There are studies, I suppose, on the ways our physical environments shape us. I don’t mean the obvious environment psychologists talk about; the neighborhood, the house, the presence of books or harsh words. I mean the environment outside the window, the creek, the mountain, the wide open sky, a fence row that goes on forever, the next house a speck on the horizon.
Or no house on the horizon, and sometimes no horizon, either. Where I live, where I have always lived, I must go in hunt of the skyline, and it is a drive.
South Dakota is a land of horizons, of prairie, a place where standing on a second floor balcony the rain comes in from off, signaled by darkening sheets of rain too small to cover the whole horizon, just a part of it. The rain moves back to front, or left to right, and it will reach you some time, but leaving you plenty of time for speculation and a chat.
I want to drive across Nebraska. I am told this is because I have never driven across Nebraska. That the wheat and road are incessant, a trial to be endured, not enjoyed. But I don’t know. I think that sounds like a wonderful thing to see and do. Drive and drive, scenery unchanging, but new to me, and therefore, exciting. The prairie grass rolling like waves, and what it must be to see a rise in the landscape, to see the change coming but not able to judge the distance, not quite yet, and if at all.
I asked people I met out in South Dakota what it was like growing up with the Black Hills for a backdrop, to drive an hour and be in the Badlands. To have so much sky. They smiled and said it was nice, and didn’t quite get the question, as I wouldn’t quite get the question if put to me. One woman said her father, who was a rancher, never looked at the sky all that much. His grandchildren asked why his walked with his head down, always down.
“I raised cows,” he had said. “I have to watch where I step.”
But this must be the exception, surely.
I don’t realize how flat Daviess County is until friends from Eastern Kentucky point it out. They find they can only be away from their mountains for just a little bit before they miss them, the “sheltering hills” James Still wrote of. I can only be in those same mountains for a few days before they begin to close in on me, make me work a little harder to breathe. So, not sheltering to me, but oppressive.
Give me the same mountains farther south, in Tennessee. Then I am tenderhearted toward them. But that is because they roll differently there. Towns and bergs are nestled in broad green valleys, valleys we can look down into from overlooks or the high winding roads. A vista of sorts.
My mother’s people came here from England. I can almost prove it on paper, I think, but I can prove it for certain when I travel there. That green and pleasant land. The gentle landscape that is broad and human-scaled. The fields and meadows, the hillocks that ring a village, the ones with the benches at their crest, inviting us to sit and gaze out on the houses below, and watch the sky change from blue to gray to navy.
I have sat on such benches and feel, in a visceral way, that it isn’t the first time I’ve sat there, and not in this century. I do a lot of sighing then, content, and warm with affection, as I catch my breath.
I feel the same in Ireland, where every rock-bound field sits not too far above sea level. They have their mountains, I think of the Wicklow Mountains, but they are gentle and promise, as one travel books said, “sweeping views and plenty of space to sit and have a cuppa.” Stand at Cumberland Gap and wonder how this could have been the best spot to cross into the West. Then meander up and down Sally Gap Drive in the Wicklow hills for comparison. And there is no comparison, none at all.
Willa Cather, American writer, was born in the Shenandoah Valley, but grew up in Nebraska. She knew something about about mountains, and also vistas, and open sky. She says, this, about that:
“Anybody can love the mountains, but it takes a soul to love the prairie.”
What soul I have for landscape, sits beside Willa Cather’s.
Greta McDonough 