Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road

by William Least Heat-Moon

  The sanctuary contained a large, blockish Jesus with feet made broad by much working and walking, like those of a barefooted Maya. That stone Christo was a Mayan fieldhand with an Amerind curve to his eyes and a sparse, almost Asian, beard; he was a worker who understood toil and dance more than suffering and godliness.

  Outside, three young women who had been mopping dust from the sanctuary tiles called out a Spanish flirtation to Berto: “Look at us, little señor!” His answer in Mayan surprised them to momentary silence, then they responded in timid Yucatec. He asked what they knew of Fray Landa, and one said “¡Malo!” and another, “Sí, muy malo,” and the third, the youngest, chanting, “¡Malo, malo, malo!” The eldest, a coin tucked into the top of her blouse, said almost reluctantly she once saw him when others were afraid to look. Those were the nights he came to the big ceiba tree by the cenote. His clothes were white, and his hair untied and it blew, and he never said even a word, and everybody ran from him, the men faster than the women. Berto suggested the holy father was seeking forgiveness. She shrugged and went silent. Loose talk could bring misfortune.

  As we went on, the young women again called out taunting coquetries. Berto whistled the thirteen-note wind-song in hopes Ik would lift the girls’ white cotton dresses. “They would like that,” he said, “because then it is not their doing.” We stopped to watch. The air remained still, and Berto tried again, and nothing happened but another come-hither from the girls. “Ik, he knows naughty sorcery.” We moved on and passed a boy trying to run aloft a newspaper kite the size of my hand. Berto whistled the melody—twice—and up the kite went only to take a sharp nosedive just like the Mayan gods when they came from the skies to earth headfirst, plunging into this our existence. “For Christians,” he said, “gods descend like down a stair, but our ancient ones, they fall into us.”

  We stopped under Father Landa’s immense ceiba that appeared to grow directly from a massive rock plate. A spirit might well select that tree because ceibas are sacred and that one grew above an equally sacred cenote, a deep limestone spring at the heart of the village. Its curving, natural tunnel was mossy, damp, and the downward stone path slick from a thousand years of bare feet; down it went, remarkably down, to the water. At the cool bottom, the spring flowed clear, but around it, beneath the hanging bats, lay old shards of earthen pots. Berto thought they were not litter but gifts from the people who built Uxmal. “That’s the reason they stay here.”

  Five days earlier, when we stood on the steep and gusty top of the Pyramid of the Sorcerer at Uxmal, Berto said for him the pyramid was a “receiver of energy” like other receptors: a threshold made from the curving nose of Chaac, the shape of a house, a stone gateway, a subterranean pool of ancient offerings. In rocks plain and carved, broken and entire, lay energy from what had long been Mayan, what will be Mayan, all of it attached to the earth and its fragments—some visible, much invisible, but none of it gone.

  BEYOND CROSS-PURPOSES

  It may be presumptuous and even—to certain natives on both sides of the state line—offensive for a Missourian to write about Kansas, especially to interpret and, in a way, commemorate it. After all, the states began their entwined history with bloodshed now often considered the first drawn in the Civil War. For that reason, among others, I think an interstate sharing of interpolations is beneficial and conducive to improved understanding, and I hope a good-hearted Kansan someday will reciprocate for those of us living just east of that once internecine border.

  Crossing Kansas

  The memory of my first witnessing the Great Kansas Passage has, like an old sock, a hole or two in it now, but the shape and texture are still recognizable. That initial occurrence happened in late July of 1947, a warm early evening of cicadas chirring out their sharp-edged presence in the vaulted branching of the elms along the street. At that time, the Second World War had not been over long enough for people to cease speaking of it, especially on evenings like that one when the steady and pleasing rhythms of the neighborhood seemed to remind men of what, for almost half the decade, they had relinquished. When the husbands and fathers and uncles stood in the glow of their cigarettes near the corner streetlamp while they talked and watched the living-room lights come on up and down the block like signals from one station to another, I think they were taking the compass of what they believed—or hoped—they’d fought for. The children sat curbside and waited for the dusk to yield to a good cover of dark before beginning a game of kick-the-can. On such an evening, I saw the Great Kansas Passage begin in a next-door driveway.

  The neighbors stood in the laughter and completions of their good-byes to friends from Scranton, Pennsylvania; the visitors were reciting their route, trying to foresee vexations and detours, readying themselves to press on into the last leg of their journey, that final segment from Kansas City, Missouri, to Colorado Springs. After arriving stiff in the knees and weary in the eyes the night before, they had rested most of the day. Now, from the street corner, the children and men observed the Easterners prepare their Pontiac for the westward traversing. At the passenger-side window hung a newfangled tubular device with a concave opening on the front end that made the machine look like a small jet engine. But the contraption did not produce thrust or heat; rather, in the days before refrigerant air conditioners, it supposedly created cool air. The thing worked by drawing in wind over wet filters and throwing a damp breeze into the car. We had heard that, on the desert, the coolers helped, but in humid summers of the middle latitudes, the machine turned a car interior into a place suitable for growing ferns and mosses.

  That evening, the Pennsylvanian driver poured water into the cooler, then moved to the front of the car, where he hung twin canvas waterbags from the heavy chrome bumper (those were the days, of course, when items could be hung not only from bumpers but from door handles, grilles, trunk latches, hood ornaments; the traveler never lacked a protuberance to tie down a loose line or affix a wet swimsuit). Every now and then, the waterbags oozed a drip, thereby cooling themselves on the same principle as the evaporative unit at the window. The Easterner had already mounted a large sun visor above the windshield. We watched the last of the loading: two Thermos bottles of water and a metal cooler—the kind that left a square of rust over whatever it sat on—printed in the Scotch plaid of the Stuart clan. Clearly, he thought the family ready to cross Kansas.

  The travelers had waited out the sun and now, with the last of the dusk, they were fixed to take off, to drive—appropriately—through the old Oregon and Santa Fe Trails’ jumping-off place called Westport, to pass over the Missouri line, and then, already sogging in the damp air, the waterbags oozing, the speedometer locked down (as best one could on two-lane roads) at seventy or eighty, the darkness protecting them, their cache of sandwiches secured in the backseat, and, finally, they would begin to cross Kansas.

  “Are you set, Marie?” the man asked his wife. He spoke in the tone Magellan may have used when he was ready to hoist sail in Seville to begin his great circumnavigation. She nodded grimly, her mouth pinched closed. They climbed aboard. She knew they were about to leave the elm-lined streets of Kansas City; she understood between them and the cool and forested altitudes of Colorado lay that great historic rectangle of discomfiture, a mythic expanse of national character-testing, a place that had done in pioneers by the thousands, a treeless, flattened, featureless, godforsaken, overheated, numbing 82,264 square miles called Kansas. After all, Marie had seen the Westerns and had heard the stories. She worked her Dentyne with a D-Day ferocity. She knew the time had come at last for her to cross Kansas.

  They disappeared into the night as they headed toward U.S. Highway 40: Topeka, Junction City, Salina, Hays, Wakeeney, Oakley, and, if all went well, the blessed western state line. There would also be Tonganoxie, Terra Cotta, Black Wolf, Yocemento, Hog Back, and Voda, but they knew that—at least for outsiders—Kansas was a place only to pass through, a place to keep moving in and thereby lessen the chances of a mechanical or a spir
itual breakdown. Whatever Zeandale, Moonlight, Hyacinth, Vesper, Smolan, Munjor, or Milberger might offer them, they would never discover. In Kansas you didn’t monkey around: You just drove and drove and drove ever farther, and you drove fast, and you drove at night, and you understood during all those long hours your sole purpose in life was to escape, to get out alive.

  The Pennsylvanians didn’t mind driving hard or being driven hard by fears and preconceptions. After all, everybody crossed Kansas that way because everybody “knew” the least which could happen was getting trapped in monumental dullness. And wasn’t it a tidy and sanity-saving fact of topography that if crossers left Kansas City at sundown and held to seventy-some miles an hour and kept bladder relief to a minimum, they could reach the Rocky Mountains in time to turn around and look out the rear window to see the sun begin its own zillionth half-hour-long crossing of Kansas? The travelers would learn the only thing, ignoring numbness, to temper the joy and relief at having crossed was knowing home now lay in the opposite direction, back on the other side of the state, and the return trip loomed like an appointment for a root canal.

  We people of the Missouri border became accustomed to these passages and the elaborate mental and mechanical preparations they brought forth. I don’t remember any of us ever telling Easterners—or Californians, for that matter—that we ourselves crossed Kansas in the summer with only the windows rolled down and a stop now and then for a cold bottle of Grapette. They would never have believed we made the journey armed with only common sense based on experience; rather, they’d have thought us self-mortifiers like pilgrims who follow the Stations of the Cross up the hill on their knees, where the goal is not travel but penance.

  We state-liners also grew used to the reports outstate travelers gave after their Kansas crossing, accounts describing a grim land tediously flat. None of us challenged the notion of coastal people who concluded Kansas has all the depth and fascination of a highway center line. Because we were Missourians, we had no obligation to defend our neighbor (historically, the two states have gotten along like the Hatfields and the McCoys, Popeye and Bluto); but even in our silence before purblind Bostonians or New Yorkers or San Franciscans, we understood that they knew nothing about Kansas except the driving time.

  I should qualify such a generalization: A Virginian once asked me, “When I go through Kansas next month, will I be near Dorothy’s house?” I asked who Dorothy was. “The one in the tornado. The one with the Wizard. The little gal on her way to Oz.” In another time, such as that often passed for outstate knowledge of Kansas. But recently I got corrected: I mentioned to a man (one widely termed here “an old boy”) that I’d heard Dorothy’s house existed beyond the imaginary, and he said, “Oh, hell yes. Somebody went and done it. Built her a place.” America: Where overnight fantasy becomes fact.

  Today, so many years after my first witnessing the Annual Summer Crossing Event, I see those passages differently. The preparations of the Pennsylvanians, although mostly needless, weren’t as purely ludicrous as I once thought. Whether they knew it or not, the piling of equipment and gumption and determination was part of the very purpose of their vacation. What they wanted almost as much as the Colorado mountains was that dreaded Kansas planogram itself. They subconsciously wished for a genuine American pioneer experience, a trial to approximate the grand nineteenth-century migrations that shaped the country, a piece of history that has come almost to define America. What the couple from Scranton desired was westering. Within their easy comforts and switched-on atmosphere, they wanted participation in the danger and mystery of crossing a portion of what was once known as the Great American Desert. Those people wanted, within a huge margin of safety, to enter a history which here happens to be in Kansas. They hoped for immersion in a historical reality, and they longed to touch something elemental if for no other reason than to give counterpoint to the picture-postcard realm of the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies. Entrepreneurial developers would, by the next decade, recognize that urge and build theme parks: Six Flags over Polyvinyl Historyland. Instead of snickering at the vacationers, I should have perceived their authentic longing to turn four hundred miles of Kansas pavement into the Santa Fe Trail.

  But an Easterner’s nervous anticipations and preparations were nearly pointless because crossing Kansas in 1947 just wasn’t that difficult any longer. Yes, one might encounter a surly pump attendant, a sour waitress, or a sheriff’s deputy looking for his quota; but with a full tank, good tires, and a strong bladder, one need scarcely set a foot down into Kansas. And, unless the crossing was at night, it truly was difficult even to imagine the region as a grand plain beset with hostile and horsed red men; to do so required the specter of darkness when anything could be lurking beyond the narrow reach of the sealed-beam headlights. Then, with fields of corn and wheat, courthouse towers and church steeples, chicken houses and privies obscured in the conquered land, an outstater could envision—from behind the tinted Saf-T-Glas—dried-up water holes, Comanches, bison skulls, the yellow gleam of prairie-wolf eyes, and death—or its promise—everywhere.

  It was those night crossings that eventually turned Kansas from a region curious and well formed into a conquered land more presupposed than perceived; to the nation beyond, Kansas became a preconception and thereby a misconception. Passages in darkness put a lie on the face of a historic land of hills, trees, prairies, streams, weird stone outcroppings, and hundreds of villages promising (and often delivering) good fried chicken and milk shakes. The mythic Kansas of our time became a distortion even more removed from reality than the Kansas of nineteenth-century myths. When the vacationers returned to our street at sunrise two weeks after their first crossing, they had become “authorities” on the country between the Rockies and the great eastern bend of the Missouri River. They would say, “Nothing out there.” (At better than a mile a minute, a rider on a moonless night truly can approximate an encounter with nothingness.) They would grumble, “It’s so flat.” (A dark highway has no hills.) “So boring,” they would crab. “Thank heavens for the Burma-Shave signs!” (Travelers see what they’re educated to see.)

  I’ve heard that some natives actually encouraged nocturnal passages in order to keep the state hidden from a coastal America that has long been packing people in tighter and tighter, but Kansans saw no cause for worry since it has always taken a bold person to give up the comforting confines of a city for the unnerving openness of the Great Plains. The kindest remark about the region I ever heard from a New Yorker was “There sure is a lot of air out there.” Indeed, it’s a fact of history that the massiveness of air, sky, and horizon also disturbed the first settlers who quickly found themselves longing for the protective enclosures of forest.

  Chase County, Kansas

  A few years ago, a Kansas friend, Fred Miller, picked up two college boys from East Orange, New Jersey, who were thumbing their way to San Francisco. Between Topeka and Paxico the conversation became spirited, so much so that one of the hitchhikers made a predictable comment about Kansas topography. Fred, who rarely sneers or hurries a rebuttal, asked, “Do you have a couple hours to waste on Kansas?” He turned off the four-lane highway and headed transverse to the usual route of outstaters; he showed them Kansas longitudinally instead of latitudinally, and he presented them the country in the clean light of an early autumn morning. He has yet to divulge that route to me, but when the tour was almost over, one of the thumbers said, echoing Dorothy’s now-classic comment when she and her canine arrive on the other side of the rainbow, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” But the New Jersey lads were indeed in Kansas and had been the whole time. When they got out and thanked Fred—as penitents, he claims—he answered that the best way to thank him was never to mention the truth of the land they had just seen and to keep spreading the word that Kansas is the billiard table of the gods.

  Fred now says he’s sorry he let his chauvinism get the better of his judgment, and he wishes he’d kept a few cats in the bag, bu
t his response, historically viewed, is quite that of the ancient Quiviran Indians who did nothing so well as to convince Coronado that golden cities lay on beyond the horizon—maybe on over there by East Orange—and thereby earn themselves another couple of hundred years’ reprieve from the horrific onslaught of culture from the Old World. Fred, by the way, denies in the face of evidence of some substance that he once wrote the Kansas legislature to suggest a new state motto—just don’t hide it in Latin: Colorado is thataway.

  Not every Kansan, I assume, agrees with Fred’s Quiviran concept of improving the territory. Even though I confess a sympathy with the view, as a writer I must try to speak the truth of a place. So, what is the truth of Kansas? Let me begin with what everyone “knows”: Kansas is flat, flat, flat. No, no, no. While one might describe with accuracy the horizon in the Kansas west of the hundredth meridian as smooth and unbroken, regular and apparently level, in truth, Kansas is marvelously tilted; that’s how the Colorado Rockies can make their slow way, granule by eroded granule, eastward to end up in the Gulf of Mexico. A billiard table, perhaps, but if (on the western border) you were to whack a cue ball—sized to the state—on the western border, over the ball’s four-hundred-mile roll eastward it would drop about three thousand feet (more than three Empire State Buildings) and crash into Missouri (an appealing thought to some Kansans). The ball would, of course, depending on its path, have to get over the Blue Hills, the Red Hills, the Chippewa Hills, the Smokey Hills, the Flint Hills, the Chautauqua Hills, and around any number of stony and upright natural obstructions like Castle Rock, the Chalk Pyramids, Mushroom Rocks, and Rock City (bumper pool would be a more apt metaphor), not to mention arroyos, creeks, rivers, and the eastern woodlands. Nevertheless, air travelers who think they have seen all of Kansas in one glance from 38,000 feet, and “know for a fact” it is indeed flat, may want to disabuse themselves by pedaling a bicycle from, say, Westport on the Missouri line to Kanorado on the other state line; along the way, let the cyclists tell their legs, “It’s flat, it’s flat.”