Missouri is full of corn. The high-as-an-elephant's-eye variety, although, depending on where you are, the show-me state deals a bit in the hee-haw variety too. I finally got away from the interstate scenery when I exited to head west on 136 in Nebraska. My destination today was the Homestead National Monument. Lots of corn both north and south of the 136, as well. Between the I-29 and the town of Beatrice, Nebraska is a ribbon of a road which, on this particular Saturday anyway, does not see many cars. Undulating through prairie, soft waves of hills really do give the sensation of oceanic liquid.
The Homestead Monument is just outside Beatrice off of route 4; it marks the site where Daniel Freeman claimed the first homestead following the Homestead Act of 1862 (yes, the act that finalized the expulsion of various Indian peoples). Politics aside, this bit of natural prairie is beautiful and I had the opportunity to walk through it on one of the trails. Red-winged blackbirds, partridge pea, purple ironweed (I think), along with several varieties of prairie grasses, swoop and shimmer. Even though this trail sits close to route 4, since there is little traffic, it is so very quiet except for the conversations in the grasses. So the Thoreauvian experience notwithstanding, I also thought of today, how much of this is my mother's country. This, along with all of the images gathered through her decades of wanderings from one side of the country to the other, is her landscape. As much as New England is mine. Here is the essence of her frame of reference. I am still about 80 miles east of where she was born and raised, but here it begins.
In an attempt to be Catheresque for a moment (if I dare), here is the soil out of which grew the struggles, many of which were fed by the experience of abject poverty and later, scraping-by working class, as well as a family habit of stoicism and silence. Farming is not my immediate heritage--my grandfather worked in a foundry until he lost an eye in an accident--but, according to family stories, when the two Irish branches of the family ventured west, they took up land. That's pretty much all I know. That, and I think I had a great-great-grandmother who was a teacher in either northern Nebraska or in South Dakota. More prairie to see in the next three days...
The Homestead Monument is just outside Beatrice off of route 4; it marks the site where Daniel Freeman claimed the first homestead following the Homestead Act of 1862 (yes, the act that finalized the expulsion of various Indian peoples). Politics aside, this bit of natural prairie is beautiful and I had the opportunity to walk through it on one of the trails. Red-winged blackbirds, partridge pea, purple ironweed (I think), along with several varieties of prairie grasses, swoop and shimmer. Even though this trail sits close to route 4, since there is little traffic, it is so very quiet except for the conversations in the grasses. So the Thoreauvian experience notwithstanding, I also thought of today, how much of this is my mother's country. This, along with all of the images gathered through her decades of wanderings from one side of the country to the other, is her landscape. As much as New England is mine. Here is the essence of her frame of reference. I am still about 80 miles east of where she was born and raised, but here it begins.
In an attempt to be Catheresque for a moment (if I dare), here is the soil out of which grew the struggles, many of which were fed by the experience of abject poverty and later, scraping-by working class, as well as a family habit of stoicism and silence. Farming is not my immediate heritage--my grandfather worked in a foundry until he lost an eye in an accident--but, according to family stories, when the two Irish branches of the family ventured west, they took up land. That's pretty much all I know. That, and I think I had a great-great-grandmother who was a teacher in either northern Nebraska or in South Dakota. More prairie to see in the next three days...
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