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National Geographic : 1982 Jul
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future. The day he said farewell before go ing east, they saw the prairie lit by sunset and moonrise, "two luminaries ... resting on opposite edges of the world." He and she would be just as separate, yet forever shar ing the same memories. We now pause at the Willa Cather Memo rial Prairie, almost a square mile of virgin grassland, and slip away for private walks. Down in the draws, larks are singing-a high spray of sound, with many caroling turns. My path meets Diane Mustonen, a high-school teacher from Omaha who is ex pecting her first child: "I like the openness and freedom here, the sense of space and light." She nods with approval: "This place is my Willa Cather." Years later Jim and Antonia met again, in a scene Cather placed at the farmhouse of the real Annie and her husband, John Pa velka: Everything was as it should be: the strong smell of sunflowers and ironweed in the dew, the clear blue and gold of the sky, the evening star. Now everything here is dry and vacant. We Cather buffs try to imagine a place bursting with life, full of animals and orchards and a dozen children. Instead, we see rusted pumps and an abandoned truck; we peer down into an empty fruit cellar, dank as a cave. Up in the sunlight Ned Ryerson has less trouble picturing the scene Willa Cather invented. A schoolteacher from New En gland, he has read and taught her books for years-but has never seen Nebraska. "I lost my sight over a year ago; this is my first solo trip. Her country is as I expected: warm and windy; you can taste the dryness." He smiles, plucks some cheatgrass, and sam ples its aroma. N 1890 WILLA CATHER entered the university at Lincoln, a world of books and ideas where "everything else fades for a time, and all that went before is as if it had not been." Driving toward Lincoln, I pass through a long summer dusk. The windmills become sculpture; grain elevators assume cathedral shapes. Mozart is on the car radio-sponsored by a feed company, I hear. Suddenly a coyote crosses the road, heading east. I stop to see his mask and flecked coat before he bounds into the wheat and is gone. First order of the day for a newborn calf is a wash by its mother. When the National Geographic,July 1982
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