Dropping in on Kathleen Norris

A few years ago I was traveling home from Montana to Illinois when I decided to detour three hundred miles to Kathleen Norris’s town of Lemmon, North Dakota.  I didn’t tell her I was coming.  I just stopped in.  Not that I saw her, and I doubt that she even knew I was there.

Norris is the author of such books as Dakota, Cloister Walk, and Amazing Grace, and moved to North Dakota after living in the bright, shining din of New York City. I wanted to see where she writes of isolation and spirituality in a place she describes as “the high plains desert, full of sage and tumbleweed and hardy shortgrass.” 

Half an hour from her town, I drove into a thunderstorm and the world went dramatic -- dark and moody with hard driving rain.  As I came around a bend in the road, a slant of sunlight burst through the clouds and lit up a patch of the prairie.  I pulled over to the side of the road to watch.  The hillside sloped down to a low ridge of brown rock that cradled a small marsh with cattails and sedge.  The rays of the sun shimmered on the wet, green prairie grass as blue sky returned in the west.  A strong wind pushed the black storm clouds east and made it hard for birds to fly anywhere.  The rough, unforgiving land was stunning.

Public Grieving

The bombings in Boston remind us that public tragedies lead to public grieving, and even if we don’t know anyone involved, when we see photographs of the faces of those who were killed when they were happy, see the faces of the injured in pain, see the despair on the faces of those who lost loved ones, we also grieve.  Public grieving becomes personal because we identify with their sorrow, confusion, and anger.  It doesn’t matter if the photographs are of people in Boston, India, or South Africa.  We are affected and we feel compassion rise from within us because we are part of the same human community.

When innocent people are killed, this is like a hammer tapping on a porcelain vase.  It sends cracks shooting through our conviction that goodness is the ruling force in the world.  How could this happen? we ask, as if we hadn’t been paying attention to news reports of bombings like this occurring around the world almost every day.  The pressure cooker bomb?  It’s the bomb of choice in Afghanistan.  How did we not know this?  We may take note of tragedies in far away lands being reported on the evening news, but then we go back to what we were doing, thinking “How sad, another bombing in…”  But if we see a photograph of the face or the limb that’s been blown off, then it becomes tangible and it affects us personally.  We grieve individual people, not numbers.

John Muir

I grew up in Wisconsin playing in the woods through the seasons and reading about John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Sigurd Olson, nature writers in Wisconsin and Minnesota. I lived near Muir’s home, we both went to the University of Wisconsin, and one side of my family is Scottish, so there are those connections. Then he headed west and found himself entranced and delighted by Yosemite’s grandeur.

When I moved to California, I went to Yosemite to experience the place that Muir raves about in his books, the place that nurtured his soul.  I was, and still am, amazed that such a place can exist – a valley with granite walls that go straight up for almost a mile, waterfalls that flow into the valley from every direction, mountain peaks that stretch to 13,000 feet, and giant sequoias that are 300 feet tall and 3000 years old. I continue to use Muir’s words to guide and draw me closer to nature.  Like him, I also to hike by myself because the solitude I find nourishes me.