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.
