Standing There

Today is the birthday of Willa Cather (1873-1947), and this morning on Facebook I posted some images of places where she was born, where she lived, where she now lies in a New Hampshire cemetery.

Actually, I reposted those images, and I didn't add anything new this year. But I got to thinking, later in the morning, about how--somewhere along the way--I began going to see places relevant to the writers I was teaching.

I have written about this in other places (including this blog), so I'm not going to rehearse it all here, so the Willa Cather example will do.

In 2005 I was teaching junior English at Western Reserve Academy, and the teachers agreed that year to assign (for the beloved "summer reading") Cather's 1918 novel, My Ántonia, one of her novels set in Nebraska, where she had grown up.

I hadn't read much Cather prior to that, and I don't like teaching things I don't know much about--an attitude I developed my first few years of my career when I didn't know too much about too many things. Enough to get by--not enough to be, well, very competent.

So during that summer 2005 I read all of Cather's novels (via, mostly, the Library of America editions), and Joyce and I embarked on a number of road trips to see the places where she'd lived. And so we went to Back Creek, Virginia (her birthplace--the house--not looking too healthy--is still standing); to Red Cloud, Nebraska (and environs), where she set so much of her fiction (the Cather home still stands and is now a museum); to Grand Manan Island (in New Brunswick), where she spent summers, writing; to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where, before her writing career commenced, she taught high school English for a while (both still standing are the school where she taught and the house where she rented an attic room); and to Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where she lies, sharing a grave with the woman she loved, Edith Lewis.

outside Cather girlhood home--Red Cloud, Neb.

the Cather home in Red Cloud, Neb.

near Red Cloud, Neb.

Cather birthplace near Back Creek, Va.

Cather cottage on Grand Manan Island

We took countless photographs, of course, which I shoved into a PowerPoint and used with my students that fall when we were doing our summer-reading thing.

While we were in Nebraska, it was nearly time to harvest the corn (fields were everywhere), and, following directions we obtained in Red Cloud, we were driving on small country roads lined with cornfields. The plants were huge.

And we got lost. We couldn't see a damn thing but dirt road and corn.

Fortunately, the roads were laid out on kind of a grid, so I knew that if I turned right at the next opportunity, we would end up back on the highway.

And so we did. But I confess to having some Stephen-Kingly worries while we were concealed by corn.

Anyway, Joyce and I have done this sort of thing with many writers--from Melville to Hemingway to Fitzgerald to Zora Neale Hurston to ... on and on and on.

I have learned--by doing this sort of thing--that there is just ... something ... about standing on the ground where once stood the literary figure I'm pursuing. Of course things do not look the same; that's where imagination takes over. You stand by Sunnyside, the home of Washington Irving near Tarrytown, New York, and you hear--you are sure you hear--the pounding hoofbeats of the horses of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman.

It's hard to believe that Willa Cather and I were alive at the same time (I was born in 1944--we shared the earth for about three years). But having visited so many of the sites, I feel I know her a little better than I otherwise would--that I see her stories better than I otherwise would--that I feel her stories better than I otherwise would--that I ...