:00 to go to town to see an orchestra because they already know they don’t like it. The best thanks Jane got was from a Chase County resident who said, “Jane, I’m over fifty years old and I’ve never heard an orchestra before.”

If you live in a place as long as Jane has, you see the interconnectedness. Or you should, because it’s there. When she decided to build her house using straw bale construction and having power sourced from wind and solar panels, she called the same builder who, in 1994, had built the symphony stage. He later told her, “Jane, do you know the two strangest things I’ve done in my career have been for you, and they were 200 yards apart?”

She lives down a hidden driveway. The only arteries to the outside world are eight miles of gravel road and, amazingly enough, a fiber optic line. But it’s a broad world for Jane, not a narrow one. She pays attention to her surroundings and is always seeking to create a prairie, not a pasture.