Morning Thanks--John Deere's plow

Basically, people visit Red Cloud, NE, for only one reason--they've read My Antonia or O! Pioneers, and they've come to pay tribute, in a sense, to Willa Cather, the woman who wrote those wonderful, American novels. The town--actually, the whole region--is a kind of Cather museum. She wasn't born in Red Cloud, but she certainly grew up there.

The business of agriculture dominates life in south central Nebraska these days, of course, but once upon a time Red Cloud was a whistle stop on the transcontinental railroad, and therefore something of a business hub. 

But when the railroad ceased to function as a people mover, life changed radically. Today, right behind agriculture comes the town's dedication to its most famous native, Willa Cather, whose ringing tributes to America's westward pioneers still enthrall readers, young and old. I remember teaching My Antonia in an American novels course years ago, then asking students at the end of term which book was their favorite. Hands down, Cather's prairie paean to a spunky farm wife was best-in-show.

Somewhere in the middle of that novel, Jim Burden, who tells the story, remembers an evening when suddenly an apparition appeared. That vision is worth quoting in full

We sat looking off across the country, watching the sun go down. The curly grass about us was on fire now. The bark of the oaks turned red as copper. There was a shimmer of gold on the brown river. Out in the stream the sandbars glittered like glass, and the light trembled in the willow thickets as if little flames were leaping among them. The breeze sank to stillness. In the ravine a ringdove mourned plaintively, and somewhere off in the bushes an owl hooted. The girls sat listless, leaning against each other. The long fingers of the sun touched their foreheads.

Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.

Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back into its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.

I've never used a plow, certainly not one akin to what Jim sees almost heavenly adorned there on the Nebraska plains. And it's worth noting that unending overplowing, historians now agree, created the great American Dust Bowl. The steel moldboard plow was a blessing, but no savior.

Still, more than any other single museum piece, that plow outlined against the dying sun veritably won the west, or at least the west of the prairie and the Great Plains.  Without it, I wouldn't be sitting here watching the dawn come up in the world just outside my window.

John Deere was a blacksmith, but he was also an inventor who one day took a chunk of an old saw and shaped it thoughtfully into a parallelogram that could rip the topsoil and simply deposit to the side so ground beneath your feet could be planted. He did it. If opening up the soil seems some kind of violation, it also fed the world. 

In downtown Middlebury, Vermont, last summer, a long, long ways from home, I stumbled on this historical marker a half-continent away from the John Deere factory on the other side of Iowa. 

Just for a moment it seemed as if I'd happened to run into a neighbor.

Like most anything else, it can be misused--and has been. But John Deere's steel moldboard plow remains a great blessing, an prairie icon for which I'm thankful this bright and sunny spring morning.