The Land’s End! There is something in the very words that stirs us all. It was the name that struck us most, and was best remembered by us as children, when we learnt our geography. It fills the minds of imaginative people with visions of barrenness and solitude, with dreams of some lonely promontory far away by itself out in the sea—the sort of place where the last man in England would be most likely to be found waiting for death, at the end of the world! It suggests even to the most prosaically constituted people, ideas of tremendous storms, of flakes of foam flying over the land before the wind, of billows in convulsion, of rocks shaken to the centre, of caves where smugglers waited in ambush, of wrecks and hurricanes, desolation, danger, and death. It awakens curiosity in the most careless—once hear of it and you long to see it—tell your friends that you have travelled in Cornwall, and ten thousand chances to one, the first question they ask is: “Have you been to The Land’s End?”
My earlier memory was of an open and generally level hedged-in pasture under the salt wind, a place still recognizable from his description. But now before me was an amusement park, a plastic England of yore: the Mariner’s Chest Arcade, Shipwreck Play Area, Legendary Labyrinth, the Smellorium (“Can you tell the difference between whisky, rum, and even gunpowder?”). Were Collins to describe things today, he might use words like hokum, humbuggery, fakery, fabricated, dissimulated, concocted, a counterfeit jiggery-pokery, and those are the very qualities grockles come for. After ten millennia of Celtic-Anglo possession, John Bull had allowed foreigners to own the hokums and reshape the Land’s End, a name become an apocalyptic, ecological double-entendre.
The sea wind followed me up the road a half-mile to the long-standing First & Last Inn, its walls dating from at least the fourteenth century when it was lodgings for men building the propinquous St. Sennen, “the first and last church in England.” In front of the inn, now a pub, lay a field of barley. Never in my searches for the perfect alehouse had I come upon the principal ingredient growing so close to the end of a tap.
The amusement park, said the publican, had so increased his business that he extended the walls of the structure to enclose a long-unused well which he judged—from its distinctive square sides—to be the work of Phoenicians trading in Cornwall long before the arrival of the Roman legions in 55 B.C. Knowing that ancient Cornish wells were often shrines, he didn’t fill it in nor conceal it with flagstones to match the surrounding floor; instead, one evening he drew up a bucket of living water and set it atop the bar to dip up brimming pints of Adam’s ale, draughts of continuity, quaffs from the ages. He installed a small light within the shaft and placed over it a plate of clear glass so that a grockle fleeing the Smellorium could now peer down into the quiet darkness to have opportunity to recognize that stationary objects—if genuine—can be vehicles as suitable for the conveyance of a traveler’s imagination as any atop wheels.
I went down to the coastal path to get closer to the end of England to try to see it in its ancient aspect and hear its mayhem of surges shattering onto the black rocks that now seemed in sufferance before their inevitable resolution into the sea, nature blessedly blind to legendary last labyrinths and smelloriums. I heard only the invincible thump and plunge of the cold Atlantic that will always be the end of things here until the end.
Chronology of Publication
Up Among the Roadside Gods
(1983)
The Nose of Chaac
(1984)
Designing a Corporate Potlatch for the Next Century
(1984)
The Last Thanksgiving of Whispers-to-Hawks
(1984)
A Little Tour in Yoknapatawpha County
(1986)
A Glass of Handmade
(1987)
Into the Antipodes
(1988)
Crossing Kansas
(1988)
Prairie and Plain
(1989)
Of Time and a River
(1992)
Writing PrairyErth
(1992)
A Fallen Yew, an Oaken Pillar, a Forgotten Birch
(1993)
A Residue of History
(1993)
Pictures from the West Country
(1994)
The Old Land of Misfortune
(1997)
The Pencil Makers
(1997)
Just South of Ultima Thule
(1998)
Not Far Out of Tullahoma
(1999)
A Land for the Resolutely Curious
(2001)
Oysters and American Union
(2002)
Out East on the North Fork
(2002)
On the Staked Plain
(2002)
With a Good Stick in Hand
(2002)
The Smoked Ciscoes of Gitche-Gumee
(2004)
Wandering Yosemite
(2005)
Morning in Manarola
(2008)
The Classic American Road Trip
(2009)
The Here Within There
(2011)
In Acknowledgment
At Little, Brown and Company: Tracy Roe, Kay Banning, Peggy Freudenthal, Liese Mayer, Brandon Coward, Melissa Mathlin, Geoffrey Shandler, Michael Pietsch.
Along the way: Edgar Ailor III, Kelly Archer, Steven Archer, M. K. Blakely, Clive Chisholm, C.L.D.W. Hutt, L. J. Keown, O. J. Litzinger, Michael Mansur, David Pulliam, Cathy Salter, Kit Salter, David Trogdon, Lois Wallace, Richard Wallace, and magazine editors cum multis aliis.
About the Author
WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON, the pen name of William Trogdon, is of English, Irish, and Osage ancestry. He lives in Missouri, on an old tobacco farm he’s returning to forest.
His first book, Blue Highways, is a narrative of a 13,000-mile trip around America on back roads. His second work, PrairyErth, is a tour on foot into a small corner of the great tallgrass prairie in eastern Kansas. River-Horse is an account of his four-month, sea-to-sea voyage across the United States on its rivers, lakes, and canals. His three books of travel have never been out of print. Heat-Moon is also the author of Columbus in the Americas, a compendium of the explorer’s adventures in the New World.
ALSO BY WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON
Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey
PrairyErth (a deep map)
River-Horse: A Voyage Across America
Blue Highways: A Journey into America
Columbus in the Americas
Acclaim for William Least Heat-Moon’s
HERE, THERE, ELSEWHERE
“Hallelujah! William Least Heat-Moon is on the road again…. He slices down through layers of biography, history, folklore, and geology to deliver a place in full.”
—Bill Marvel, Dallas Morning News
“Heat-Moon’s curiosity and adventurous nature have not dimmed, making him a first-rate travel guide. He is an original, memorable wordsmith.”
—Steve Weinberg, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Heat-Moon wanders off in every direction in this scintillating collection of short writings…. A master at conjuring place, Least Heat-Moon intertwines primeval geology with modern social mores, gorgeous scenery with tourist tackery, vast landscapes with intricate psychologies…. There is a dazzling variety of places, people, and curiosities, linked by a highway of funny, perceptive, and generous prose.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A captivating new collection of his short-form travel stories… which are always greater than the sum of their parts. But the most endearing tales are those closest to his home and heart.”
—Kristin Baird Rattini, American Way
“Least Heat-Moon is truly one of this nation’s best travel writers, if not the best. He takes travel writing seriously as a literary genre. An essential title; highly recommended.”
—Lee Arnold, Library Journal
“Heat-Moon is at his finest when in often overlooked places…. Here, Th
ere, Elsewhere is worth the investment in time, a good dictionary, and open-mindedness.”
—Katherine Hauswirth, Christian Science Monitor
“Heat-Moon unplugged!… An admirable combination of reportage and boots-on-the-ground observation…. Within this praise for America, no matter when it was penned and who did the final edit, you feel the lament of a man watching the homogenization of place and the diminishment of what it means to be curious about one’s surroundings.”
—Stephen J. Lyons, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Because nearly a decade often passes between Heat-Moon servings, devotees of his books have necessarily learned to be epicures rather than gluttons. Such an unexpected feast thus provides longtime readers a rare opportunity to gorge…. Here, There, Elsewhere provided a sufficiently splendid meal.”
—Cliff Froelich, Columbia Tribune
“William Least Heat-Moon’s latest book is not a meandering travelogue, but a philosophical peregrination about the act of travel, its universal effects and personal consequences…. To William Least Heat-Moon, travel is a means of becoming, a way to realize your full self. It is a path to both journeying outside your current frame of reference and also to delving more deeply into your inner being. Heat-Moon loves to relate a good travel story, but he’s not one to settle for the superficial overview. Whether in explicating geologic strata or the essence of the inner life, he digs deep and is ever the explorer.”
—Lois Carr, Wichita Eagle
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
The Mole Lady
Thitherward
The Here Within There
Dosojin
Up Among the Roadside Gods
Second Draft
A Glass of Handmade
Putting Legs Back on a Story
A Little Tour in Yoknapatawpha County
A Conducer
Oysters and American Union
Yucatán
The Nose of Chaac
Beyond Cross-Purposes
Crossing Kansas
All Knowledge Human and Cosmic
Out East on the North Fork
A Dust Ball Under the Bed
Of Time and a River
To Explain Delight
With a Good Stick in Hand
The Manichean
The Old Land of Misfortune
In the Guise of Fiction
The Last Thanksgiving of Whispers-to-Hawks
Approaching the Ineffable
Prairie and Plain
To Go Solo
A Fallen Yew, an Oaken Pillar, a Forgotten Birch
The Great Miscellaneous
A Residue of History
Prolegomenon
Not Far Out of Tullahoma
A New Order
Designing a Corporate Potlatch for the Next Century
A Trio of Postcards
Just South of Ultima Thule
Sounded by Trumpets Silent
Writing PrairyErth
The 3,170th County
The Smoked Ciscoes of Gitche-Gumee
The Because-It’s-There Association
A Land for the Resolutely Curious
Anchovies and Olives
Morning in Manarola
Something of a Firefall
Wandering Yosemite
One Sweet Talker
Into the Antipodes
A Criminal to Remain Anonymous
On the Staked Plain
Assonance from the Upper Missouri
The Pencil Makers
Why We Do It So Often (and in So Many Ways)
The Classic American Road Trip
Bipedal Kaleidoscopes
Pictures from the West Country
Chronology of Publication
In Acknowledgment
About the Author
Also by William Least Heat-Moon
Acclaim for William Least Heat-Moon’s Here, There, Elsewhere
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by William Least Heat-Moon
Cover design by Lindsey Andrews; photograph by Edgar Ailor III/Ailor Fine Art Photography
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
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First ebook edition: January 2013
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Photographs on here, here, here, here, here, here by Edgar Ailor III of Ailor Fine Art Photography
Maps by the author
ISBN 978-0-316-22501-4
Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road Page 30
