I take very few trips that don’t involve an off-the-beaten path excursion to a writer’s landscape. I will hike through forests, scramble up the side of mountains, walk for miles, ignore a world capitol’s must-see sights to gaze upon the same vistas and views, the peaks and prairies and panoramas that nourished an author’s creative expression. 

I’ve tumbled so far into this traveler’s quest that I’m working on a sassy little guidebook that matches women writers with the places they loved.  

And here’s one of those places.  

If you have never been to Red Cloud, Nebraska- have I got a writer’s road trip for you.

Close your eyes and conjure this image of a young Willa Cather’s first glimpse of Nebraska. Listen to the churning chugga-chugga of the Burlington and Missouri locomotive as it rattles over the tracks that point west.  

It has been a long, uncomfortable journey from Virginia for the Cather's but now that they’ve crossed into Nebraska, Willa can see oceans of grass that reach for the hazy blue line of the horizon.

She presses her face up to the train window, her breath making little clouds of moisture on the glass. This midwestern prairie is both beguiling and strange to Willa, who is used to the green glens of rural Virginia.   

And it will imprint itself on her imagination long after she has forsaken these wide open lands for the northeast.

“....the first autumn the shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion that I have never been able to shake.  It has been the happiness and curse of my life," Cather said.

Cather moved east for college and never returned, but the good citizens of Red Cloud knew a literary legacy when they saw one. 

Visit the National Willa Cather Center, 20,000 feet of gallery and museum space that includes a bookstore and classrooms. The center also offers guided tours of the town and Cather’s childhood home.

But make the centerpiece of this writer’s road trip the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie and let the wind carry the perfume of rich soil and sun-dried hay to you. Nesting birds chitter among the reeds and pollinating bees circle, finding the tiny wildflowers hidden in the tall grass.

You’re gazing back into time. This is what Willa Cather saw in the summers of her childhood. 

— Kerri Miller | MPR News