PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  I thought, stop and fix this image, and as I started to sit I saw at my feet the figure eight in stone: parallel to the ridge, tangent circles looking like the sign for infinity drawn in flint. Wasn’t it clear that two people had sat here and watched the spread valley when it was a grassland of hoofed and homed beasts, all the while knapping out their razored points to let that ruminant blood? The only chert nearby was this figure of gray, curved flakes the size of thumbnails. The old sea had not left these stones.

  Under the southwest wind, I sat down inside the loop and merge of lines of no start or end, and I lost sense of the late afternoon, and my mind seemed to fall into the circles and away. I think I dozed, because the next thing I remember was the dusk sunk into an oppressive sky, and the gone-too-far alarm coming on again. Then I was up and trying to keep along the dark ridge and walk a straight course. A few days earlier I’d heard about a man miles from his ranch in this very area who’d fallen from his horse and lain with a broken pelvis through the night; he tried to keep from passing out so when the pickup trucks came looking they wouldn’t run over him.

  The prairie was a wet burden, and I kept feeling as if I were down, below, under, and the grasses dragged: a sea-bottom walker through beds of kelp. I began stumbling, and I thought, hike a figure eight and the cowboys will find you next spring. Then, as if I were not walking in my sleep but sleeping on my walk: in some light-less, soundless dreamplace, obscure forms seemed to pass by in pale luminescence, opalescent figures everywhere. My lower body sogged in the cold dew, the upper half in hot sweat. Then something rose from nowhere and snagged me and pulled me down: I’d come to a fence, a road, and, farther, the car. I was woozy that night and thrashed through the distortions of fevered and vertiginous sleep.

  That’s my memory of the figure eight, but now I understand it in a different dimension; another energy transfer happened, one I hadn’t realized: I’d come into the prairie out of some dim urge to encounter the alien—it’s easier to comprehend where someplace else is than where you are—and I had begun to encounter it as I moved among the quoins, ledgers, pickled brains, winds, creek meanders, gravestones, stone-age circles. I was coming to see that facts carry a traveler only so far: at last he must penetrate the land by a different means, for to know a place in any real and lasting way is sooner or later to dream it. That’s how we come to belong to it in the deepest sense.

  Of Recharging the System

  The superstitious might conclude that the fellow used up his luck in surviving the war, although he’d been shot at only once, the time he got curious about a volcano crater north of Saipan and nosed his C-46 transport down into the cone for a good look. A Japanese soldier put a 9.5 millimeter bullet into a hydraulic line, and Larry Wagner suddenly had to horse the heavy plane up over the crater rim and turn it back toward the base, but the flying was more difficult than dangerous, and, in the end, there was no flaming crash, just a pretty good story, the kind every wartime pilot earns. After the war he went home to Kansas City, Kansas, got a job in a bank trust department, married Martha Cable, and they had a daughter and son. He was blond, lean, vigorous, and respected for his honesty and friendliness.

  One afternoon in 1953 he went to the doctor, after feeling punk for a few days, and at the back of his mind lay a dark coil of foreboding, an anxiety everyone knew then, and he asked the physician, Is it polio? The doctor wasn’t sure and gave him some pills, primitive antibiotics, and Larry Wagner drove home and told Martha to take the children to his mother’s, and he went to bed. At about five that afternoon he got up to go to the bathroom, and he just fell over. His legs wouldn’t work. His mother helped him up. Three hours earlier he’d walked four blocks, and now, abruptly, he’d just taken his last steps ever. He was thirty years old. At one in the morning he found himself not breathing worth a damn, and his mother called an ambulance to take him to the hospital where he went into an iron lung, and the next day he heard the diagnosis: bulbar poliomyelitis, a disease more common among children.

  Six months later, when he left the iron lung, he had only a most limited use of his right hand, and his arms and legs had become mere danglings as if made of cloth like Raggedy Andy’s, and he required a respirator to breathe. He would say later, I’m one of the lucky ones—I can cough. I can keep the lungs clear. He has since learned to use muscles not normally employed for breathing so that he can get by on his own unless he needs to say more than a couple of sentences, and then someone must place in his mouth a respirator hose to fill his lungs so he can expel his words: his sentences begin strong and fade with the air supply. Larry is well read and articulate and doesn’t speak in brevities to accommodate himself. When he talks, he holds the plastic tube between his teeth, clenching it coolly and waiting for the respirator to catch up with his urge to finish the thought. This man of quiet reasonableness, who can raise only a couple of fingers, has been one of the prime movers to establish a Tallgrass Prairie National Park in Kansas.

  He was sixty years old when I met him, a practicing attorney specializing in documentary law, the drafting of complex trusts and realty transactions. He said to me then: It’s one of the things I can do without humiliation, especially when I have a secretary who can just as well wash my hands as take dictation. Unlike some wives who marry hale men and then suddenly find themselves with a quadriplegic, Martha has stood by him, and their children are grown now and at last can see the remarkable in their father, who, says Martha, by all rights should be dead. In Chase County, a few people have wished he were.

  Some time ago: I am in the back seat of the Chevrolet Suburban, and next to me is Blaine Shea, a Kansan from New York who fell in love with the Flint Hills during a thunderstorm on her way home from a football game in the sixties. That rain may ultimately prove to be one of the important cloudbursts in Kansas history, so significant is her contribution to prairie preservation. Larry sits in the front, the respirator behind, his head gently strapped to the seat back, and his father, Ray, is bounding us over a section of pasture near the Verdigris River. Ray is eighty-five, looks sixty-five, drives as if he just got his license. Behind me is an ice chest full of fried chicken, potato salad, sliced tomatoes, and chocolate cake—our K (as in Kansas) rations. I’d like to get into them now, but Elaine says, No way. Next to the ice chest, collapsed neatly like a card table, is an electric rocking-bed that Larry will use in the motel tonight; thirty-six times every minute it will tilt him like a teeter-totter to approximate the action of his lungs. Without it, when he fell asleep, he would suffocate, since he must breathe consciously.

  Larry has just told me that he reads by balancing a book on his right knee so that his right fingers can turn the pages. Elaine says, Sometimes he sits outside, and I put his chair across the breeze to turn the pages. Appropriate for a Kansan, I say, and she nods, and I ask, how about a piece of fried chicken in this nice prairie breeze, and she says, Cool it.

  Larry is showing the land he hopes will one day become the first national park in Kansas, the first federal one given to tallgrass prairie, that essence of America, that landform still unrepresented in the park system. The formal proposal has again died in Washington, killed off by Kansans, and prospects look poor as ever since the idea first appeared in the twenties and resurfaced every decade. Larry explains things, clamping the air hose jauntily between his teeth the way Franklin Roosevelt used to clench his cigarette holder, and he waits for the machine to catch up; Elaine fills the gaps with information about STP, Save the Tallgrass Prairie, a group begun in 1973. The National Park Service originally proposed eighty sites, then trimmed those to three, all in the Flint Hills, the last long-grass acreage of any size remaining in the country. Once there were four hundred thousand square miles of tall prairie (about the area of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas combined) over the middle of America; but, of that, plows, cows, and towns have left only three percent or less, much in fragments along right-of-ways and in neglected cemeteries, all pieces too small to convey the essence of prairie: horizon-to-
horizon grasses and blossoms interrupted only by the rise and fall of the land itself. A hundred grazed acres do not constitute a prairie any more than a hundred pruned trees comprise a forest, and, in spite of what Emily Dickinson wrote about a single bee making a prairie, its essence of immensity does not lend itself to microcosm. STP worked hard to keep the proposal from dying in the bureaucracy.

  Of the three final sites selected, one lies mostly in Oklahoma at the tail end of the Flint Hills, another in the northern Hills, and the third is right here under our bouncing seats, under the fried chicken I’ve been unable to work back into the conversation. This site, which includes all of Chase County south of the turnpike and smaller portions of three adjoining counties, has the highest priority because of its splendid escarpment, negligible population, varied soils, and three watersheds rising within the site that would lessen outside pollution. The recommended acreage of the park has varied over the years, although a tract ten by ten miles is the smallest that would allow a rich restoration of a native prairie in its diversity, from water bears to bison; that much is necessary to control visual contamination in a place where you can see twenty miles sitting down. Other tallgrass preserves around the Middle West are “pocket” prairies, an oxymoron if you ask me: grand scale is necessary to know what red hunters and white pioneers must have felt as they, like bits of flotsam, moved across the marine-like swells of grass.

  A few people believe the conservation effort here is pointless, since the interstate has already hacked into the eastern slope that’s also crossed by two sets of high transmission lines, six pipelines, and several microwave towers, but other parts of the Flint Hills have been hit even harder by reservoirs, a power plant, military installations. The Chase site is the best of what remains. Anyone who thinks, as some here do, that the changes technology and an increasing population make on the land have ceased in this corner has not been paying attention to the twentieth century. I read about things like aerial fertilizing of pastures, a process that would alter the balance of native species, and I ask myself, what threats are coming that I haven’t even imagined yet? Today, a casual traveler through the county must look hard to find grass he can truly describe as tall.

  Every major conservation group in America has backed the park proposal, but this support has been stymied by a group of cattle raisers called KGA, Kansas Grassroots Association, which urged the state legislature to pass a resolution calling for Congress to ignore the idea. Some members of the association quickly turned the issue into an emotional uproar with fright tactics, and, where logic failed, they substituted vituperation. The poisonous assertions were effective, because they rarely got into the news or formal discussions and could work unchallenged on the street: You’re gonna see your cemeteries moved. Your daughters won’t be safe. In the thirties, when Chase countians wanted a fishing lake, they applied successfully to the Works Projects Administration, but after they learned that some of the men building the lake would be blacks, the citizens dropped the idea for twenty years. Not everyone responded to the park proposal on those terms, of course; one Cottonwood man who didn’t said to me, If you want to kill off something here, all you do is throw in the word colored. There was other ugliness: Larry Wagner received abusive and threatening phone calls, and the wife of one prominent countian, at a town hall meeting, grabbed a map from an elderly professor explaining the issues and shredded it.

  The formal arguments of the KGA were these: people would be driven off their land, acreage would be dropped from the tax rolls, beef production would decline, honky-tonk development (Six Flags over the West Forty) would trash the place, a federal bureaucracy would be an incompetent steward. But the strongest ally was the old hostility toward government born out of a fear of diminished individual rights which pervades the West. After the words communists and coloreds, the most potent is feds.

  The KGA held that ranchers had maintained the pastures for a century and more, and it saw the park proposal as a threat to a way of life central to American history. Proponents answered the KGA objections by tailoring the plan so that no family would have to move or lose its right to pass on its land, and transient grazing (less destructive and more in keeping with history than the recent year-round cow-calf operations) could continue in areas of the park; federal entitlements from off-shore oil drilling and the money the park itself generated would more than compensate for property tax losses. Proponents pointed out that the land taken out of beef production would amount to less than one third of one percent of Kansas pasturage and that any disfiguring peripheral development could be controlled through zoning, covenants, and scenic easements. They said to judge the government as an incompetent steward depends on whether you look at the Park Service or the Forest Service—the record of the former is as good as the other’s is poor.

  The fear of federal tyranny should never have been much of an issue, since just three Chase families lived on land they owned within the tract, and the single change for them would occur only if they decided to sell their acreage—then the Park Service would have right of first refusal. But some people who merely leased pasture might have to find other grass. A peculiar aspect of the debate was that most of the opposition leaders had no connection with the site itself, and others were not even Chase countians, yet they were able to intimidate any resident who disagreed with them through that unspoken and universal tyranny of village life: You gotta live with us. At the height of the debate, a Wichita reporter talked to merchants in Cottonwood Falls and claimed he found several favoring the park, but he could not get even one to speak up. Some people around Kansas came to believe that self-serving nonresidents were manipulating Chase County out of a rare and nonpolluting opportunity to broaden its economy and share more of American prosperity, while others lamented losing a chance to put the lie to the nightmare Kansas of In Cold Blood, The Wizard of Oz, Pike’s “desert,” drought, and grasshopper infestations. Here was an opportunity to show the beauty of the native land and to ease that Kansan defensiveness deriving from outsiders’ ignorance of the place.

  The association argued that prairie should be preserved privately, and park proponents held that individually owned plots were dangerously subject to intrusion, that private protection could succeed only temporarily. The KGA suggested a prairie parkway of linked highways and scenic overlooks, and, in fact, such a system came about until the issue seemed dead, and then the county highway department pulled down all the route markers but for the one in front of the courthouse. The association claimed that ranchers, out of self-interest, would always maintain the health of pastureland (their record so far is mediocre), and proponents said what needed preserving was not grazed fields but an entire ecosystem: of the sixty-some native grasses here, cattle raisers are interested in five; to them, the hundreds of other plants, those diverse and necessary ornaments of the prairie, fall almost entirely into the category of “weeds.” A pasture is as far from a balanced native prairie as is an overgrown Cottonwood Falls back lot.

  Now: at last the fried chicken is out, and Elaine says, We agree with KGA in wanting to preserve a century-old way of life, but we also want to preserve one that’s twenty million years old, but we’ve failed by barging in here as “experts,” tramping around and mapping people’s land, and not making them part of things right at the beginning. Although we had broad support, the perception of us here was as city people from Johnson County, the place known across the state as the home of spoiled brats of all ages. We lost control of the terms of the discussion early, and with them eventually went the tallgrass park. The sad thing, when the issue began to die here and the effort shifted to the Oklahoma site, Chase countians began calling us, hoping STP would buy their land.

  And Larry says, It’s a loss for America, for Kansas, and for almost everyone in Chase, and, as his air dwindles, he says, without wait ing for the machine to catch up, I like them very much. Good people.

  How things stand now: some Kansans, who believe that both ranching and complete ecosy
stems must be preserved, are trying to work through education and conservation easements to show people how all lives here sooner or later depend upon natural diversity. They are trying to point out how the worst tyranny will come not from a federal park but from an impoverished people and a depleted land.

  Larry Wagner spends more time now overseeing his farm southwest of Kansas City that he and his father bought in 1963, a place with a few acres of virgin ground, a buffalo wallow, and restored grasses and plants. The last time I was with him, after he told me he would soon convey, with the financial help of others, the farm to the Kansas park system, he said, As a thick cover of natural vegetation began coming back in the late sixties, it pulled more precipitation into the aquifer, and two springs, dry for years, started flowing again. All we did was to help the system recharge itself.

  Down in the Hollow

  Texaco Hill humps up at my back, looms up dry in the heat. I’m on my way down into a northerly inclined hollow, and I’ve just stooped to a snow-on-the-mountain, its white-margined blossoms not yet open, to test the milky sap once used (so I’ve heard) to brand cattle, and I’ve dribbled out a small circle on the back of my hand, and I’m waiting for the flesh to liquefy or whatever it will start to do before I wipe it off. I’ve been crouched so long, watching, that a harrier seems to have taken me for a rock, because it just slipped the ridge wind and beat to a hover close enough I can see its hot eye of golden ice. Collapsing its wings like a parasol, it drops hard into the bluestem, thrashes, then labors up out of the hollow to catch the wind, and hooked into its nerveless, ebony talons is a small, curled, limptailed something, and in the grass lies a fluff of bloodied fur. The Mysterium has opened for just a moment, and I’ve glimpsed inside, and it’s deflected me from my search for the headwaters of the Verdigris River.