There's so much not to see on the prairie that I like to take my writing classes out to show them what's really here. I've got my reasons of course, but when I tell them we're going out to look at the land, most of them chuckle as if they doubt there's really something worth looking at. But by early October, they're usually getting tired of an eight o’clock class, so a quick trip seems like a good break. And it is for me too. I don't have to prepare. Besides, how many college classes can jump in a van and drive just fifteen minutes to a ghost town?
Highland, Iowa, is a place that is no more. What's left is a sign with a map of what once stood on the corner: a blacksmith shop, a general store, Mt. Joy Church of God, Mt. Joy's parsonage, the Rock River Lutheran Church, and its horse barn. Two churches out of five buildings. There must have been some faithful there.
Today, one huge old cedar and a couple dozen younger pines stand like a windbreak on the west edge of Highland's only remaining feature--a cemetery. It must have been a Norwegian settlement; the names on the stones are Hemmingson, Gunderson, and Johnson. But today nothing else stands on the gently sloping hilltop where Highland once bustled, nothing but a few tipsy gravestones and that heavy, wooden sign with the drawing of the old town.
Sometimes I think I'd like to live there myself, although I don't think it would be all that cozy with no live neighbors. What I love about the place is its lofty position on the landscape: up on a knoll, at the corner of two dissecting gravel roads that fall away from the prominence of the intersection like unfurling ribbons of dust.
To the west is the quintessential American vision--endless waves of land rolling into a horizon that often appears almost indistinguishable from the canopy of heaven.
Now picture this. None of my students is exactly thrilled to be out there. The Iowa kids, after all, have grown up on the prairie; they'd just as soon leave. West-coast kids certainly haven't come to northwest Iowa because they wanted a Great Plains experience. As much as they enjoy getting out of class, they harbor serious concerns about the sanity of the instructor when he parks the van at the cemetery and tells them all, Joseph Smith-like, that this is the place.
Here's what happens. They get out warily. It doesn't matter if the sky is dark with clouds or clear as a bell. They step out of the van, clutching their notebooks, their Bics in their teeth, and take a few slow steps down the gravel road. "Here we are," I say. "Find a place to sit and fill up some paper." That's all I tell them. It's early in the morning, but all the way out there they've been talking. Once they take a few steps away from the van, however, they're silent. Maybe it's the cemetery.
They stand there poised between the gravel of a long-gone, slivery fragment of human civilization and the liquid dreaminess of endless prairie landscape west, and, I'm telling you, the place takes their breath away. There are no curios here, no souvenir shops, and they can't get Egg McMuffin for miles. The place is so empty it's eerie, so expansive it diminishes them.
That's when they really "see" the prairie. I love it.
Some wander through the postage-stamp cemetery, pointing at old dates. Some sit on the long prairie grasses that grow from the ditches at the side of the road. Some sit together; most go off alone. The assignment?--they have none. Just look. Just see.
Last year it was overcast. The sun brightens colors, and when the sky is full of burgeoning gray the whole area wears a frugal numbness. But the prairie's grandest feature is not its color. In spring the whole region wears the green haze full of promise, the fledgling corn and beans creating an emerald mist that hugs the land. In summer everything matures, the green deepens. October wears a husky yellow, and winter's white quilt is always dappled with dark and crusty earth since snow rarely covers everything here--the wind won't let it sit peacefully. What I'm saying is that I wasn't disappointed about the clouds; the plains aren't all that colorful anyway.
What they are is big, immensely big. And that's the feature that takes my students' breath away. They've been in Iowa for at least a year, driven east and west and north and south on prairie highways, but always going somewhere, rarely ever looking. So some of them--for the first time, I think--actually stop and see the power of the earth's prairie contours.
What they see astounds them. I've stuck quarters in public binoculars on Table Mountain and looked down over Africa's southern tip at Capetown. I've been on Pike's Peak several times, and the view is gigantic. But there's no mountain here at Highland. There's not even that much of a hill. There's only big sky. But that's enough to fill them.
I don't have to tell them to work. I don't have to reprimand a one of them for chatting or giggling. I don't tell them they're responsible for some dinky 500-word essay to be handed in the moment we get back to the campus. I don't even say I want to read what they write. In fact, I never read a word of that assignment because I want them simply to look, to see, and to feel with their pens.
There's something about the positioning they take out there, the cemetery of a ghost town sitting silently behind them while an endless vista unfolds before them so hugely that it makes each of them little more than a recipient of whatever awe their senses can absorb. I've always had to laugh about Ralph Waldo Emerson's great spiritual experience, a moment in nature when he suddenly became, he says, a "transparent eyeball." But out there on the prairie, I like Emerson's sci-fi image, in part because my students become, just for a moment, little more than eyeballs, their silence hinting at their own eccentric transparency. I'm convinced you don't need a mountain top for a spiritual experience.
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[Tomorrow: finis]
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