There is a German word when translated in the strict and limiting sense, means “homeland”. Heimat however, is a bigger idea. An idea that I understand as a powerful and incurable blend of geography and belonging that defines one’s aesthetic. I always think of it as the fourth dimension that can be felt by some people about a physical space that is dear – or at least – defining to their identity.
Red Cloud Nebraska has a population of 1,020 give or take. I got to meet a few of them on our recent visit. But the one most talk about in Red Cloud I never will meet. At least in person. Red Cloud was founded in 1870, give or take, and it’s most popular citizen was born at about that time and showed up in town 10 years later.
I can’t claim to know anything about Willa Cather, Red Cloud’s most discussed resident. But academics and literary fans from around the world have taken the long, straight and lonely roads to Red Cloud for years to research, extol, discuss, and debate her. They tour her childhood home, scrutinize the peeling wallpaper in her attic bedroom, and find physical and specific evidence of the places and people she immortalized in her prose.
The one thing I think I can say about Willa Cather is that she understood the idea of Heimat. It seems every brick and blade of grass in that prairie town has somehow been translated from it’s physical properties into the feel, sense, the sorrow, beauty, the heitmat Red Cloud’s most famous author defined.
We walked in the prairie named after her. It is one of the last remaining landscapes in the continental United States never to have been under a farmer’s plow. I ran my hands through the Indian Grass and Big Bluestem as it swayed just like it did 1870. When I turned the faucet on in the sink of the town cottage we stayed in, I drank the water. The same ground water from the Ogallala Aquifer that poured out of well pumps in 1883, the year Willa Cather arrived here. We listened to the Meadowlarks and Magpies. When the sun rose on us I watched the shadows and felt the Midwestern heat begin to burn the back of my neck. The same sun that has been baking the window sills and windmills in this town for 100 years and more. And I thought about how all these things that make up a place can be translated so deflty into a different format and language. From dirt and sweat and dimension and space into words without weight, shape or time.
Be it prose, painting, song or image, my visit to Red Cloud was above all, a study in how I can understand someone by their art, and by where they are from, and how a place so small on the Great Plains could be so much fodder and muse for such big works of acclaimed American literature – how heimat can be so viscerally experienced by some, and by some even fewer, so vividly expressed.
A contemporary contextualzation of heimat.
More refined thoughts on The Willa Cather Prairie
And, more on Willa Cather from the Willa Cather Foundation in Red Cloud, Nebraska.