Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Perhaps because of that feat — or maybe because Gus’s name was also William — he was the only person other than an aged Sunday-school teacher I allowed to call me Billy. And why not? Here was a Nestor who could pop a boy’s catcher’s mitt.

  Once again, abiding reader, I’ve let my story tumble forward too fast, eager as I am to tell it to you.

  A few years after the death of my maternal grandfather — a man who tossed out not curves but tales of the Spanish-American War — Gus, a widower, wedded my grandmother, a marriage we all honored. My mother and her sisters loved him, although he had a habit, said one aunt, that came straight from Satan: at the supper table, during our standard-to-the-point-dozen-word-plus-Amen grace, Gus did not bow his head. He looked directly forward as if staring something down. At age eight I loved that moment because I was sure heavenly remonstrance sooner or later would happen right there over the Sunday chicken and dumplings — probably nothing dramatic like his forehead suddenly sprouting horns, but maybe a warning shot, like his pupils turning into vertical slits. Such flagrance in the face of Powers Eternal, that just had to be asking for it. Then again, a man who could whiff the Babe might also be able to slip a fast one past a deity or two.

  The way things turned out, nothing at all occurred, and Gus’s years exceeded those of all but one of my blood ancestors; what’s more, as he of generous heart aged, I saw the grip of the Devil loosen in my brain until I no longer believed there was a Devil to grip anybody’s brain. So you see, had young William Kubitzki not one afternoon fanned the Bambino, my theological notions might today have quite a different cast, and this book might be a tract about sin and redemption. But then again, maybe it is.

  I tell these few things about Gus because Q once said I traveled as if he were in the backseat. I don’t believe his revenant ever was, but he indeed has done many miles in the back of my head, including more than I can account for in crossing the Great Plains by each of its major auto routes, a number of those passages made solo, a condition almost necessitating voices in the back of one’s head. It’s good for sanity to traverse the Plains with a companion (even if your own memory) who can tell stories. Should you have ever crossed with children (in the days before electronic distractions), you may remember the value of a tale, no matter where it ranged on the whopper index: my father once got me through two Kansas counties (and into a hell of a nightmare) with one about a boy forced by Old Man Grimsley to bury Mrs. Grimsley’s severed arm which for months afterward would drag itself from the grave each Wednesday night to hunt for the soft throat of the boy who could chokingly tell the appendage where the rest of the body was. A shrewd parent knows monotony is not a physiographic fact but a mental condition, something the Great Plains teach, as does the open sea.

  On one eastward crossing, I stopped near the western edge in Last Chance, Colorado. At the café counter was a woman heading to her home along the Front Range. When I asked how the town got its name, she said, “It used to be the last chance to fill your tank or get a soda pop, but the real reason if you ask me is that it’s your last chance to turn back before you get way the devil out there.” With the last two words, she waved her arm eastward all the way to Missouri. I said I liked it out there. “So do I,” she clarified. “It always reminds me how much I love trees.” Here was a woman who might like a bald man just for making her thankful for a hairy husband. Her point, nevertheless, stands: who can doubt deprivation being a keen intensifier of appreciation?

  The Great Plains seem destined to be misperceived and consequently misunderstood by any traveler arriving with assumptions and myths rather than with eyes and mind open. If we’ve at last gotten beyond the early description — the Great American Desert — we’ve still not entirely escaped a frequent conflation of two homonyms: plain and plane. The expectation of finding a realm of two dimensions (which at times can even look like a place of one dimension — that of across) is likely to fulfill itself, because the third dimension of height often seems measurable only with a micrometer.

  In truth, no matter how difficult we find them to perceive, there are assuredly three dimensions out there. I would even argue there is also a fourth: rare is the traveler who can cross without occasionally tapping a watch to see if it’s stopped.

  The other homonym, plain, is also misleading, tinged as its dozen or so meanings are with inaccuracy and negativity: (1) unobstructed; (2) uncomplicated; (3) unmixed; (4) undecorated; (5) unpretentious; (6) neither beautiful nor ugly; (7) not hard to comprehend; (8) not unusual. Only the first term has a tincture of accuracy, and I think it’s the meaning white Americans had in mind when they first encountered the vastness some two centuries ago. On a clear day — even in the pollution-dimmed skies of our time — if you are on a rise (like the back of a pickup), you may be able to see forty miles around. Were you on a horse or behind a team of oxen heading westward in 1848, you could see all the way into your next week.

  I’m speaking here of the view being unobstructed. To set foot onto the Plains is to find obstructions beyond measure: rocks, cacti, gullies and gulches invisible until you reach their edges, quicksand, and rivers too dry for a raft and too damp for feet. But the greatest obstruction is not on the ground — it lies in the mind where the potential for a collapse of resolution is there at every moment, as the traveler sees ahead only more of what lies behind.

  Walt Whitman said the Plains were a land to “test propositions,” such as (say I) the proposition that your desire is sufficiently strong to reach the other side of a place comprising about a fifth of the forty-eight states. Other propositions also have been tested there, with failure the result as often as otherwise. An institution carried beyond the ninety-seventh meridian is certain to get changed, often vanishing through either withering or transformation: plows, crops, hats, laws, faiths, attitudes, words. The Plains are the greatest terrestrial transformative force within America, and they are the only region to broadly defeat us: we succeed in leveling mountains and forests, in damming rivers and killing lakes, but the Great Western Plains frequently best our tries at mastery. Like no other landform, they teach humility: they are a place to put hubris in its place. And because wisdom requires the vanquishing of vain pride, it is possible to love the Plains for that.

  Walter Prescott Webb, in The Great Plains, wrote in 1931:

  East of the Mississippi civilization stood on three legs — land, water, and timber; west of the Mississippi, not one but two of these legs were withdrawn — water and timber — and civilization was left on one leg — land. It is small wonder that it toppled over in temporary failure.

  I question only that penultimate word. It isn’t failures that are temporary but rather many of the successes.

  Americans first came onto the Plains with a sense of beauty influenced by European Romantic painters who revered verticality — the Alps, the Highlands, castle towers, church steeples, gorges, waterfalls, cliffs — and they demonstrated little appreciation for long and uninterrupted horizontals. Those explorers and traders couldn’t see that the Great Plains were to become a distinctively diagnostic American landform, nor could they realize then, compared to a grand savanna, the coasts and mountains of the world were common as tenpenny nails.

  Show a German or Japanese two pictures: one of a windmill against a long and level horizon, and a second of, perhaps, the New Jersey shore, and ask him which photograph “says” America.

  I’m not representing myself as a plainsman, because I’m only a passer-through that territory: my longest stay has never exceeded a month, but I’ve been there in heat and blizzard, drought and flood, I’ve been there in storms of lightning and thunder, wind, rain, hail, ice, snow, and dust. Authentic American weathers. I’ve walked the ground, photographed a prairie fire from the inside, ridden the Plains on a horse, slept on them, and studied on them, and I cherish them and do not want to live there.

  For me, the High Country is a broken wilderness, although in places it remains wilderness enough. When I make a cros
sing now, I no longer look glumly on abandoned and dessicated barnyards, schoolhouses, churches, gas stations, and sometimes even an entire Main Street overgrown and all but gone — like Kanona in northwestern Kansas where my mother came from (a tree growing inside the old vault of the unroofed bank). In county after county across the Plains, the American economic experiment failed within a generation or two, yet the tribal peoples there have lasted for more than five-hundred generations, in part because they understood the Plains demand either nomadism — like the totemic bison — or provident moderation, especially in the use of water. The place challenges American economics because it will not long tolerate overload.

  The dust bowl years were a result of a ten-foot-deep carpet of grasses getting torn loose and the great engine of the Plains — wind — picking up and hauling Kansas and Oklahoma and eastern Colorado elsewhere. In the late ’80s, I spent seven years writing a book about a single county on the tallgrass prairie of Kansas. In one interview, a woman rancher said, “Rip out the carpet, and the boots are soon wearing a hole in the parlor floor.” If farmers today turn the soil more wisely, they drill ever deeper into it to suck the aquifer to grow crops properly belonging in Ohio or Mississippi; if ranchers have seen the consequences of overgrazing, they nevertheless run cattle on land barely capable of supporting skinny-legged pronghorn. The injudicious American “experiment” on the Plains is not yet over, and young citizens alive as I write these words will see even more of it continue to fail until our goal becomes not voracious mastery but circumspect harmony.

  Some inhabitants live on the Plains out of necessity, some out of inertia, but others abide because they want to dwell under a sky so deep on a clear night you can still see all the way to the beginning of the universe, and it seems then you can breathe in the cosmos directly; they are people able to tolerate winters that look not like a season but extinction.

  Those natives must lead the rest of us in comprehending the Great Plains, that seemingly boundless and distinctive place (to return to homonymic meanings) of mixed and innumerable complications, often decorated (especially in spring), frequently beautiful and ugly, always difficult to comprehend spatially and temporarily, as ready to excel at obstructing human passage and plans as they are to bring forth some of the most pretentious cloud formations on earth.

  Primitive societies recognize, for one reason or another, forbidden lands, but in America, such a concept can be the very reason for intrusion or invasion, and in a landscape appearing limitless, to speak about limits can turn some citizens choleric. If a place exists in nature, so they believe, then it’s out there for the taking. But the plain fact is, the Plains foil and stymie, and they are always ready to make a fellow run for cover where there is none, and that’s why they are great.

  I meet Americans elsewhere who think the Plains are emptying, and perhaps that’s true in Thunder Hawk and White Earth and Haydraw and Windhorst and Circle Back (five miles from Needmore), but in Lubbock, Oklahoma City, Wichita, Bismarck, and dozens of other cities out there, populations continue to rise. People aren’t leaving the Plains so much as they are clustering, concentrating, redistributing themselves into sprawl around urban edges. Even Wyoming of the great vacancies has more residents than a decade ago. Across the grand American champaigns, Plains folk are doing what their cattle do in the face of a storm: rambling to a place to hunker down. Maybe you make it through the night, and maybe you don’t.

  2

  The Widow’s Man

  WERE TRAVELING CHILDREN TO HAVE an encompassing conception of space, time, and a capacity for patience, then that eternal question “Are we there yet?” might scarcely exist in their instantaneous world. For an adult air traveler, arrival is clearly defined and the yet has the promise of termination: you get in a machine, it moves, you get out of the machine, and you’re there — or nearly so. For a long-distance land traveler, even an adult, arrival is not only more drawn out but more problematic: if it’s not an address, the exact location of there can become a question without certain answer. Like our march toward earthly finality, arrival by road comes only incrementally, with a mile here, an hour there, a night someplace else. Approach is more than just the last phase before arrival — it’s at the heart of a true journey and one aspect separating real travelers from mere arrivalists whose highest wish is for destination.

  When I’m on the road, I often measure distance from my journey’s end not in miles but by indicators. I’ve already mentioned or implied geographic lines of black-eyed peas and green chile and corner-grocery grinders, but of course those “lines” are even less than imaginary because territory changes gradually like a seaward-flowing river losing its freshness to brackishness before becoming salt water in another realm.

  Those three indicators all happen to be culinary, but intimations, of course, can appear in other ways: the shape of a barn roof, the style of a pasture fence, what’s considered a weed, what’s taken for granted, the length of a vowel, or whether an R appears where it shouldn’t be or disappears where it should remain. And certainly, there’s that loveliest of signposts: the native willingness to chat with a traveler.

  On the Great Plains, I always know I’m entering the West when I see a recumbent horizon of 360 degrees. But there are other signs too: sagebrush, tumbleweed, mounted jackalopes in taverns, loping pronghorns (called by Westerners antelope, which they properly are not any more than a bison is a buffalo or a chile pepper a chili). Even more totemic to my eye, though, is a crooked juniper fence-post topped with a magpie. If magpies could truly speak (instead of just garbling along in mock English), and were I to ask one of them, “Are we West yet?” it would say, “You bet your boots, brother.” (About the magpie, I’ll say more anon.)

  You’ll note in my Great Plains identifiers nothing remotely culinary. If we exclude beef and potatoes and possibly pie, the Plains are a great American desert when it comes to the table. The nineteenth-century necessity of stretching out a supply of coffee beans to get over the Oregon Trail, for one example, apparently permanently affected and infected not just a cup of joe but also most of the comestibles. Beer? On the Plains, the only hops you’ll find are on a playground. Mixed drinks? Order a cocktail (if you dare) in Broken Bow or Lusk, and after the bartender dopes out how to make it, you’ll need to explain why a nightly martini is doctor’s orders and that you don’t mind if it’s in a beer glass; you may then want to stare down anyone who heard you. Other than putting tomato juice into Budwater beer, a manly fellow drinks only what’s taken straight out of a bottle, and if his potion is distilled, it will have to come from a grand selection of four or five choices behind the bar; in the northern Plains, two of those will be schnapps, regular and flavored (expect butterscotch).

  In certain agricultural areas, the recent influx of Hispanic labor has raised possibilities of a toothsome meal, but beware: so-called Tex-Mex lends itself to victuals coming from a box or carton. If the sign outside does not use the word authentic, if the salsa was made that morning in the kitchen and includes fresh cilantro, and if the only blue eyes in the place belong to customers, then there’s a chance of good eating. Often I have to cross the High Country on big breakfasts and milk shakes.

  After three days on the Plains, Q and I had passed through Nebraska and on into Wyoming where we found our way to Buffalo and the Occidental Hotel of 1880 right on Main Street and smack along Clear Creek. The Occidental was a long, brick building — actually three linked ones — of two storeys and a lobby with a hearth, a mounted elk-head, a framed Navajo blanket, and a wooden-cabinet radio wafting out Guy Lombardo. It was one of those places a visitor will later describe with a sentence beginning, “It was one of those places.”

  Down a short hallway from the lobby was the saloon which, even without a stuffed jackalope, made this clear: “If it’s the West you’re after, bub, then you’re there.” Although needing none, a bonus in the Occidental Hotel was a well-stocked, second-floor library of real books — not condensed novels or broken sets o
f cheap encyclopedias or official state-manuals or thirty-year-old textbooks. Just down the hallway and around the corner was our room (in fact, a trio of small linked rooms ending with a claw-foot bathtub). On the radio, a model that likely announced the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the Sons of the Pioneers warbled out “Cool Water.” Later, from the tub, I heard a warbling Q:

  All day I face

  The barren waste,

  Without the taste

  Of water, cool water.

  Ol Dan and I

  With throats burned dry

  And souls that cry,

  For water,

  Cool, clear water.

  Her Ol Dan invited her to quench a thirst down below at the brass rail in the saloon and across from the player piano and under the glassy gazes of twenty-one mounted trophy-heads or skulls. In a far corner was a poker table covered in green felt and, above it, bullet holes requisite in such a room.

  Q said, “Well, Ol Dan, are we there yet?” We were so much there we decided to stay a few days to walk around Buffalo, population something more than four-thousand souls, hang out in the library, walk down Main to the soda fountain, hang out in the library, walk up Main to a plate of chop suey, hang out in the library, and at sunset join the menagerie of taxidermied ungulates for conversation with whatever cowpoke — genuine or sham — wandered in for a toothful of Old Tickler. On one of those evenings when no one wandered in but an osculatory twosome, I told Q a Wyoming story that for a while disturbed her.