October 2, 2017 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Alex Ross’s charming “Cather People,” an account of his recent trip to Red Cloud, Nebraska, to attend the opening of the National Willa Cather Center. He stays at a bed-and-breakfast, roams the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie (“When I was last there, in June, the sky was a blaring blue and the hills were a murmur of greens. The air was hot and heavy enough that thoughts evaporated from my mind. I lay under a cottonwood tree and listened to leaves and grass swaying”), talks about Cather’s letters (“The letters echo her voice—‘confident, elegant, detailed, openhearted,’ as Jewell and Stout describe it”), speaks with Cather scholars, and recalls visits he made a few years ago to places in New Mexico that figure in Cather’s novels. One such place is Acoma. Ross writes,

The vistas around that shiver-inducing place, which a small group of Acoma still inhabit, have hardly changed since Cather saw them almost a century ago, and, as usual, her description is definitive: “This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape.”

“Cather People” is a delightful blend of travelogue and literary criticism. I enjoyed it immensely.