WILLA CATHER

The Mesa
Taos, New Mexico

By Tracy Tucker

I am an American pilgrim. I’ve visited a hundred holy sites trying to find my way, seeking an intercession, hoping to meet my gods in the air. I’ve found myself at Walden Pond, naturally, and the stone wall at Robert Frost’s farm, but there are many stations on this journey: the American Gothic house, Steinbeck’s “Mother Road,” First Avenue in Minneapolis, and a spot on the side of a Missouri highway where Ira Louvin died.

But by profession, as a writer, as an archivist, I hold one figure above them all — Willa Cather. I’ve traveled where she traveled, slept where she slept, and chased the horizons that populate her novels and short stories. From her birth house in Gore, Virginia, to her grave in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and so many places she wandered in between, I’ve been there, trailing after her spirit, looking for my own.

Cather wrote in a 1912 letter that, for the first time, she was glad to be away from New Mexico and Arizona; though she enjoyed the summer, she “was ready to leave when the time came.  … The country,” she continued, “is wonderful, fabulous; but after all, ‘dans le desert,’ as Balzac said, ‘il y a tout, et il n’y a rien; Dieu sans les hommes.’” The desert is everything and nothing. God without men.

And so I am in Taos, seeing the sights, but it’s the desert that calls me. For days, I let myself be led and, while I keep in mind a place to sleep, the roads just run.  I think of Cather’s letter quoting Balzac. I see everything and nothing.

On the mesa west of town, the road runs out but I walk on, the scent of chamiso pardo and rabbitbrush rising like prayers as I brush by. I breathe in their incense. Cactus spikes whisper against my pack. I have visions. I try to fathom Cather in this land. She rides through at a distance, but I can barely make her out. Between us are other figures, but they might be mirages. Smoke and sand. Wind shaking the wild oats.

A dried fruit of a tree cholla clings to the back of my coat. I don’t discover it until I’m back in Nebraska, and I tuck it away in the console with other relics: sea glass from Nantucket Harbor and limestone from my family’s farm and corroded buttons found buried in the dirt of an abandoned Colorado soddy.

At home I look at Cather’s letter again. After she quotes Balzac, she writes, “You see, you get so lonely (I mean your soul gets lonely) in a land which has had only a geological history. Your spirit can’t find anything to hang on by!” But it can, I think, and mine has hung on to that mesa, returning again and again, a lost traveler walking in circles in the only place that feels real, independent of man.

Back in Cather’s Nebraska, the cholla fruit, dense and desiccated, splits its skin, and its seeds pour out, tiny miracles. Their prickles are everywhere I touch, snagging. When I think I’m rid of them, I notice tiny cholla growing in the sand at the edge of the yard. I tease them out, nurture them, but I don’t think they need me. The desert is real. I’m the mirage.

Tracy Tucker is the Education Director and Archivist at the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and an Affiliate Fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies. Tucker’s research, writing, and photography focuses on the Plains and has appeared in Old Northwest Review, Midwestern Gothic, Whirlwind, Open Mic, Prairie Fire, the Willa Cather Review, and others. A forthcoming chapter comparing the work of Willa Cather, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Sanora Babb will be published in Unknown No More: Essays on Sanora Babb (Oklahoma University Press, 2021).

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory