Where Grass is Country, As Water is Sea

a kind of prairie

"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."

I had just finished reading Willa Cather's masterpiece, My Antonia. I had read it long ago in high school, but perhaps it hadn't meant as much to me then. This time its memorable characters, wisdom and reflections, and above all descriptions of the vast land and how it shapes the soul and even at times erases the self, had a powerful effect on me. I cannot tell you how much I loved that book! It transported me back into time, and I could almost smell the tall red grass of the prairie and see the dusty roads "like soft gray rivers" in faint moonlight, a place that was "nothing but land, not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made."

It's just easier for me to understand now than I did as a teenager on Long Island how fully a place can entrance you, and surround you, and swallow you up. And because yesterday was an odd day that found me alone and without commitments, I decided to walk off into our own version of Nebraska prairie. Oh, it's admittedly a hilly one, not a prairie at all,  but my impulse was exactly this: "...I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away...if one went a little farther, there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass."

And so I did. There was a break in the rain but it was still a bit blustery and sometimes showery clouds rolled by, dropping rain or making great shadows. I decided to divert from the road and walked straight into the tall grass, stepping onto damp earth that rose gradually and then so steeply I felt that I was walking directly into the sky, then dipped again until I briefly lost my bearings and must climb the long steep grade in front of me in order to reach a point where I could see the vista again to know exactly where I was. So at times I was completely surrounded by tawny brown and wine-colored grasses, with occasional patches of thistle and the bright little flowers of yellow of mustard, all undulating in the wind. So much motion in it...

I hadn't gone far and was never actually lost...the ocean, after all, is an easy means of orientation, and I knew in which general direction to walk to get back down to the familiar winding road of our canyon, but there were flickers of uncertainty, when all around was generic grassy hill and I looked upward at a horizon revealing nothing but sky, and I sometimes felt vulnerable, thinking of mountain lions and snakes, but I mostly felt thrillingly invisible and lost, and at the same time connected to something far greater than myself.

As Willa Cather wrote "… I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness, and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great..."