Recently I travelled 3700 miles by car, from Massachusetts to Minnesota, then south to Missouri, and back again. Allowing for the time spent in Minneapolis, the journeyed portion of the trip was only six days. A little over 600 miles a day with many halts and a few wrong turns. It is a small accomplishment I understand, in this modern age, or in the larger scheme of things–even in my own life–but was done for reasons important to me. I had hoped for some perspective on what was to be, and was indeed, a great event, and found more than enough to please me.

All of it is territory I have travelled many times previously. Yet I had never before seen the sculpted hills of Wisconsin in October, when the crop has been cleared away and the greater care for the soil, achieved by those devoted farmers, is so splendidly naked to the eye beneath the delicate contour and weave of their machines.

Driving the snaked and narrow roads of West Virginia just ahead of a truck ladened with gypsum all in a rush was somewhat new to me. Any driver might know that sense of imminent demise even on the interstate highway. But caught in a twisting tunnel between trees and cliff, where repeatedly turning off to the side was of no help as another truck was quickly there again, or else I was soon caught at the rear of a logging truck making a laborious climb with a string of other drivers behind me. Frustration blinds. Thus I cannot say that West Virginia has added to my sense of proportions in life on this trip.

I have many times seen the corduroy fields of autumn-dried cornrows cut down to the nub by enormous combines, but never quite so vast as this, nor so exactly inscribed and angled against a thinned horizon pressed between ambers and amethyst–not just as I saw on old route 50 during my return over the surreal flatness of central Illinois.

The lines of perspective are drawn there for any to see. A golden section can be found by a simple turn or tilt of the head. That perfect ratio so common to the plains, so blatant, will draw the eye without effort.

The fierce and more vast beauties of the ocean are less appealing to me perhaps because all perspective there is so easily lost.

Horizons in Iowa are trimmed by the dark edging of trees, planted to resist still ungoverned winds, which become a far distant crack between earth and sky, with perspectives between eye and the infinite keyed by the isolated islands of farmhouse, silo and shade tree. But never before had I witnessed those house-sized harvest combines work their way in October against the standing armies of desiccated stalks like alien creatures in the crepuscular night, their eyes aglow, one after the other creeping steadily across the vastness of the plain–though it is all just a normal part an evening and of the ageless need of the farmer to beat time and the coming of wet weather.

It was good to see and be reminded of where my meals come from.

My knowledge of farming is akin to my knowledge of magic. It is as little as the land is large. How may such enormities of purpose be judged by such small personal prejudices. I love magic, and I love to eat.

And I was on my way to a wedding.

Though Minneapolis is at the heart of this land, my daughter has not married ‘a son of the middle border,’ but a townsman–from a Mississippi river town–a common heritage to her own. Those who work the soil of the land above the rivers are less than five percent of us, after all–and part of the afore mentioned magic. But the groom and his family are no less Mid-westerners and I was happy for the chance to travel to the celebration of their vows. More than happy, with half of my own family so deeply rooted there.

My daughter is also the child of her mother, and all of the heritage that follows there, of course, but what I found dear on this journey was that she had gone to that particular territory to marry where her father’s fathers had roamed and farmed and married and raised their own families, and died. Poor Irishmen, all, escaping a holocaust, and coming to find a future, which had now become my own past and a portion of her past. I might equally find some inspiration in the Mississippi itself, where one great grandfather was a pilot and steamboat captain, or in nearby Duluth, where another forefather captained a tugboat on Lake Superior. But this is just about her own father who is quite taken with the Great Plains and the perspectives of an earth so broad and deep that it bends to the eye alone.

And thus I had the opportunity to visit the cemetery in Keokuk where many of her father’s people are buried in the ‘middle Catholic’ section which is properly between the ‘old Catholic’ and the ‘New Catholic’ divisions, of course, and thereby be reminded of the marriages that have made me, and my daughter too.

But as much as I love the closeness and detail of river towns, I am more overawed by the prairie.

Though the weather was near perfect during the ten days, I have in the past witnessed the coming of summer storms there, and once stood with my children to watch the flash and grumble of a mountain of cloud grow where no mountain should be, the roiled ceiling illuminated with a dozen strikes at once from end to end until its mass at last swallowed our small part of the earth below in a black torrent of rain. By any comparison, storms in the east occur in a narrow spectrum divided and sectioned as much by trees and hills as by window frames.

And we have walked the leveled field of an ancient mountain where its ghost arose in a mountainous cloud to rest as a crown on mere heads of grass, unaware of weight or scale.

The careless speak of billions and trillions of this or that. To stand at the edge of mere hundreds and be overwhelmed by the immensity of it is more humbling to me even than to stand in the dark of night and stare into the stars. Those cold bits are remote and uncaring. But the soil at your hand has texture and the smell of flourishing, and it rises beneath your feet without moving–by deception–and then runs way as fast as the eye can see. The lands of the prairie are latitudinous, marked by longitudinal roads which disappear by merely stooping. The deafening silence of the stars alone are nothing against song of the cricket, and comforting sough of the wind.

This land was written upon before any relative of mine came by. Trailed by foot and pony, and before that by massive herds of buffalo. Those paths may still lie just beneath the straight lines of the surveyor’s grid followed now by roads between squared miles. Perhaps from the air one might see the palimpsest of ancient ways where fields have been left fallow by unsettled probates or poor stewardship.

Nearer the great river, the land tumbles, with muscles bared. The graves of my father and father’s people rise within sight of the prairie, but the place is so hedged by oaks and beech that it could be anywhere east of there. True, the gray teeth of the tombstones are at least irregular–a modest acceptance of the differences of those beneath. But their resting place is not awesome. It lacks perspective, I thought.

Within moments I am away again to the more generous splay of fields, not empty, but full in fact, where stars may be found at night to fall, or to be fallen.

 

 

 

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