How good it is to look sometimes across great spaces, to lift one’s eyes from narrowness, to feel the large silence that rests on lonely hills!
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen

“Too many trees,” my father said as we stood behind my home looking out at the treeline which had grown into its June fullness. Years ago, my parents had come to visit our new home in rural Iowa, an area abundant with hardwoods and hills. As we stood together, I tried to look through my father’s eyes at the timber I’d come to love. How could there be too many trees? I thought, turning my head to the sky to admire the overstory of large cottonwoods that flashed their waxy leaves like iridescent scales in the noonday sun. “It makes me feel a bit claustrophic,” he explained, “hemmed in.” A native Nebraskan who spent summers on his grandmother’s farm in the Sandhills, my father loved wind and wide open spaces. If he could’ve raised a staff to part this treeline, he would’ve. If he could’ve opened a way forward towards the distant ridge, he would’ve breathed more easily.

Recently, I drove from my Iowa home to my daughter’s home in Great Falls, Montana. A 19-hour roadtrip, this drive is not for the faint of heart. As I made my way across South Dakota, I recalled the jokes I’d endured when I moved to Iowa. One of my colleagues took great pleasure in catching me before a college break to wish me a good holiday in Kansas or Oklahoma or South Dakota. He smirked as he delivered his well wishes and safe travels, playfully refusing to identify my home state as Nebraska. Once in a defensive moment, I asked him what he had against Nebraska. He shrugged and smiled, remarking that Nebraska was a drive-through state, a necessary inconvenience on the way to great ski resorts and some of the nation’s most popular parks. With painful realization, I saw that my home state was little but an ellipsis in the travel plans of many who ventured west.

In her 1904 travel story, The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen, English novelist Elizabeth von Arnim celebrates the great spaces which rescue us from life’s narrowness. She would’ve found a kindred spirit in Nebraska author, Willa Cather. Cather’s love for the prairie is evident in her novel, My Antonia:

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

As I drove across the prairies in South Dakota, I felt just this–the whole country running before me, the land stretching endlessly towards a suggestion of horizon. I felt my soul open. It was like shedding clothes, letting the the open road pull me forward. My only companions were sun and sky and land and silence. It was magnificent.

Oh, I’m well aware there are risks for a woman driving alone across a land where there are often no services for miles (as in nothing!) And I confess that there were moments when I felt particularly vulnerable, all that space unfolding before and around me, all that silence threatening to undo me. But most of the time, I felt particularly grateful for the wide open spaces. You would love this, Dad, I said aloud as I left Rapid City, South Dakota and headed into Montana. And knowing this made me happier than I could say.

Poet, novelist, and rancher Linda Hasselstrom grew up on a cattle ranch in western South Dakota, a family ranch homesteaded in 1899. For years she hosted writing retreats on her family ranch, offering residents an opportunity to understand and love the prairie as she did. She claimed that “[u]nless one has lived thus, intimately with the prairie, it is a universe difficult to understand, to feel” (“Thunder Butte: High, Solemn, and Holy,” in Land Circle, 1991). The prairie is, indeed, a difficult universe for many to understand and impossible for many to love. It’s an acquired taste developed from living intimately with a land others snub as “fly-over or drive-through” territory. If driving alone through this region is not for the faint of heart, just imagine the challenges of living as a female rancher here.

I’ve long admired the prairie photography of Solomon D. Butcher, who set out to photograph the history of pioneer life in Nebraska. Between 1886 and 1912, he enmassed a collection of more than 3,000 photographs. Many of his photographs are stark reminders of just how tough it was to survive the prairie’s many challenges. Families stood in front of sod homes that rose humbly from the prairie, not a tree or another structure in sight. Or they stood around a child’s grave, wearing their Sunday best as they paid homage to a life that might have been. Many families created unique tableaus, hauling their finest possessions out of their homes and arranging them in the yard as backdrops for their photos. One prairie woman instructed her family to move her pump organ a quarter mile away, so their crude sod home wouldn’t be seen in the photo. There, she arranged her husband and children around the pump organ, a piece of culture to impress–and allay the fears of–the family back east. Several of Butcher’s photos feature trees, animals, and people that he actually inked into the finished works. In his photograph, “Lookout Point Near the Snake River, Circa 1890,” he drew in 7 trees, 2 horses, and a man. Perhaps he thought that eastern folk just wouldn’t have the stomach for photographs of endless land and sky. Perhaps he feared that they’d see nothing when he saw something, that they simply didn’t have eyes to see the wonder of the great grasslands. Perhaps he, like writer Randy Winter, feared that they might look at the prairie and “see a great emptiness, a void that staggers the psyche and leaves much too much room for a mind to wander” (“Nature Notes”, 1987).

In Cather’s novel, O Pioneers!, her protagonist, Alexandra Bergson, settles in Hanover, Nebraska where she’s determined to farm. Through the years, Bergson grows to understand the power and endurance of this land:

The land belongs to the future, Carl; that’s the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk’s plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother’s children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it–for a little while.

A century later, I felt as Bergson did as I drove west across the prairie. The land is always here, and we own it but for a little while. At least, I hope that the land will always be here, for its loss would be immeasurable.

When I pulled into my daughter’s driveway in Great Falls, I took a deep breath and stretched, willing my 69-year-old bones to move after 2 full days of driving. Later that night when I eased myself into bed and closed my eyes, I could still feel the hum of the car on the road, feel the grasses, like waves, washing up on the shore of my soul. I could see a herd of pronghorn antelope grazing near a herd of cattle, see the sun, a bright tangerine ball, suspended in a sky veiled with smoke from Canadian wildfires. I could hear the sound of my own breathing, the words I spoke into the silence of my car. I could feel and see and hear all of this, and it was good.

And lying there, I understood what Cather’s Antonia felt when she said, “If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. . . I felt what would be would be.” There are times when feeling erased and blotted out isn’t painful but wonderful. To stand between earth and sky, to succumb to a geography where what would be would be can be a freeing thing. And a humbling thing. On the prairie, one can feel blessedly small and grateful for the immensity and wonder of creation. Here, one might be content to simply drive without arriving at any particular place. In these wide open spaces, one might roll down the windows, turn off the radio, and escape the narrowness that too often defines us.

for Nicole

Names are powerful things. They act as an identity marker and a kind of map, locating you in time and geography. More than that, they can be a compass. –Nicola Yoon, The Sun is Also a Star

I’ve always had a thing for names. I first became aware of this as I surveyed my new box of 64 Crayola crayons. What a smorgasbord of names, a veritable feast for name-afficianados like me! Periwinkle, aquamarine, salmon, maize, emerald, fuschia, raw umber, orchid, tangerine, cerulean! As I pulled each crayon from the three-tiered box, I marveled at how its name was a perfect identity marker. To become a crayon namer, to examine the 64 perfectly pointed crayons and christen them with perfectly chosen names! Be still my heart! In time, I sorted and moved my favorite crayons to the top tier, vowing to keep their points for as long as I could resist using them. Even at 8, I felt something magical in these names. In late July when I see the aisles of school supplies begin to emerge, I still make a pass through the crayon section. As I stand in front of these big box crayons with new and spectacular names (macaroni and cheese, banana mania, Granny Smith apple, wild blue yonder, jazzberry jam, and timberwolf) I’m grounded in the time and geography of childhood. A name can do this: provide a kind of map to particular moments and memories.

British poet W. H. Auden claims that “[p]roper names are poetry in the raw.” I became school-age in the 60s when a name like Shannon was relatively exotic in a field saturated with Debbies and Julies. And I loved this. I loved that my name was unusual, that it sounded like a poem to my ears. When I began considering names for my own children, I spoke them aloud often, trying them on, listening to how the first, middle, and last names worked together. I rejected many combinations as being too flat. I wanted something musical and memorable. And I wanted my children to love their names as I loved mine. Above all, I wanted them to know that their naming had been a sacred act, for “[a] good name is rather to be chosen than great riches.” (Proverbs 22:1).

So, what if you aren’t blessed with a beautiful name? What if your name is common or odd? What if the very sound of it–its combination of consonants and vowels–jars the senses? In Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Good Country People,” the protagonist’s mother refuses to call her daughter by the name she’d chosen for herself. O’ Connor writes: “When Mrs. Hopewell thought the name, Hulga, she thought of the broad blank hull of a battleship. She would not use it.” Although I’m certain there are worse fates, a name that evokes the broad blank hull of a battleship must come with a unique set of challenges.

Children’s novelist Katherine Patterson writes: “The name we give to something shapes our attitude to it.” I often shudder when I hear the names that some parents have consciously–or unconsciously–given their children. My dad told the story of a brother and sister in his hometown whose names sadly shaped others’ attitudes towards them. What were their parents thinking when they named their children Harry and Rosie Rump? Consider, too, the name of my former student, Kinda Short. When I called roll on the first day of class, I hoped that my pronunciation of “Kinda” with a short i was accurate. But she corrected me quickly. It was “Kinda” with a long i. And tragically, she was kind of short. As I was chatting with a group of students before class one night, a young woman announced that her brother and his wife just had their first baby, a girl. “What’s her name?” I asked. She shrugged and said, “They’re still deciding. But they’re considering Twin Towers.” Twin Towers? Did I hear her right? This was a name straight out of the Frank Zappa playbook (remember Moon Unit and Dweezil?) In his short story, “The Scarlet Ibis,” James Hurst writes: “Renaming my brother was perhaps the kindest thing I ever did for him, because nobody expects much from someone called Doodle.” If this poor girl was to be saddled with a name like Twin Towers, I wanted the power to rename her, so that she might escape the legacy of terror and grief associated with her name. Renaming her would be, at the very least, an act of kindness. At best, it might save her life.

In L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Avonlea, we read a conversation in which Diana, Anne’s good friend, proposes a possible solution for an unfortunate name:

“That’s a lovely idea, Diana,” said Anne enthusiastically. “Living so that you beautify your name, even if it wasn’t beautiful to begin with… making it stand in people’s thoughts for something so lovely and pleasant that they never think of it by itself.”

To beautify one’s name, to make it memorable as something lovely and pleasant is a lovely thought. Like O’Connor’s fictional character, Hulga, my maternal grandfather, Wilbert Zorn, had a name that sounded like the broad blank hull of a battleship. He lived such a wonderful life, however, that he beautified it, softening its hard edges with sunny days spent on the banks of sandpits, a bucket of crawdads and a whole lot of love between us.

Recently, I commented on Nebraska photographer and blogger (Sandhills Prairie Girl), Nicole Louden’s post, confessing how much I love how she names things that populate the Sandhills. Naming things, I wrote, is a divine act, for it calls them into the significance they merit. Confucius argues that “[i]f names are not correct, language will not be in accordance with the truth of things.” Nicole’s pratice of using correct names for the things about which she writes and photographs endows her work with a truthfulness and a profound sense of place: not plant but “soapweed,” not wildflower but “pucoon,” not shore bird but “phalarope,” not moth but “cecropia moth.” How well she uses the power and the majesty of particular names!

And speaking of particular names, my favorites are the names of my grandchildren, Gracyn Mae and Griffin Jay. Though they are 11 and 14 now, I can’t say their names without remembering their births, their name days. When I say their names, I can feel the sweet weight of their infant bodies in my arms. I can hear the giggles of sleepovers, and I can see them sitting companionably on the dock at the end of a summer’s day. I want to speak their names, proclaiming, “Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name” (Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn). Melodramatic, maybe, but nontheless true.

In the past few years, I’ve begun to lament my inability to remember names. Often as soon as I hear a name in an introduction, it floats away like chaff in the wind. I hate this. For I know that naming is ultimately an intimate act of knowing and blessing. I want to be able to say “wild chicory” to distinguish it from other roadside plants. I want to be able to say, “Hi, Laura” to distinguish my friend from other women. In the sanctuary of naming, I take solace in the unmerited grace for those, like me, who occasionally forget. And when I can’t recall the name “periwinkle,” I take solace in the fact that, with patience, I’ll be able to retrieve this name eventually. For a name is a powerful thing, and no self-respecting periwinkle would answer to “blue”.