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.