Something soft and wild and free

Is it not ironic that the two places I feel most at home are so widely divergent? - on a ship, underway; and here, roaming in the expansive desert Southwest.

This is Willa Cather country, at last: Willa Cather, probably the least-studied famous American author, and, far and away, my favorite. I wrote my college thesis on her, much to the shock of my English-equals-born-in-England professors.

Willa Cather wrote of many things, but she hit her stride with North American pioneers, and in the desert Southwest. Both underlay "Death Comes for the Archbishop", my favorite work of hers.

Most evident in this book is Cather's belief that a person's identity rises from and is forged by the land itself. Her writing is as expansive and many-hued as the high desert setting.

Colors are so washed out, so muted elsewhere, compared to this desert brightness. The violets of far-off mountains and late-afternoon skies; the reds and pinks of the rock, rising in towers and dropping away in canyons; the shrubs and cacti and cottonwood in deep olives and bright apple-greens; the wildflowers in bright yellows and reds and purples; the brilliant turquoise sky peppered with towering white clouds; the sun blazing sunsets into oranges, pinks, bronzes...there is a sharpness as well, each color contrasting brightly with the next, each angling for a bigger piece of the reflected sun.

You can smell the rain coming, the shift in the air from a dry hotness to a whispered breeze to a frantic downpour, kicking up the dust and drowning the web of arroyos cutting across the mesas. And then it's over before you've hardly gotten wet, the hot sun quickly baking the damp away, the rain forgotten but for the flooded washes and ill-drained roads.

I want to leave my car behind, ride a horse off into the sunset, explore the endless sandstone canyons and scrubby mesas, sleep in a simple hut or abandoned cave, build a fire, listen to the echoes of long-ago ancestors whispering endless truths.

It is the land. It calls.