PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  The Cottonwood, by seeming to turn itself into sloughs and oxbow ponds, masks its usual slow but strong persistence eastward: only one other river in the two-hundred-mile length of the Flint Hills in Kansas has managed to cut through them. And, almost certainly, every few years the Cottonwood rises to thrust itself violently into the laid-down hills as if aroused to ravish them. But then it falls back, detumesces, metamorphoses itself into a gentler, more feminine thing: supine, languid, fecund. As Yang it cuts a face into the hills, and as Yin it suffuses that visage with life.

  Throughout the quadrangle, and in the north especially, gas wells were drilled about the turn of the century, with more coming in the forties and eighties; before the First World War, Elmdale was surely the smallest hamlet in the country to have gas lamps along its eight streets. The second of its two newspapers, a thing born and gone in 1909, was the Gas Jet. At that time many citizens called the town ELL-um-dale, and even still I hear older residents say it that way, but when the twentieth century closes that fossil pronunciation (which I think derives from Cornish immigrants to America) will be gone, as are Tuh-PEEK-ee and Em-POR-ee. Like the hills and the human days spent in them, countians’ words lie in a watershed where the course of things is seepage, drainage, erosion, and then deposition in some unknown place farther away. Could I ask Clara Breese, I think she would say, Indeed.

  Up Dead-End Dirt Roads

  One morning when I was walking a couple of miles south of Elmdale at Camp Wood, more than a hundred acres of timbered vales and grassy uplands given for a retreat for young people in 1916 by Stephen Wood, Sam’s brother, I found an uncommonly well preserved brachiopod still resting in a piece of its once soft seabed, both now turned to stone. I took the fossil down to the creek to wash it off, and a boy and girl, about nine years old, came up to watch. I told them what it was, the boy unimpressed but the girl curious, and she asked whether people ever became fossils, and I said yes, but even the oldest ones were a hundred times younger than this shell. I tried to suggest 250 million years by telling them the hundreds of miles this shell had traveled since it had clamped itself closed for the last time, and the girl asked how far the shell had moved since she was born, and I said about the distance from your heel to your big toe. She was disappointed to have lived so many years only to find it had gone no farther than that. The boy believed nothing I was saying. Then she said, Where will things be when I’m old? I flipped a pebble a few feet away and said, about there, and she said, again disappointed, I wish it could go farther, and I said if your bones last as long as this shell, you’ll be getting near Hawaii.

  I liked her attempt to imagine tomorrow as yesterday, her own bones become stones. I had just been reading Vachel Lindsay’s brave pronouncements about the coming surge of prairie youth into philosophy and artistry, and it came to me that I should try to take a little time-hike myself, one where the destination would be Chase County of a coming day. I went to the high school in Cottonwood, up to the second floor, and asked the librarian, Carol Glotzbach, whom I’d met before, whether she could assemble a few students, a cross-section of juniors and seniors, to talk about their future here. I went to the principal and told him that we would need to use the library after hours, and he answered some questions: enrollment was 180, grades ten through twelve; more than three quarters of the graduates would at least try college; discipline was not a problem, nor was substance abuse, if you excluded boys spitting tobacco behind the radiators. He believed inspiration the greatest battle.

  After classes, eight students came to the library, where I’d brought some pop and chips as poor recompense for taking away the first good spring afternoon. Four lived in the out-county, two were Hispanic, one black, one a Finnish exchange student, none from a wealthy family. Carol Glotzbach said to me, You wanted typical Chase kids—I’d call these typical, although the ethnic balance is different from the school. This place is almost entirely white.

  The students and I talked awhile, and I was struck by their deference to one another and by their good looks. I asked them to write down, privately, a sentence saying what kind of work they’d like to go into and another describing themselves so that a stranger might recognize them. We shot the breeze a few minutes, and then I turned on a tape recorder and let things roll along. It was a little colloquy that by its nature encouraged responsible talking but discouraged more private comments—things I probably could not repeat without giving the teenagers bogus identities, a common ploy of oral historians. The seniors were T. W. Burton, Marko Hirsimaki, Shannon Lopez, Jeremy Smith, and the juniors Kendra Dawson, Raymond Galvan, Glenna Grinstead, and Shawn Potts. They said these things, and this is how Dub Burton described himself:

  (Jobs: cowboy, electrical engineer, jet pilot. T. W. is a tall, lean, dark-complected male, never serious, easygoing, carefree.) He said, I like working alone. I love working with cattle, but there’s no future in it now. Unless the older people should start dying off, there’s not going to be any future for me here in ranching, but I’d give my right arm to do that. I don’t even like coming to town—I prefer to stay out there where I’m at, but I don’t see any future for me here, so I’m thinking about finding something else to go into—don’t know what it’d be. My parents and teachers—seems like they pressure me, wanting me to go to school, but I don’t really want to, but I know I’ll about have to. If I could, I’d love to have my own place, but this is the first year my dad’s told me—he’s a ranch foreman down by Matfield—he said I’ll have to find something different. I’ll always be looking for something here though, but I think I’m going to have to go someplace else. I’m hoping not to get any farther away than Wichita. You know, when somebody from the outside buys up land here, they’ll bring in new people to take care of it usually. I don’t know, maybe I’ll go to Wyoming. He stopped, looked up, smiled, and he said, I’m just thinking, my stepmother used to work in the restaurant on the turnpike down by Matfield—it was a Howard Johnson’s then—and she said people would come through from out of state, and they’d go, “I don’t know how you stand to live in this hellhole.” Well, I guess it’s bred in us, like ducks to water.

  Shannon Lopez (fashion merchandising: Shannon is an easygoing, unpredictable type person. She is dark-skinned, dark hair, green eyes). In a year, I’ll be gone from here. I lived for a while near San Francisco, and I love a city. But I’ll come back for rodeo—I don’t ride—it’s just that we live in Strong City across from the rodeo grounds, and we sit up on the roof of our house and listen to the rodeo. That’s the only thing to come back for. I don’t like this town—I mean, what’s this county ever done for us? People are more concerned with the roads than with us. And, you know, the only way to meet new people here is to get out of the county—if you have a car. They’re so behind on the times that they won’t accept new things—even some young ones can be negative too. Like, new students have to meet higher standards to be accepted in our school: everybody knows the new students, and if they don’t come up to your standards, they’re pushed aside, put down in a lower class, and people won’t talk to you. I made more friends in a summer in California than I have here in twelve years. In a city you can be yourself—in Chase County, if people don’t agree with the way you are, you get talked about, not talked to. I mean, kids gossip more than adults. I hate that about Chase. There’s no privacy: if you do anything, the whole county within a day knows about it. If I come to school in clothes that I like, people say, “Oh my god! Look what she has on!” In a city they don’t do that. And when that guy came in to talk to us on AIDS, after the program was over, there were suddenly two or three senior girls who supposedly had AIDS, just because they asked a lot of questions. There are other things too, like if you’re Mexican, things are different. When we moved here when I was in the first grade, we had people coming by our house, yelling stuff, cussing my mom out. My brothers were in high school, and guys would come by and try to pick fights with them. They’d yell, “Get out of this town!” It was really bad.
Nobody would talk to us. It hasn’t really changed.

  She was working at not crying and was irritated with herself for not merely speaking in simple anger. People—teachers—make remarks, and it hurts us. We really don’t have to put up with it—if we wanted to do something, we could probably get some teachers fired. I mean, there are teachers in this school that admit they’re prejudiced, but if they’d switch places with us they’d realize how it feels. You sit there and you have to laugh at the jokes. She stopped again, the other students averted their eyes to give her some privacy, and she continued, Kids say, “If you’re not full-blooded white, you shouldn’t even be over here.”

  Jeremy Smith(computer repairman, musician: Jeremy is a little short; great personality; he likes to have fun, and he likes his music). I live down around Wonsevu with my foster parents, but I’m from Wichita—my family is still there. I’ve been here four years, but I’ll be going back to Wichita after I graduate. He paused and said quickly, as if to face the issue but not dwell on it, drumming fingers as he spoke, I hear some teachers telling racist jokes too, but I get along with white people fine—sometimes I forget I’m even black, and I live with a white family here. In Wichita, my parents used to have to go down and take my sisters out of school because of stabbings going on, but things aren’t like that in Chase County. I’ve never been in a racial fight here. I’m not bragging, but I’m accepted because I have so many talents—I play drums, guitar, I’m in forensics. There’s only one other black person in the school—a guy—there aren’t any black girls. But if I date a white girl in Chase, they say, “Why don’t you stay with your own kind?” So, my girlfriend lives in Wichita—but she’s white. I think the prejudice is mostly with parents. When I’m with kids, it’s fine: if I went out with a white girl here, I don’t think the kids would mind, but the parents would about have a heart attack. Things have been all right, and people have helped me out, like when my neighbor—he’s white—totally rebuilt my car engine, and he just had me pay for the parts. He did all the labor free.

  Marko Hirsimaki (physical education coach, naval cadet, engineering: Marko, that athletic-built young man owns friendly and outgoing mind, of course, with some kind of inside trouble). Here I live near Wonsevu and Burns, but in Finland I live north of Helsinki, maybe one hundred fifty miles from Russian border. I come from the forest with lakes. When I first saw Chase County, Kansas, I thought that I’m in the wrong place: there was some mistake. Then I thought of it as some kind of challenge: it’s my place, I have to live now here. I had all kind of dreams about U.S.A., then I came to Chase County and found it was some kind of nightmare. I was disappointed. I don’t know if I’ll bring my parents here to see things—I know they’ll get mad. It wasn’t what I was waiting for. I said that his words reflected those of many Nordic immigrants who settled in central Kansas in the nineteenth century and that he was recapitulating history. He said, Yes, but you know, I’d like to meet more strangers, but that’s impossible here, but I don’t want big city—one night in New York City was enough, it was driving me nuts. There are some nice places here: one is right by river—grass and trees and clear water, like some kind of dream. And the courthouse—in Finland we don’t have very many old buildings left like that. If you don’t look at houses here, it looks exactly like in those old movies: some cowboys riding to the sunset. I’d like to do that. I thought I come to U.S.A. to see some kind of paradise, but then I realized it’s not any better than Finland. Now, I love Finland more. We do many things even better than you do—of course, some things we don’t do. But the kids, they can’t realize that. They live in a small community, they think there is only one way to go, that there isn’t any other way. I think that’s bad: you have to know there is something different, to learn about life. Before school started, at the first football practice, kids were very curious about me. Someone said, “Is he some kind of Russian?” I said, “No—don’t kill me yet.” It made me mad, it made me sad. They ask, “Do you have toilet paper there!” But I learned it’s easier to teach students about Finland than the teachers—they seem limited.

  Glenna Grinstead (probably a housewife on a ranch or working for a business: Glenna is a short, petite girl with an energetic personality and a ready smile. Dressed in her western outfit, she has a warm look and an ornery look in her eyes). I live near Cedar Point. My father is a feedlot manager and my mother is a secretary at a health care center. The future—I know it’s hard to find a job here, but I want to go into ranching. I’d like to have a little land. I spend a lot of time at Camp Wood—it’s my favorite place in the county, especially sunrise there, it’s so beautiful. I don’t know about sunsets—usually I’m so tired I don’t pay any attention. There’s nothing better than being outside, on a horse, riding along with grass up to your stirrups, or out shagging cattle, or helping a sick calf—it gets a feeling in my heart, like, this is just right, I’d like to do this all my life. But that’s going to be hard because people are going under. To keep a living you have to have an outside job almost. It’s real hard. The future—I don’t want to leave. I mean, this is a good place for families, but people here are so closed-mouth, it takes forever to get to know anybody, the adults especially. It seems hard to start over. My parents had so much trouble when they came here: people think, “You haven’t lived here all your life so you have no say in this matter.” If I have to leave I might go to Montana or maybe a ranch in Colorado but no cities. I mean, if you compare us to kids that live in a city, the majority of us have had a lot more responsibility. I think we’re a lot more prepared to go out in the world. The things we’ve got, most of us have gotten them ourselves—we’ve earned them.

  Raymond Galvan (Ray is a pretty laid-back mellow kind of guy, who is in a rock & roll band and likes to ride motorcycles as one of his many different hobbies. He is about five-nine and has black hair and brown eyes). I live in Strong City. My dad works for the Santa Fe. I don’t think there’s a future in Chase County for me. I’m a musical kind of person—I play the bass guitar. After I graduate from high school, I’ll probably move to Wichita: I’ve got some family there, my brothers. I might get a job in a music store, making speaker boxes or something, or else get a job laying carpet. If I could go anywhere, I’d go to L.A. That’s one place you can really get a band going—all the record companies are there. I wouldn’t mind coming back just for the heck of it for rodeo, otherwise, I don’t know. He started a couple of sentences, broke them off, then said, I just wish people here would keep their mouths and ideas to theirselves. It just kind of builds up. He didn’t want to say what he referred to.

  Kendra Dawson (interested in business: Kendra is a blonde, blueeyed junior, fun and outgoing. She participates in a number of activities and sports). I live in Cottonwood. My dad is a rancher and farmer and my mother is a housewife. My grandparents and great-grandparents have all lived here. If I get married to a farmer or rancher I’ll stick around, but if I don’t I probably won’t stick around. I couldn’t live in a big city—I’d have to find a place similar to this, but maybe where people don’t pass judgment so bad. Like when they first had that deal for birth control down at the health center on Broadway: if anybody saw you just walking down that block, since there’s not much else there, they would probably assume you were going to get birth control pills, and talk would start. And this new church on the highway, the one that broke off from the Homestead Friends church—for everybody who doesn’t go there it’s called just “the church.” Everybody talks about it: “What they do out there isn’t right.” If you’re seen going in, everybody starts talking about you. I don’t know what the problem is other than maybe people leaving other churches, but whatever it is, it’s stupid. Shawn Potts muttered, It’s change—the county won’t accept change, and Kendra said, It’s an older community, and they just don’t make transition very easily at all. She listened to Shawn, her boyfriend, confirm separation of generations, and she said, We had a good girls’ volleyball team this year, we went sixteen-and-four
, and we’ve had two second places in state competition the last couple of years, but nobody bothered to come out and watch us—nobody supported us, maybe fifteen people in the stands. Older people, except for your family, just don’t have much interest in us. I asked her if she were to stay on here, what she would change, and she said, I wish we could get rid of the Podunk image most people in cities build up about places like this. Even though Emporia’s only thirty minutes away, to them we’re like back in the hills—no electricity, no running water.

  Shawn Potts (I’d like to run my grandparents’ farm and ranch. Shawn enters as a man sitting good in the saddle—as a rancher he loves the out-of-doors and cattle). I live west of Strong City. I like the springtime when the Flint Hills is burning and at night when the fire glistens off the water—that kind of depicts the country around here. And the courthouse is special, but with it being here so long people take it for granite. I like the togetherness of this county, especially in the country with the ranchers and cattlemen: when you’re out and you have trouble, there’s always a neighbor that’ll come help you. Somebody talked about problems meeting people, but if you move up Diamond Crick it’s like a welcome party: everybody brings new families things—but if it’s not up Diamond Crick maybe things are different. This is a good place to raise a family because you can know more people than in a city. But the high school teams the community doesn’t back unless you’re real good, especially a football team. Last season we got behind twenty-one to nothing to a weak team, but in the fourth quarter we got our heads in the game and got together and wound up winning twenty-eight to twenty-one, but the people watching us had went home. The next day half the county thought we’d lost. Someone said that even the rodeo was having problems now with local support, and Shawn said, The rodeo takes people back to what this county really is—it takes them back to what it’s come from and what it’s been. I think people ought to wake up and realize how neat this place is, and how much work people went to to build things like the courthouse and the Z Bar with all the tunnels, and Clover Cliff, and the bridges. If the ground could talk, if the ground could talk . . . We waited for him to finish, and finally I said, what would it say? and he shook his head. You stuck me now. I guess it would give the good, bad, and ugly. Somebody could dig up all the neat and bad things about this place, I guess, but it’s something nobody’s ever going to find out because they haven’t kept enough records.