PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Dean and I came here in 1947, and we saw floods about every year, but the water never got out of the yard until ’51. It came up early on Wednesday morning, and it rolled across those west bean fields like a wall, it seems. We didn’t have much time before it started up the porch steps and under the front door and then through the windows. They’re low like old windows are. This is the highest house here: built in 1913 for seven thousand dollars and paid for with one crop of alfalfa seed. My husband was head wire- chief in Emporia, in telegraph communications for the Santa Fe, and whenever it looked like high water, he’d take out for town so he wouldn’t get cut off. That Wednesday he got the horse to higher ground and went on to work. I was here with my daughter and son, both still in school. First we crated up the chickens and took them up to the sun porch on the second floor, and that was our mistake: it took too much time to run down three dozen fryers. We got the dining table up on boxes and the piano up on something—got it up a foot or so—we thought that was enough, and she smiles at her naiveté and says, They tell that the Indians believed a big flood would come every hundred years, but our people who build on high ground have their wells go dry in the summer: we located down in here to have water. My well’s been polluted by floods, but it’s never gone dry.

  There’s a story of the woman who in the drought of 1929 prayed hard for rain, even asking that the river overflow and water their dying corn, and it began raining, and the Cottonwood rose and washed out their whole crop, and I ask, did you pray? and she says, I suppose we did. My son got scared when the water started rising in the house, but he got over it. The first floor is four feet above the yard: I measured the water in this kitchen, and it came to the top of the table, thirty-three inches. We took canned goods upstairs: I remember a lot of hominy and mackerel. Haven’t eaten hominy since.

  Edith sets preserves and a glass of cold water on the table, and she says, When the river’s coming on, I always fill the bathtub so we can wash up and flush the toilet. Somebody will bring us drinking water. In ’51, a boat was at the house by noon to pick us up, but when the water’s six feet deep with a current like we get here, I don’t go outside. She says that as if speaking of spring showers. That boat wasn’t big enough. I can’t swim. Besides, I had no reason to get out. I like to stay and take care of things. I guess I’m an old river rat.

  She slows as she recalls the details, and she says, We stayed and watched the river rise: the chicken coop washed away, and that was it for us raising chickens. The soybean crop went, but the wheat we’d already harvested. Then, the second day my son got restless, and he went up on the roof with the dog and his twenty-two and shot at trash floating by. An airplane flew over and saw him and passed word that the McGregors were signaling for help. I wasn’t scared, really wasn’t. My husband couldn’t get away from all the stopped trains in Emporia: every stranded passenger wanted to send a message. He didn’t come home until Monday. But every night he drove up to the south bluff to see if the oil lamp was burning in the window—that was our signal that we were all right. On Friday I started stirring the water with a broom so the mud would go out with it. I went round and round the rooms, and finally, when the water was out of the house, I went to the porch time and again and brought in buckets of water to throw on the floors. You don’t wait until you need a shovel. These pine floors held up, but all the veneer furniture and the doors and the piano just fell apart.

  She’s watching to see whether I find all this eccentric, and she says, I walked out of the house Sunday, but my son put a bundle of clean clothes over his head and waded out Saturday evening—went to town for a good meal. When I came out, first thing I did was get a drink of cold water and a big slice of fruit pie someone brought—peach it was. Then strangers started coming out to stare and pick through our fields and houses. They carried off more than the river did. For the first time she shows irritation.

  She says, I remember that before the water started rising, animals did strange things. Groundhogs, skunks, snakes all moving: they weren’t waiting for the water. A mother skunk got trapped in the barn with her two little ones, and my son lifted the babies up on a feed box, and then the mother climbed up but never raised her tail. She seemed to understand. A neighbor, the French war bride, stopped her pickup on the highway and opened the door to see if a big old hog was all right. He climbed up in the seat and sat down beside her, she said, “just like he knowed me.”

  Now Edith is looking out the window where she could once count eight houses along Hunt Street. She says this seriously: If people don’t know any better than to live down here, they’ll have to suffer the consequences, but I never knew anyone to die in our floods.

  III

  In the early summer of 1951, Frances Staedtler’s husband’s parents jacked up their big house, added three feet to the foundation, and set the house back down on it. Six days later the Cottonwood was at the door, and then in the kitchen, the living room, and the family went upstairs. Frances spoke to me for a while about the floods, her story paralleling the others’, and, when she began talking about her mother-in-law taking the ironing board to the second floor in case she needed a raft, Frances had to stop, and she struggled to say, I’m afraid I can’t go on. It’s too much remembering how we all were in those days, when we were strong enough to fight it. We were together.

  These people of Saffordville, the whole population, all five of them, as they talk their way back into the big floods, grow animated, and sorrows and smiles come and go so quickly about their faces that I almost don’t see them, and their eyes are widened and keen. They are not boastful, but they relish, not having beaten the river, but having held their own with it and not yielding to it other than by climbing a flight of stairs, and the whole time they realize the battle is a little foolish—just the way they want it. They recognize but do not say how the river whets a fine edge on their lives, and I never heard any of them speak love for the river, or hate. These are not people locked in the floodplain by poverty; they are held here by recollections of what the river has given them: hours of a family bound tightly like shocks of wheat, of moments when all their senses were almost one with the land, of times when they earned the right to be tenants on the first terrace of the Cottonwood River. One afternoon, Edith McGregor said to me: Not everybody gets the chance to live like this.

  Under Old Nell’s Skirt

  I know a man, a Maya in the Yucatán, who can call up wind: he whistles a clear, haunting, thirteen-note melody set in the Native American pentatonic scale. He whistles, the wind moves, and for some moments the heat of the tropical forest eases. It’s a talent there to appreciate. But does he summon the wind, or does he know just the right time to whistle before the wind moves? He says, in effect, that he is on speaking terms with the wind, and by that he means it is a phenomenon, yes, but also a presence, and it has a name, Ik, and it is Ik that brings the seasonal rain to Yucatán. You may call such a notion pantheism or primitivism or mere personification: he wouldn’t care, because for him, for the Maya, for all of tribal America, the wind, the life bringer, is something to heed, to esteem: Ik.

  In Kansas I’ve not heard any names for the nearly constant winds, the oldest of things here. When the Kansa Indians were pushed out of the state, they carried with them the last perception of wind as anything other than a faceless force, usually for destruction, the power behind terrible prairie wildfires, the clout in blizzards and droughts, and, most of all, in tornadoes that will take up everything, even fenceposts. But people here know wind well, they often speak of it, yet, despite the several names in other places for local American winds, in this state, whose very name may mean “wind-people,” it has no identity but a direction, no epithet but a curse. A local preacher told me: Giving names to nature is un-christian. I said that it might help people connect with things and who knows where that might lead, and he said, To idolatry. Yet the fact remains: these countians are more activated by weather than religion.

  Almost everything I see in this plac
e sooner or later brings me back to the grasses; after all, this is the prairie, a topography that so surprised Anglo culture when it began arriving that it found for this grand-beyond no suitable word in its immense vocabulary, and it resorted to the French of illiterate trappers: prairie. Except in accounts of novice travelers, these grasslands have never been meadows, heaths, moors, downs, wolds. A woman in Boston once said to me, Prairie is such a lovely word—and for so grim a place.

  More than all other things here, the grasses are the offspring of the wind, the power that helps evaporation equal precipitation to the detriment of trees, the power that breaks off leaves and branches, shakes crowns and rigid trunks to tear roots and disrupt transpiration, respiration, nutrient assimilation. But grasses before the wind bend and straighten and bend and keep their vital parts underground, and, come into season, they release their germ, spikelets, and seeds to the wind, the invisible sea that in this place must carry the code, the directions from the unfaced god, carry the imprint of rootlet and rhizome, blade and sheath, culm and rachis: the wind, the penisless god going and coming everywhere, the intercourse of the grasses, the sprayer of seed across the opened sex risen and waiting for the pattern set loose on the winds today of no name; and so the grasses pull the energy from the wind, the offspring of sunlight, to transmute soil into more grasses that ungulates eat into flesh that men turn into pot roasts and woolen socks.

  Now: I am walking a ridge in the southern end of Saffordville quadrangle, and below me in the creek bottom are oaks of several kinds, cottonwood, hackberry, walnut, hickory, sycamore. Slippery elms, once providing a throat emulcent, try to climb the hills by finding rock crevices to shield their seed, and, if one sprouts, it will grow straight for a time, only to lose its inborn shape to the prevailing southerlies so that the windward sides of elms seem eaten off but the lee sides spread north like tresses unloosed in March. If a seedling succeeds on a ridge top, it will spread low as if to squat under the shears of windrush, and everywhere the elm trunks lean to the polestar and make the county appear as if its southern end had been lifted and tilted before the land could dry and set. A windmill must stand straight and turn into the wind to harvest water, but the slippery elm turns away to keep the wind from its wet pulp.

  And there is another face to this thing from which life proceeds. Yesterday I walked down a ridge to get out of the November wind while I ate a sandwich, and I came upon a house foundation on a slope bereft of anything but grasses and knee-high plants. It was absolutely exposed, an oddity here, since most of the homes sit in the shelter of wooded vales. This one faced east—or it would have, had it still been there—and the only relief from the prevailing winds that the builder had sought was to set the back of the house to them. There was the foundation, some broken boards, a few rusting things, and, thirty feet away, a storm cellar, its door torn off, and that was all except for a rock road of two ruts. The cave, as people here call tornado cellars, was of rough-cut native stone with an arched roof, wooden shelves, and a packed-earth floor with Mason jar fragments glinting blue in the sunlight; one had been so broken that twin pieces at my feet said:

  The shards seemed to be lost voices locked in silica and calling still.

  These cellars once kept cool home-canned food (and rat snakes), and, when a tornado struck like a fang from some cloud-beast, they kept families that mocked their own timorousness by calling them ’fraidy holes, and it did take nerve to go into the dim recesses with their spidered comers and dark, reptilian coils. I stepped down inside and sat on a stone fallen from the wall and ate safely in the doorway, but, even with the sun shafts, there was something dismal and haunted in the shadowed dust of dry rot here and dank of wet rot there. Things lay silent inside, the air quite stilled, and I felt something, I don’t know what: something waiting.

  Was there a connection between this cave and that house absent but for its foundation? The site, sloping southwest, seemed placed to catch a cyclone in a county in the heart of the notorious Tornado Alley of the Middle West, a belt that can average 250 tornadoes a year, more than anywhere else in the world. A hundred and sixty miles from here, Codell, Kansas, got thumped by a tornado every twentieth of May for three successive years, and five months ago a twister “touched down,” mashed down really, a mile north of Saffordville at the small conglomeration of houses and trailers called Toledo, and the newspaper caption for a photograph of that crook’d finger of a funnel cloud was HOLY TOLEDO! Years earlier a cyclone wrecked a Friends meetinghouse there, but this time it skipped over the Methodists’ church and went for their houses. In Chase County I’ve found a nonchalance about natural forces born of fatalism: If it’s gonna get me, it’ll get me. In Cottonwood Falls, on a block where a house once sat, the old cave remains, collapsing, yet around it are six house trailers. Riding out a tornado in a mobile home is like stepping into combine blades: trailers can become airborne chambers full of flying knives of aluminum and glass. No: if there is a dread in the county, it is not of dark skies but of the opposite, of clear skies, days and days of clear skies, of a drought nobody escapes, not even the shopkeepers. That any one person will suffer losses from a tornado, however deadly, goes much against the odds, and many residents reach high school before they first see a twister; yet, nobody who lives his full span in the county dies without a tornado story.

  Tornado: a Spanish past participle meaning turned, from a verb meaning to turn, alter, transform, repeat, and to restore. Meteorologists speak of the reasons why the Midlands of the United States suffer so many tornadoes: a range of high mountains west of a great expanse of sun-heated plains at a much lower altitude, where dry and cold northern air can meet warm and moist southern air from a large body of water to combine with a circulation pattern mixing things up: that is to say, the jet stream from Arctic Canada crosses the Rockies to meet a front from the Gulf of Mexico over the Great Plains in the center of which sits Kansas, where, since 1950, people have sighted seventeen hundred tornadoes. It is a place of such potential celestial violence that the meteorologists at the National Severe Storms Forecast Center in Kansas City, Missouri, are sometimes called the Keepers of the Gates of Hell. Countians who have smelled the fulminous, cyclonic sky up close, who have felt the ground shake and heard the earth itself roar and have taken to a storm cellar that soon filled with a loathsome greenish air, find the image apt. The Keepers of the Gates of Hell have, in recent years, become adept at forecasting tornadoes, and they might even be able to suggest cures for them if only they could study them up close. Years ago a fellow proposed sending scientists into the eye of a tornado in an army tank until he considered the problem of transporting the machine to a funnel that usually lasts only minutes, and someone else suggested flying into a cyclone, whereupon a weather-research pilot said, yes, it was feasible if the aviator would first practice by flying into mountains.

  Climatologists speak of thunderstorms pregnant with tornadoes, storm-breeding clouds more than twice the height of Mount Everest; they speak of funicular envelopes and anvil clouds with pendant mammati and of thermal instability of winds in cyclonic vorticity, of rotatory columns of air torquing at velocities up to three hundred miles an hour (although no anemometer in the direct path of a storm has survived), funnels that can move over the ground at the speed of a strolling man or at the rate of a barrel-assing semi on the turnpike; they say the width of the destruction can be the distance between home plate and deep center field and its length the hundred miles between New York City and Philadelphia. A tornado, although more violent than a much longer lasting hurricane, has a life measured in minutes, and weathercasters watch it snuff out as it was born: unnamed.

  I know here a grandfather, a man as bald as if a cyclonic wind had taken his scalp—something witnesses claim has happened elsewhere—who calls twisters Old Nell, and he threatens to set crying children outside the back door for her to carry off. People who have seen Old Nell close, up under her skirt, talk about her colors: pastel-pink, black, blue, gray, and a survivor
said this: All at once a big hole opened in the sky with a mass of cherry-red, a yellow tinge in the center, and another said: a funnel with beautiful electric-blue light, and a third person: It was glowing like it was illuminated from the inside. The witnesses speak of shapes: a formless black mass, a cone, cylinder, tube, ribbon, pendant, thrashing hose, dangling lariat, writhing snake, elephant trunk. They tell of ponds being vacuumed dry, eyes of geese sucked out, chickens clean-plucked from beak to bum, water pulled straight up out of toilet bowls, a woman’s clothes torn off her, a wife killed after being jerked through a car window, a child carried two miles and set down with only scratches, a Cottonwood Falls mother (fearful of wind) cured of chronic headaches when a twister passed harmlessly within a few feet of her house, and, just south of Chase, a woman blown out of her living room window and dropped unhurt sixty feet away and falling unbroken beside her a phonograph record of “Stormy Weather.”

  London Harness, an eighty-five-year-old man who lives just six miles north of the county line, told me: I knew a family years ago that was crossing open country here in a horse and wagon. A bad storm come on fast, and the man run to a dug well and said, “I’m going down in here—you do the best you can!” The wife hollered and screamed and run to a ditch and laid down with their two little kids. That funnel dropped right in on them. After the storm passed over, she and the kids went to the well to say, “Come on up, Pappy,” but there weren’t no water down there, and he weren’t down there. If you’re in that path, no need of running.