Great Plains graduate fellows visit western Nebraska

Head west on Highway 2 on an early autumn afternoon, before lunchtime when the sun is just a little too high and bright and static, and the land around your car seems dry and unchanging until suddenly, quietly, everything loosens. The farm and grasslands ripple, becoming duny. The tense daylight itself relaxes into a new kind of motion, ducking here and there, now past Broken Bow, now past Alliance, into the odd geology of clouds, how they seem to play with the dunes. On them, the clouds' shadows stretch willy-nilly and distorted; the Sandhills' version of funhouse mirrors for the sky above.

"For all the dust, the land moves so much like water," I remarked to Emily Rau, a doctoral candidate in the English Department at UNL and the managing editor of the Willa Cather Archive, in the driver's seat beside me...

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