by Matt Weiland
We went to Fort Worth and stayed at Reno’s house for a few days, and then started up through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, and down through Missouri and Arkansas. I might as well say that we drank a lot, and snorted a lot of crystal meth, and we went barreling over the Great Plains in Reno’s bus, stopping at night to load equipment into some club, play a couple of sets, crash in a motel room, and then begin again the next morning. Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Omaha, Little Rock: The names were as perfumed and mythic to me as Paris or Athens or Tunisia would have been; but I had been to Paris and Athens and Tunisia, to Cologne and to Cambridge. I had never been to Texarkana, or Shreveport, let alone to those long flat spaces in between. I took a camera with me and shot off a couple of rolls. Almost every picture shows the same thing, and they all look like abstractions: the blue above meeting the greenish-brown below, and nothing in between.
Freedom, room to move, a place in time. We’d stop at a gas station in the middle of nowhere to fill up, and emerge from the bus to stretch our legs and stare dazedly down a hundred miles of flat highway, and I would think the same things other people think when they get onto the Plains: I can do anything here. No one can find me. There’s nothing to bump into, nothing to break, there are no surprises when you can see the next car coming from miles away. The days unfold on an endless playing field.
When we got to Wichita one Saturday night, there were high-school kids cruising up and down the main drag, shouting things from car to car, and generally whooping it up. They really did that: It was like arriving in New York for the first time—say, after growing up in Wichita—and discovering that everyone really is either Italian, Hasidic, or gay. I couldn’t have been more delighted to see it. We loaded the band’s equipment into the Coyote Club, and went back to the Holiday Inn for a nap.
Then back to the club, and another new, essential thing. I had spent much of my youth in nightclubs: Max’s Kansas City and CB’s in high school, and later Hurrah and the Mudd Club, Tier 3, the Roxy, the Paradise Garage—New York’s vast and shifting world after hours. I’d seen drag shows at the Escuelita, drank warm beer at an anarchist club in an abandoned building in the East End of London. But I’d never seen a hundred guys in gimme caps mixing with a hundred girls in tight Wranglers, while outside a miles-long freight train passed. This was their weekend, and this was what they did with it; they paid a little money, got a loud hot show from Reno and his band, flirted, danced, drank, made a night for themselves. I did pretty much the same, and I learned something along the way.
It happened like this. I’d noticed a girl when we first came in: long-legged and very lovely, with long, straight brown hair and perfect pale skin, she was about my age and her eyes were glittering with mischief. She looked upon the Coyote Club and all the people there with some mixture of exasperation and amusement; she knew them, she was fond of them, but she seemed just a little too glamorous for the place, and she wore an expression that suggested that she’d had it with all this, and she’d be gone if she could just figure out where to go, and how to get there. A little later, I was standing halfway between the bar and the entrance to the club when she sidled up to me, and opened up a conversation by saying, in a smart, musical voice, “Didn’t I work on your pickup truck this afternoon?” I looked at her—she was just about to smile—and I replied, in all seriousness and sincerity, “No, I don’t think so. I’m not from here.” And she laughed.
Reader, a rube in reverse is a rube nonetheless. I hadn’t realized she was kidding; it never occurred to me that everything about me made it perfectly plain that I wasn’t from there.
In itself this is not unusual. I have a tendency, fortunately or not, to believe that I’m invisible even when the facts would indicate otherwise. I’ve wandered blithely through the slums of Karachi, with no more sense of myself than it took to notice that everyone seemed very polite. On the sidewalk in Shigatse, in southern Tibet, I made a joke to a companion about my quest to document the yeti, that mythical creature, oversized, pale, and unusually hairy, only to realize, some hours later, that people were staring because that was me, exactly—that I was it: the Abominable Snowman. In the Congo, children in little villages would jump up and down, point and shout muzungu!, while I vaguely wondered why they identified the photographer I was traveling with, who was Vietnamese, as a “white man.” You see what I mean.
The composition of the world is such that these little self-recognitions, when they finally occur, usually mean noticing that I’m white, or western, or American; but not in Kansas, no—it was the first place I had ever been where it was obvious, at least to everyone else, that I was swarthy, eastern, and vaguely foreign. I went into the Coyote Club dressed, as far as I can recollect it, like a Jewish Johnny Thunders (this was twenty years ago, when I could get away with that sort of thing). I thought of Kansas as exotic, but it wasn’t until the girl laughed that I realized that Kansas thought of me that way, too.
There are two things that I need to stress here. The first is that when I say it was Kansas that first taught me that I’m not exactly white, I don’t mean that I felt black: I’m not, and I didn’t, and I wouldn’t presume to speak for someone who was black, or Mexican, or Indian, or know what they might feel when in the Midwest. Perhaps what I felt is better described as a vague sense of my own ethnicity. Now that I live in Texas I feel it surprisingly often: Every few months someone will say to me, with startling frankness, “You’re not from here, are you?” I heard it from a check-out girl, who blurted the question out as I was loading up my groceries; I heard it from a contractor who was working on my house. I heard it from a Mexican woman who stood beside me in the take-out line of a restaurant (though under most circumstances, she would probably describe me as Anglo: the ironies ripple across the language). Usually, it means something like, “You’re nose is bigger than most people’s around here,”—which it is—or, “You stand differently: You’re wound a little tighter than we are”—which I am. These are facts, and every so often someone decides there’s no point in ignoring them.
The second thing I want to make clear is that there was nothing sinister in the experience, nothing offensive intended, and no offense taken. I didn’t feel objectified, or debased, or despised, or ostracized, or unwelcome. There in the Coyote Club, and this is the point, everyone was looking for some fun, including me, and everyone found it. The curiosity that was brought to bear, the amusement, the desire to get out of your same old ways and into something new: that was mutual, and not just harmless but a boon.
The girl who approached me: her name was Emmy, she worked at the car rental desk at Wichita Airport, and she was all around adorable. We went to her house and talked for a while, then back to my room on the twenty-first floor of the Holiday Inn—about as high up off the floor of Wichita as you could get, with an illuminated minor league baseball stadium lying down below, beyond that, the lights of the city, and beyond that, Kansas in all directions into the darkness. I left Wichita the next morning (Emmy woke up to see me off, then went back to bed, to luxuriate under the protection of a check-out time that was still some hours away), a little bit smarter, happier, and more bold.
I said something at the start here about the Kansas of the Mind, but the reverse is true as well. The mind is a kind of Kansas, or mine is anyway. Or my memories are: For one thing, I seldom go there, so however near they may be, they remain somehow far away. They are vast and green, and both perfectly plain and inescapably mysterious; there are heat patches along the way that create shimmering, hallucinatory reflections, and tornados in the distance. There are pretty girls, loud music, jokes that it sometimes takes me a while to get. I’m different there, different than I am here and now—smaller, in some obscure way, and always astounded by the feeling of freedom—and different than everybody else as well. In the Kansas that is my memory, I’m not yet me, but not quite another, either. As I say, I don’t go there often, but I don’t need to; I know that it’ll be waiting for me whenever I get around to revisiting,
and I know, because this is the point of such places, that it will be exactly the same.
KENTUCKY
CAPITAL Frankfort
ENTERED UNION 1792 (15th)
ORIGIN OF NAME From an Iroquoian word Ken-tah-te meaning “land of tomorrow” or “dark or bloody ground,” or “meadow land”
NICKNAME Bluegrass State
MOTTO “United we stand, divided we fall”
RESIDENTS Kentuckian
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 6
STATE BIRD Kentucky cardinal
STATE FLOWER goldenrod
STATE TREE tulip poplar
STATE SONG “My Old Kentucky Home”
LAND AREA 39,728sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Marion Co., 3 mi. NNW of Lebanon
POPULATION 4,173,405
WHITE 90.1%
BLACK 7.3%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.2%
ASIAN 0.7%
HISPANIC/LATINO 1.5%
UNDER 18 24.6%
65 AND OVER 12.5%
MEDIAN AGE 35.9
KENTUCKY
John Jeremiah Sullivan
The Commonwealth of Kentucky is shaped like an alligator’s head. It is also shaped like the Commonwealth of Virginia, as if the latter were advancing westward by generation of adult clones. In a way this is so. The southern borders of these states are keyed to the same horizontal projection—one surveyed by the frontier planter William Byrd in 1728—while the rivers forming their northern extents fall back just opposite each other from the eastern and western flanks of the Appalachian massif. There’s a mirroring there. In 1818 one of the few people able to mount even a semi-coherent accounting of the ancient processes responsible for it neared Louisville aboard a long covered flatboat that following local custom he called an ark. It was summer. He was traveling down the Ohio, on the alligator’s eye. He’d convinced a couple of booksellers in Pittsburgh to advance him $100 for a new and more accurate map of the river’s tributaries. That was mostly a way to earn travel money on his part, which is fine, because in the end they refused to publish what he wrote. He was thirty-two, not famous but known in scientific circles, mainly for his work on Sicilian fishes. In Sicily, which was held by the British, one did not want to sound too French, so he went by his matronymic, Schmaltz. Since coming to Kentucky however he had resumed the name of Constantine Rafinesque.
“Who is Rafinesque, and what is his character?” once asked John Jacob Astor. The context of the question is not given. Rafinesque himself could get dizzy before the complexity of the answer. “Versatility of talents and of professions,” he wrote, “is not uncommon in America; but those which I have exhibited … may appear to exceed belief: and yet it is a positive fact that in knowledge I have been a Botanist, Naturalist, Geologist, Geographer, Historian, Poet, Philosopher, Philologist, Economist, Philanthropist. …”
The first thing one notices about this oft-quoted self-description is its ostentation, with hints of insanity. The second is that it’s woefully incomplete. Rafinesque, who is cursorily named by Darwin in On the Origin of Species as a forerunner in the study of evolution, in fact came closer than anyone else to grasping natural selection in the decades before that book was published. He came up with the name Taino for the islanders whom Columbus met. He is hailed as “the father of American myriapodology” (the study of many-legged bugs). He was the first person to understand dust, that much of it comes from the atmosphere. He invented the word “malacology” (the study of mollusks). In 1831 he contacted a philosophical club in New York, proposing the establishment of a “Congress of Peaceful Nations.” He’d already written an open letter to the Cherokee warning them that they would soon be forcefully moved to the West, a full decade before it happened. These examples are chosen at random.
Those river arks only moved downstream. The owners broke them and sold the lumber when they’d made their destinations. They were floating islands, often lashed together (as during Rafinesque’s trip) into caravans. An 1810 account says they were shaped like “parallelograms.” Some were seventy feet long. You lived in a cabin or out on deck, other times in a tent, with an open cooking fire. There were animals. To go ashore and come back, which you could do whenever you wanted, you took your own, smaller boat, kept tied to the gunwale. The arks went slow when the water was slow, fast when it was fast, and crashed when it was very fast. This distinctly American mode of travel sufficed throughout the interior for a century and is now so gone we struggle to reconstitute its crudest details. It has no Twain. Rafinesque liked the arks because he could botanize as they drifted. He felt the vegetable pulse of the continent shuddering down its veins. The green world whispered to him. He tells us in a short, hectic, wounded memoir, written near the end, precisely what it said. “You are a conqueror.”
The New World had a way of never being new. I don’t mean the Native Americans. That part is obvious. But in European terms, somebody was always already there. The first person De Soto met in Florida spoke Spanish. In fact, was a Spaniard! Is it the Plymouth voyage or one of the Jamestown voyages that had on it a group of Indians coming back from a visit to London? These days everyone knows not even Columbus made a “discovery;” the Vikings beat him by a half-millennium. Just so Rafinesque, that first time he crossed the Kentucky mountains, had a whole prior American career, an earlier act. From 1802 to 1805 he’d crisscrossed New England, been in the fields and at the high tables, patronized as something of a boy genius—he was just nineteen when he first arrived, on the pretense of apprenticing to a mercantile firm, though he instantly vanished into the woods—and squinted at by a few who noted his “mania” for discovery. It was said he attempted to rename and reclassify the first common weed he spotted on American soil.
Nonetheless influential persons encouraged Rafinesque. Benjamin Rush, a Declaration signer and the first great American physician, offered him an apprenticeship in his practice, medicine and botany being closer together then. Rafinesque refused. His destiny had been revealed to him and did not lie in the city. At the time, Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery was in the Far West. Later expeditions might look to the South, at Louisiana and Arkansas, or toward “the Apalachian mountains, the least known of all our mountains, and which,” said Rafinesque, “I pant to explore.” He was taken to meet Jefferson, and they corresponded. The earth, which Rafinesque believed was an “organized animal rolling in space,” had arranged for him to be present and correctly positioned at this moment, just as a continent of taxonomically pristine vastnesses offered itself to science. He would gladly, he wrote to messr. le président, serve as official Corps naturalist, being supremely and, although it gave him no pleasure to say so, uniquely qualified for the role.
Jefferson either never received or else neglected the letter. He thought of Lewis and Clark’s expedition as primarily a military thing and would never have forced a socially indifferent French polymath on the “nine young men from Kentucky.” Instead he sent Lewis himself to Philadelphia and had him tutored by the savants. Rafinesque, who was in the city and had secretly allowed himself to credit a claim that he’d soon be asked to join the mission, must have seethed. He watched another man’s body step into his future and occupy his moment. The things we’d know if they’d sent Rafinesque to the Pacific! His fevered interest in Indian languages alone—almost without parallel for his day. Even as it was, even on his own, he somehow talked the War Department into sending out vocabulary questionnaires to all of its Indian agents. One sees these mentioned with great esteem by linguists who have no idea Rafinesque was behind them.
A mission of discovery would have molded and disciplined him as a researcher. For once he’d have known the weight of a duty as large as his own self-regard. Every person of learning on the East Coast and in the European capitals would have waited on his findings regarding the flora and fauna and tribes. The western mountains. He’d have been forced to anticipate broad scrutiny, to adapt and refine the radically advanced system of natural classification he was beginning to contemplate,
for he had already begun to peel away slightly from the “indelicate” and arbitrary sexual system of Linnaeus, his great master and guide. No choice but to go methodically, to keep to what he could see—the number of specimens alone would dictate that.
He chafed when he heard no reply and sailed for Sicily, muttering as always that they hadn’t been ready for him here, wherever. This is how it was with Rafinesque, always too quick to take offense, too antsy—untouchable in the field, certainly, but never able to sit. His departure was lamented in the press. Yet he left, and with, it has to be admitted, a certain petulance.
Three days after his ship weighed anchor one of his friends in Philadelphia intercepted a letter from Jefferson. A new expedition was forming. This one would seek the Red River. If Rafinesque were still interested, a place could be made. It was as far as I know an unprecedented provision on Jefferson’s part, made expressly with Rafinesque in mind. Jefferson had seen very well what he was in the room with when they met. Now Rafinesque’s embarrassed friends had to reply with the news. “Unfortunately, Sir, …”
I’m not sure America ever completely forgave Rafinesque for this betrayal, this weakness of faith. By “America” I mean the land. It had called him. He had not come. He went to Sicily instead.