PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  The population of Chase County is 3,013 at the last counting (about what it was in 1873 when its remarkable courthouse was built), and that’s four persons to the square mile, roughly as many as in a Brooklyn apartment. Chase is thirty miles long north to south, twenty-six miles east to west on the south border and a mile shorter on the north. Five hundred twenty-six miles of county road run Chase, 403 of them gravel, seventy-six broken asphalt, forty-six dirt, and one concrete; except for lanes twisting down creek hollows, these roads follow the cardinal compass points along section lines. Three state and federal highways traverse it: Kansas 177 splits it longitudinally, U.S. 50 crosses near its middle before breaking off into a forty-five-degree angle, and Interstate 33 (the Kansas Turnpike) takes a similar angle to link Kansas City, a hundred miles northeast, with Wichita, thirty-five miles southwest. Chase countians use these cities, but more commonly they drive to Emporia, twenty-five miles east of county center.

  Of a dozen settlements, three or four still can be called villages and two are towns—Cottonwood Falls, the county seat, and Strong City. Only in these, once linked by a horse trolley, can you buy gasoline and groceries. When citizens want a new car or the latest novel or a pair of spectacles, they must drive to Emporia in Lyon County. Chase no longer has a resident physician, dentist, or a pharmacist, but it does have six lawyers, six insurance and thirteen real estate agents. There is one high school, one middle school, two grammar schools, and sixty teachers; within seventy miles of its borders are a couple of dozen colleges and universities. Chase has eleven sites on the National Register of Historic Places (more per citizen than any other Kansas county), a single newspaper (the weekly Leader-News), one public library, sixty-six volunteer firemen, six filling stations, one sheriff and two deputies, one barber, and one traffic light (flashing). Also: a nine-hole golf course (sand “greens,” players in coveralls, hazards of curious cattle pressed to the barbed-wire fences), an annual rodeo, an airfield (grass), a gun club (Friday night shoots), a movie house (piano still down front), a nursing home. And so on. Before the last world war there was more of almost everything except abandoned farmhouses and collapsing windmills.

  You may see the county from one of the many transcontinental flights that pass right over it, or you may view it from an Amtrak window (no stops in the county), or you can get fired down the long, smoking bore of the turnpike that shoots across it. You may also see it from its graveled roads, dirt lanes, pasture tracks, or vestiges of historic trails, or from its couple of hundred miles of canoe navigable waters, and you can travel it by leg and butt—that is, by walking and reading. There’s another means too: call it dreaming, where the less conscious mind can mouse about.

  People passing through from other counties have sometimes found it a good spot to get thumped. A man from Marion, immediately west of here (now residing safely in Colorado), told me: We used to call it Chasem County. The story there was chase ’em, catch ’em, kick ’em. I add only that people in Cottonwood Falls will comment on the number of federal marshals shot down in Marion. But one thing is surely here: Chase County, Kansas, looks much the way visitors want rural western America to look. A college student, a Pennsylvanian working on a ranch near Matfield Green, said to me: I can’t believe this county. I can’t believe it’s still like this. I mean, it’s so Americana.

  I

  SAFFORDVILLE

  From the Commonplace Book:

  Saffordville

  I must describe it. Its physical characteristics are somehow close to the heart of the matter.

  —Mark Helprin,

  “Mar Nueva” (1988)

  There is no describing [the prairies]. They are like the ocean in more than one particular but in none more than this: the utter impossibility of producing any just impression of them by description. They inspire feelings so unique, so distinct from anything else, so powerful, yet vague and indefinite, as to defy description, while they invite the attempt.

  —John C. Van Tramp,

  Prairie and Rocky Mountain

  Adventures (1860)

  Creeds and carrots, catechisms and cabbages, tenets and turnips, religion and rutabagas, governments and grasses all depend upon the dewpoint and the thermal range. Give the philosopher a handful of soil, the mean annual temperature and rainfall, and his analysis would enable him to predict with absolute certainty the characteristics of the nation.

  —John James Ingalls,

  “In Praise of Blue Grass” (1875)

  “The first experience of the plains, like the first sail with a “cap” full of wind, is apt to be sickening. This once overcome, the nerves stiffen, the senses expand, and man begins to realize the magnificence of being.

  —Richard Irving Dodge,

  The Plains of the Great West (1877)

  As to scenery (giving my own thought and feeling), while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone, and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the prairies and plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America’s characteristic landscape. Even [the prairie’s] simplest statistics are sublime.

  —Walt Whitman,

  Specimen Days (1879)

  Prairies let us out. . . . They aid to grow a roomy life.

  —William A. Quayle,

  The Prairie and the Sea (1905)

  The children of the American Revolution hesitated forty years at the western edges of the forest because they didn’t trust the grasslands.

  —Sellers Archer and Clarence Bunch,

  The American Grass Book (1953)

  Let no one think he may as well keep away from these regions, or pass through at night. There is no part of Kansas where the visitor who would know America can afford to be careless of his surroundings.

  —John T. Faris,

  Seeing the Middle West (1923)

  For more than a generation, [pioneer] Americans viewed this [prairie] expanse, greater in size than the vast wooded regions they had just crossed, as some huge ocean separating east from west, itself no place at all.

  [The prairie] immensity, its apparent visual redundancy, makes pointless a rush to somewhere else and creates an overwhelming suspicion that there is nowhere else.

  —Wayne Fields,

  “Lost Horizon” (1988)

  An alert race cannot develop in a forest—a forested country can never be the center of radiation for [pro-dawn] man. Nor can the higher type of man develop in a lowland river-bottom country with plentiful food and luxuriant vegetation. It is on the plateau and relatively level uplands that life is most exciting and response to stimulus most beneficial.

  —Henry Fairfield Osborn,

  “The Plateau Habitat of Pro-Dawn Man” (1928)

  The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see.

  —N. Scott Momaday,

  The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)

  Kansas is not a community of which it can be said, “happy is the people without annals.”

  —Carl Becker,

  “Kansas” (1910)

  In all the world there is no more peaceful, prosperous scene than in the “bottomlands” of the thousands and thousands of Kansas creeks. . . . Here are the still waters, here are the green pastures. Here, the fairest of the world’s habitations.

  —William Allen White,

  Emporia Gazette (1925)

  I’ve wondered sometimes if geography might not have been among the chief determinants of our Kansas mind.

  —Kenneth S. Davis,

  “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”

  (1954)

  There are few regions in the United States that are more important and less known than this bluestem-pasture region of Kansas.

  —James C. Malin,

  “An Introduction to the History of

  the Bluestem-Pasture Region of Kansas” (1942)

  There is no need to personify a river: it is much too lit
erally alive in its own way, and like air and earth themselves is a creature more powerful, more basic, than any living thing the earth has borne. It is one of those few, huge, casual and aloof creatures by the mercy of whose existence our own existence was made possible.

  —James Agee,

  Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939)

  Kansas brags on its thunder and lightning, and the boast is well founded.

  —Horace Greeley,

  An Overland Journey (1859)

  No Kansan likes to do anything easy.

  —Paul Wellman,

  The Bowl of Brass (1944)

  We who live in Kansas know well that its climate is superior to any other in the world, and that it enables one, more readily than any other, to dispense with the use of ale.

  —Carl Becker,

  “Kansas” (1910)

  With the exception of the high character of its people, the greatest asset of Kansas is its climate. Yet, there seems to have been an unfortunate tendency from the first settlement to exaggerate spectacular and unfavorable features.

  —S. D. Flora,

  “The Climate of Kansas” (1918)

  [Kansas is] a state like nothing so much as some scriptural kingdom—a land of floods, droughts, cyclones, and enormous crops, of prophets and plagues.

  —Julian Street,

  Abroad at Home (1926)

  The special quality of fine prairie weather isn’t necessarily one of intrinsic merit, but of contrast with what has gone just before.

  —John Madson,

  Where the Sky Began (1982)

  The Tibetans . . . revere the wind and sky. Blue and white are the celestial colors of the B’on sky god, who is seen as an embodiment of space and light, and creatures of the upper air become B’on symbols— the griffon, the mythical garuda, and the dragon. For Buddhist Tibetans, prayer flags and windbells confide spiritual longings to the winds.

  —Peter Matthiessen,

  The Snow Leopard (1978)

  Wind is a plant’s only chance to make music.

  Cook Islanders had names for thirty-two different winds.

  The Jews, Arabs, Romans, Greeks, and Aztecs all took their word for spirit from the word for wind.

  In the 1880’s, an American at Point Barrow, Alaska, watched Eskimo women chase the wind from their houses with clubs and knives, while the men waited around a fire that had been built to draw the wind. When the men decided the wind had come to the fire, they shot it with rifles and poured a cauldron of water on the fire. As the dying wind tried to rise in steam from the smouldering embers, they crushed it with a heavy stone.

  Of all the phenomena of nature, wind is probably the least understood and the least controlled.

  —Peter Steinhart,

  “Tracks of the Wind” (1988)

  A single, severe thunderstorm supercell can hold more energy than a hydrogen bomb.

  —John G. Fuller,

  Tornado Watch #211 (1987)

  A few very fortunate people have gone aloft in tornadoes and survived. During [a] tornado in Wichita Falls, a man was blown out of his exploding house. Like Dorothy, he glimpsed others in the funnel. A house trailer rotated near him, and in the window he could see the terrified face of one of his neighbors. (She did not survive.) Flying ahead of him was a mattress. If I could reach that, he thought, I’d just go to sleep. He then lost consciousness and woke on the ground, wrapped in barbed wire. Flying splinters had made a pincushion of his body.

  —William Hauptman,

  “On the Dryline” (1984)

  From what angle does the mysterious ordainer see causes and effects? Is there any sense in the elements, those intermediaries between him and us?

  —Victor Hugo,

  The Toilers of the Sea (1866)

  “Things have a life of their own,” the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. “It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.”

  —Gabriel García Marquez,

  One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

  Each hamlet or village or town should be a place, its own place. This is not a matter of fake historicism or artsy-craftsy architecture. It is a matter of respect for things existing, subtle patterns of place woven from vistas and street widths and the siting and color and scale of stores, houses, and trees. . . . If the countryside is to prosper, it must be different from city or suburb. . . . That difference is in part the simple business of containing our towns and giving them boundaries.

  —Robert B. Riley,

  “New Mexico Villages in a

  Future Landscape” (1969)

  Gain! Gain! Gain! Gain! Gain! is the beginning, the middle and the end, the alpha and omega of the founders of American towns.

  —Morris Birkbeck,

  Notes on a Journey in America (1818)

  We always need theres, spots which happily aren’t like ours, to validate heres. Mostly theres are inert supports, silent witnesses to the quality of here.

  —Robert B. Heilman,

  “We’re Here” (1987)

  Chase County has 2,839 people. There is one blind person, one insane person, and 745 voters.

  —News item,

  Chase County News (1873)

  Maybe you never heard of Cottonwood Falls, but the philosopher who said that the whole universe was reflected in a drop of dew may have had that particular town in mind.

  —King Features news item,

  “Here’s America’s Progress at a Glance” (1936)

  In the Quadrangle:

  Saffordville

  In 1952, when I first crossed Chase County, I was twelve years old and riding in the front seat as navigator while my father drove our Pontiac Chieftain with its splendid hood ornament, an Indian’s head whose chromium nose we followed for half a decade over much of America. In the last weeks, I’ve probed my memory to find even one detail of that initial passage into the western prairies. What did I see, feel? Nothing now except our route returns. My guess is that I found the grasslands little more than miles to be got over—after all, that’s the way Americans crossed Kansas. Still do.

  In 1965, when I came out of the navy, I drove across the prairie again on a visit to California, and the grasslands looked different to me, so alive and varied, and now I believe that two years of watching the Atlantic Ocean changed the way I viewed landscape, especially levelish, rolling things. I also began to see the prairies as native ground, the land my hometown sat just out of sight of, and I began to like them not because they demand your attention like mountains and coasts but because they almost defy absorbed attention. At first, to be here, to be here now, was hard for me to do on the prairie. I liked the clarity of line in a place that seemed to require me to bring something to it and to open to it actively: see far, see little. I learned a prairie secret: take the numbing distance in small doses and gorge on the little details that beckon. Like its moisture, the prairie doesn’t give up anything easily, unless it’s horizon and sky. Search out its variation, its colors, its subtleties. It’s not that I had to learn to think flat—the prairies rarely are—but I had to begin thinking open and lean, seeing without set points of obvious focus, noticing first the horizon and then drawing my vision back toward middle distance where so little appears to exist. I came to understand that the prairies are nothing but grass as the sea is nothing but water, that most praine life is within the place: under the stems, below the turf, beneath the stones. The prairie is not a topography that shows its all but rather a vastly exposed place of concealment, like the geodes so abundant in the county, where the splendid lies within the plain cover. At last I realized I was not a man of the sea or coasts or mountains but a fellow of the grasslands. Once I understood that, I began to find all sorts of reasons why, and here comes one:

  I am driving west of Emporia, Kansas, on highway 50 where it takes up the course of the two-mile-wide and shallow valley of the east-running Cottonwood River, and I’ve just entered the prairie hills through a trough of a wooded bottom on this route that runs some way i
nto the uplands before it rises out of the floodplain to reveal the open spread of grasses. The change is sudden, stark, surprising. If I kept heading west, I would ride among the grasses—tall, middle, short—until I crossed the prairie and the plains (the words are not synonyms) and climbed into the foothills of the Rockies. By following route 50 into Chase County, up out of the shadowed woodlands, out of the soybean and sorghum bottoms and into the miles of something too big, too wild to be called a meadow, I am recapitulating human history, retracing in an hour the sixty-five-million-year course of our evolution from some small, bottom-dwelling mammal that began to crawl trees and evolve and then climb down and move into the East African savannahs. It was tall grass that made man stand up: to be on all fours, to crouch in a six-foot-high world of thick cellulose, is to be blind and vulnerable. People may prefer the obvious beauty of mountains and seacoasts, but we are bipedal because of savannah; we are human because of tallgrass. When I walk the prairie, I like to take along the notion that, while something primal in me may long for the haven of the forest, its apprenticeship in the trees, it also recognizes this grand openness as the kind of place where it became itself.