This past Monday and Tuesday, I drove back and forth from Minneapolis to Decorah, which is a small town of about 8,000 people in northern Iowa. The night before the drive, a winter storm dropped several inches on snow. Driving on 52 South between Cannon Falls and Rochester, I saw two cars which had veered off the left hand lane going north and slid into the median. They had hit patches of snow and ice in the left hand lane, which is less traveled than the right lane. After observing that, I stayed contentedly in the right lane as I drove south.

As someone living on the east coast where houses, trees, buildings, wires cut cut the sky into small chunks, the wide open land and sky on either side of 52 made me feel diminished and, at the same time, enlarged. It also reminded me of Willa Cather’s descriptions of the prairie in O Pioneers!

In the first part of the book, “The Wild Land,” Cather describes how the land and the farmers strive against each other. One could call this a struggle, a fight, a taming, but I prefer the Greek word “agon,” which means competition or contest. In its strictest meaning, “agon” refers to an athletic competition, chariot racing, or a music competition. But in his Greek Hero course, Greg Nagy defined “agon” as a competition in battle as well. He called the struggle of Achilles with Hector an “agon” — if memory serves. He also refers to Oedipus’s quest as an “agon.” The protagonist’s father, John Bergstrom, struggles against the land and loses, dying of exhaustion as he gazes out upon his farm and tallies up what he will leave his children. However, he puts the responsibility of the farm upon his daughter Alexandra and not her brothers, Lou and Oscar. He recognizes in Alexandra strength of will, incisive intelligence, and imaginative determination. Alexandra has an intuitive understanding of the land. She rejects entering into a renewed agon, and instead melds with the land. In the last chapter, Cather describes the ecstatic melding:

When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

Cather, Willa Sibert (2009-10-04). O Pioneers! (p. 31). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.

The paragraph has an almost orgasmic flow to it. Alexandra drives the wagon up the Divide; the Genius bends down to her. Alexandra hums, her face shines, tears fill her eyes, and her little brother is awed by her expression. But of course with Cather, anything sexual is suppressed, diverted, squelched.

But even once the land is settled and tamed, cut across with fences, divided into fields, held down with telephone poles stringing wires across the sky, the land exerts its own power. I saw driving down how the land was marked by high-standing silos, houses set on hills, and stands of trees. I could see where each farm was by its silo. One hundred or more years ago, farms were identified by the windmills which pumped the water from beneath the ground. Yet, even so, the snow separates the farms.

In Decorah, the snow shuts down schools and businesses, because the dirt roads leading to the various farms can’t be plowed. People are isolated on their farms when the snow falls.  Cather describes the winter landscape in the third part, “Winter Memories:”

The variegated fields are all one color now; the pastures, the stubble, the roads, the sky are the same leaden gray…The ground is frozen so hard that it bruises the foot to walk in the roads or in the ploughed fields. It is like an iron country, and the spirit is oppressed by its rigor and melancholy.

Cather, Willa Silbert (2009-10-04). O Pioneers! (p. 93). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.

I saw that sameness of color driving along 52 — a grey, white broken by lines of brown trees, and squared buildings. Once I saw a black shape leaping through the snow. My first thought was “wolf,” but that was a romantic notion. The shape was racing toward the house at the top of the shallow hill, jumping above the snow line. The snow was so blindingly white, the dog was a flat, black shape with no distinguishing details. Just a silhouette like a cut-out stencil instead of a real three dimensional dog.

The other thing I thought about was what strength of heart and mind a person would need to live through a long winter in Iowa or Minnesota. Even today in 2015. If enough snow falls, a person could be cut off from the world for many days. I think the folks must have very different types and quantities of food stored in the basement than I do in Philadelphia, where I can usually get to a grocery story even in the worst snow storms because everything is so close.  But that is a trivial concern. While preparing to teach Cather’s O Pioneers!, I read accounts of women who went crazy after days and days all alone in a dugout house, left behind by husbands who had to find work, left behind with no one — or just little children. All the burden of running the farm and withstanding the winter and snow fell on them. Alexandra tells the story of Carrie Jensen who feels like life has no purpose until she sees the bigger world by staying with relatives in Iowa and sees the bridges over the Missouri and Platte Rivers. I have to feel a bit cynical that Carrie Jensen would think of any town in Iowa as the big world. But I think the mention of the bridges is key because those bridges represent human engineering crossing a natural boundary, taming nature.

I stopped along the drive and took photographs of the landscape. When I was preparing them for this post, I tried the “feeling lucky” button on Picasa. The change of the grey sameness to electrifying blue and high contrast black distorted the reality of the “iron country.”

Iron Country of Minnesota

“Feeling Lucky” distortion