It was always a particular joy to take students out to Red Cloud. Having read My Antonia, they were inexhaustibly teachable. As I've said before, I don't remember students not liking that novel; many loved it, in great part because Tony Shimerda, Cather's Antonia, was so lovable.
As we'd come down south from Hastings, we'd enter Catherland, and I'd tell them that the prairie as they knew it in northwest Iowa was nothing like what they were going to see. In and around what she called "the divide," that land looked harsh any time of year really, although in late spring it might carry enough emerald to look promising. We'd go in the fall, when, after summer, the landscape was often as red as she describes--red and dry, very dry.
What's more, just across the Republican River, in Kansas, there stands a plot of prairie whose unsheltered openness still makes anyone who takes a walk out there feel like a pioneer, a land that meets the eye like that grassy inland sea so many early residents claimed was so forever open that it prompted fear. This kind of breathtaking open prairie.
The students got it too, once they'd arrived. They understood at least something of the homesteading experience when they'd walk out into the tawny nothingness and experience the something you can only really experience when you're in the middle of nothing.
That expanse of Kansas prairie is still there across the river, but to me, nine years after being there, I couldn't help thinking that prairie like this, Great Plains prairie, had changed because everywhere you looked there was corn. Red Cloud's immediate environs looked all too similar to northwest Iowa.
Look at the corn on the left of the dirt road that leads to the original Cather homestead, the first place Willa lived when she moved to Nebraska from Virginia, the place she really never could forget. That corn, tall and straight, ip and down the hills--some of it somewhat drought-stricken, but most looking pretty sporty for mid-August.
Here's the way the place looked in 2011, maybe two months closer to winter, mid-October. Not desolate. It's a hayfield, but if you look closely in the background there's something of a corn field too, not much of a crop really, but if you're planning on using what you've grown for silage anyway, right from the get go, earlessness isn't going to surprise you or push you into bankruptcy.
But last week there was corn all over My Antonia's prairie and some of it seemed northwest- Iowa tall, which, I must admit, was sad, not because I wish Catherland farmers the worst, but because the landscape I found here years ago seemed so stunningly Great Plains-ish on those earlier trips.
Everywhere you looked were irrigators, monstrous technological wonders that inch over the land and rush water from far beneath the earth, from the Ogallala Aquifer, an underground sea beneath this land that creates agricultural commodities that comprise more than one-sixth of the world's agricultural output. Irrigators--center point as well as the tubes lying at the edge of innumerable fields--have altered the landscape, or so it seemed.
All the way west and north into Nebraska there was corn, much of it almost shockingly green, and turns the plains into something unimaginable a century ago, a circus of circles when you see it from a plane.
I was in a little Chevy, a rental, that undoubtedly had scant experience on the kind of dusty trails that surround the world of Willa Cather. I didn't fly, so I didn't see art work; all I saw was what seemed endless fields of corn.
I shouldn't have, I suppose, but I couldn't help feeling a little sad: the world around "the divide" seems to have change significantly. Cather's descendants (I think there are still some out there), if they're still in farming, have to be thrilled with the new income--a hayfield doesn't pay like corn, especially with ethanol gushing forth from every local pump.
What's more, the roadside weeds are monstrous now, closer to life-giving water. The fact is, I could barely see the land where once the Cather house stood. Buttonweed, ragweed, and sunflowers were ten feet tall.
That sign, a few shots back, wasn't immediately visible. I had to hunt for it. What's more there's a bridge out just down the road a bit, which meant that I had to back out, up and over two hills, maybe a half mile, to get back to gravel.
This is my favorite shot of the homestead, how it's supposed to look. That pump, sometime long ago, may well have been set in the ground by Cathers. Willa herself, a little girl from Virginia, may well have pumped water right here. Maybe not too. Just let me hold on to my fantasy.
Because that's the way it's supposed to look like out there, the way it will forever look in my imagination. This is the land where Cather's family put down roots in Nebraska. Today, mostly, it's corn. Wherever you look, it's corn.
Right now, that story is the story of the plains. Once upon a time the land all around the Republican River belonged to the buffalo. Then came Native tribes who did their hunting out here, migrating, families and all, from lands to the east and north and west. Then came the homesteads, people like the Cathers. Some of them, like Willa's own family, left rather quickly, more than a century ago, moved into town because life was somehow easier when you lived in a circle.
All things must pass, I guess. I'm not the first to say that, and, sure as anything, I won't be the last.
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