He speaks of twice confronting men who had, on separate occasions, grabbed his youngest son and torn his shirt. I told them both, “If you’ve got any problems with my boy, I’d like to settle them now.” And I said to one, a coach, “This isn’t like back in the dirty thirties—this is more modern now.” Coach said he was sorry, and I told him, “That don’t get it anymore.” I should’ve took him to Discrimination. After a moment, Fidel says, Nobody paid for the shirts.
He is telling all of this while he keeps fixed to his map, and as he speaks, he draws in the ties of his tracks, a couple hundred little hash marks. At first I see them as tallies of wrongs, but when he keeps making them even after the topic changes, keeps laying down those little sleepers, I think: of course, the most important element in a trackman’s work is the crosstie—that piece holding the railroad together, the predicate between subject and object, the linking between soil and rail. A trackman’s days go to battling ties; as feet are to a walker, so ties are to a train. (Later I would recall ancient Aztec picture maps that used narrow parallels with footprints drawn between to indicate roads. In a like way, Fidel’s map is primitive—of a first time.)
He does not fill in all of the space between his rails with ties but stops as if the time has come to put up the mauls for the day, as if to leave some work for tomorrow, and he looks over his document. I can’t tell what he thinks its worth is, but then he gives me the answer: in the left comer, right under his good eye, he draws a small rectangle and in it carefully prints By Fidel G. YBARRA, and he adds his postbox number, street address, zip code, and ten-digit phone number (four digits put through local calls). He rolls it, presents it to me (and I’m thinking, of all the papers countians have handed me, this map of a man’s territory is the finest because it is the most wrought). He accompanies me to the sidewalk, where the catalpa-pod pendulums swing slowly, and Fidel nods a so-long, and his right eye looks past me, past the courthouse at my back, on past everything in the hills.
Ex Radice
We are walking, you and I: it is the warm season, but one such as cannot exist because this day is April and May, June and July, and autumn presses against spring right through the fullness of midsummer. The prairie reaches out in bloom all at once and more: we can see plants in their entirety, can look into the soil as if it were sky, see roots in their descent, their webbed complexity, and we can penetrate the fibrous darkness below us where most prairie living goes on. We have power to do this, and we understand it is possible only in a dreamscape. It is useful to remember that the planet is a ball of dark never more than half wrapped in light, where darkness is the rule, light the exception; remember also that with our sleeping, blinking, wakingness spent in darkened places, we, like the prairie, live most of our days in nights.
We are walking then. We have walked here before. You may have sensed this, and you may have recognized some things here and about and suspected it. Once I saw a cutaway drawing of the inner ear titled HOW WE HEAR, and it struck me that the illustration confused the how of things with their apparatus. I am trying to avoid that as I tell you something about my writing and reading: when I walk this prairie county I often mutter words, phrases, and notions that eventually turn into this book, and I never think of this as talking to myself or as being a half bubble off plumb. That the words must travel far and alter form does not change things: you have often been with me, and sometimes when I am struggling to reach you it happens that I dream you. Certain kinds of writing and dreaming are intertwining things, like wild grapevine up the trunk of the plum tree: from the same dark soil, different fruits.
For the past several days I’ve been reading how tribal peoples took their health—body and mind—from prairie plants: how they ate them, used them to allay fever, heal wounds, stanch hemorrhage, ease pain; how, with them, they cleansed themselves, decocted fragrances and love charms; how they decorated themselves with seeds and pigments (but, given the respect they accorded the flower nations, how they rarely picked a blossom just for its beauty); and how they often apologized and left an offering to harvested flora. Of the several hundred herbaceous plants native to this place, rare is the one Indians did not employ in some way, yet most of their ample botanical knowledge—much of which is not mere folk wisdom but empirical learning about alkaloids, glycosides, resins, proteins, and so on—has been lost; of what remains, little has been examined to distinguish superstition from science. Yet I tell you from experience, I have eased a burned tongue with seeds from black samson, taken direction from a compass plant, and cleansed my hands with buffalo-gourd pulp.
These past few days I’ve been home looking at some forbs and legumes I’ve brought in from the prairie, and I’ve eaten parts of some and brewed several extracts according to old receipts: one of them I couldn’t bring myself to swallow (a writer most fails when he loses nerve), but another I drank two cups of. Soon I lost my legs and had to lie down, and my mind seemed to tumble as if old tethers broke, and I dozed off into some grassland dream, and when I woke all I brought out of it was a recollection of an entanglement of long and numerous yet nearly invisible tendrils of a radiating vine; also in my head were the first six words of this chapter. I have wobbled to a chair, and I’ve followed those six words to this point because I believe they are the issue of darkness and that concoction, something come from minced and steeped prairie root: had I dreamed of God I could talk about deus ex radice, but it is you who came out of the root.
So: we are walking in an impossible season, and we are looking at totems of this land, more certain emblems of the long prairie than any other things but the tallgrasses themselves. The place is in them, and, in their ways, they carry the place. We are walking and looking, heading ourselves only in the cardinal directions, the native paths of approach to the Primal Urge.
East: Silphium laciniatum: listen: where these yellow rays of blossoms once grew in abundance ten feet high, some prairie tribes refused to camp, believing that the plants drew down lightning, yet during electrical storms the people burned the dried root to ward off thunderbolts (the plant is not so plentiful now, and lightning must seek fenceposts instead). Now, look within the soil and see the ten-foot taproot growing like a great carrot: from it the original prairie peoples made extractions to treat rheumatism, scrofula, constipation; and from it also came a diuretic, diaphoretic, expectorant, antispasmodic, vermifuge for their ponies, and a general tonic for listlessness for both people and horses. In several dialects its name translates as “big medicine.” Indian children, in season, broke open its stems and collected the balsamic resin and chewed it like gum, and even the first white children in the county used to fan out on the hills on their way home from school and collect the candy, the plants being the only sweetshop in the neighborhood. This passing of useful botanical knowledge from red people to white is the exception not just because whites often scorned such wisdom, but because medicine men and Indian women, the keepers of much of this knowledge, had little commerce with settlers; and also, surely, lore must have been deliberately withheld from a people taking away the land, so that the thieves got the big machine but not the operating instructions.
White men also learned that this plant turns its long and rigid leaves on edge and points them toward the poles as if to gather only morning and afternoon sun; from this habit, whites used it as a cynosure on landscapes that could seem featureless to lost travelers, and they called it compass plant, pilot weed, polar plant, and also rosin weed and gum weed. It is not so easy to find here today unless you get into a hay meadow or a neglected piece of ground, because cattle take to it as did bison and red men.
South: Cucurbita foetidissima: I will tell you: when I began walking the county, I came upon this strange plant several times, and one day I asked a farmer what it was, that huge thing spreading green tentacles over his rock fence, and he said, Some goddamn old vine. Later I looked it up and learned it was buffalo gourd (but not why so named, since bison don’t eat it), also called coyote melon, fetid gourd,
wild pumpkin; and I found that to the Osage this goddamn old vine was mon-kon-ni-ki-sin-ga, “human being medicine,” and I shall show you why. But first, see how it lies low, crawls, trails itself, raising only leaves and its yellow-star flowers; see how it takes the ground as if it were flood, its copious spreading not so much growth as flow (and in the worst drought it will continue pushing its deep greenness, as if little more than encased water, over other vegetation turned the color of dust). It radiates itself over a fifty-foot diameter, and, were you to cut the long tendrils and tie them end to end, you could lower them from the observation deck of the Empire State Building to the sidewalk: there would be enough to do this eight times, all of that growth achieved in just five months, where the annual rainfall may be fifteen inches.
If you like, crush the prickly leaves and smell them and understand why the scientific name is “gourd-most-foul”; take the fruit—little yellow spheres with light stripings pole to pole as if geographers’ globes—break one open, and rub the moist, stringy pulp on your hands, and the saponaceousness, smelling sweet like pumpkin, will cleanse them like soap. Save the seeds—their protein we can eat—and put extra gourds in your pocket: we can fashion them into rattles should we need to attract the ears of the Grand Mysterious.
Watch how I grasp the plant, lift it from the soil, and haul it into the light as if I were an Eskimo pulling a seal through its ice hole: nearly two hundred pounds, the weight of a large man and something of his shape too (now you understand the Osage name). I ask you, have you heard medieval lore that the mandrake root screams when pulled from the earth? I ask you, do you believe in the doctrine of signatures? Do you have pain in your feet, in your head? An Indian healer could take a piece from the part of the root that approximates the place of your discomfort and prepare you a remedy. But the mystic properties of mon-kon-ni-ki-sin-ga and their uses, I think, are lost utterly. Now, say this: Some goddamn old vine.
West: Psoralea esculenta: you see grasses are taller here, flowers more bountiful, their kinds more, and you feel a sense of the aboriginal you can wade into. This slope has not been grazed for several years, so it is a good place to look for Indian breadroot, also called, in English, more than a dozen other names, and every comparative label is inaccurate: wild turnip, prairie potato, ground apple, scurf pea. In fact, it is related to beans, although I find the taste of it fresh from the soil more like a raw peanut, but other travelers thought it similar to a carrot, Jerusalem artichoke, or white radish, and one even said it tasted like horseradish. Of the names, I like the Winnebago best, tdo-ke-wi-hi, “hungry,” which stands in contrast to the Latin: “edible scabbiness” (psoralea, as in psoriasis).
Whereas buffalo gourd advertises its tuber, breadroot hides away its little bulb for most of the year by letting wind break its stem near the ground so that it goes bounding off, spilling its seed. But, for a few weeks in late spring, it raises five-fingered leaves just above the new grass, as if calling for attention like a waving hand in a crowd. The tuber, usually about the size and shape of a hen’s egg, lies a few inches beneath the surface; it was these small swellings of carbohydrate that Indian women were prying from the earth with fire-hardened digging sticks and trimmed elk antlers on the morning of the battle of the Little Big Horn, and you might like to think of the high-arched arrows that brought down the cavalry’s arrogance as powered by bison haunch and breadroot.
Digging a prairie turnip doesn’t have the romantic thunder and blood of a buffalo hunt, but it was just as important to the plains peoples, and, although they would likely have survived without breadroot, their life would have been different: their stories and legends (the maiden who wielded her digging stick so avidly she dug through the earth and fell into the sky), their sports, health, names on the land, the look inside tepees where dried breadroots hung braided in strands like locks of the horsemen. Some prairie tribes made their way into bison country on annual hunts along courses determined by the richest slopes of breadroot as if they were oases. The people put pounded root into soups; they blended it with sliced bison stomach or beaver tail (Lewis and Clark’s favorite meat); they pulverized dried flesh and added marrow and sun-dried cherries to breadroot flour; they mixed the roots in stews of yellow calf or venison or fattened pup; from them they made buffalo-berry pudding or coal-baked flatcakes; and sometimes they peeled off the leathery skin and ate them like fresh apples. Today, cattle have reduced the number of breadroot plants, and the effort of wrenching the tubers from hard soil has turned modern tribes to bagged flour and sweet potatoes and sal tines; but, five years ago at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, I swapped a Lakota man a dozen prime Missouri Jonathan apples for a pair of dried breadroots the size of quail eggs.
During their expedition, Lewis and Clark often traded for “white apples,” and Lewis wrote the first description of them and their preparation but concluded with this: The white apple appears to me to be a tasteless insipid food of itself, tho’ I have no doubt but it is a very healthy and moderately nutricious food. I have no doubt but our epicures would admire this root very much, it would serve them in their ragouts and gravies instead of the truffles morella. And journals of many early western travelers mention breadroot: Pierre-Antoine Tabeau (all the wandering nations leave regretfully the districts where the prairie turnip grows abundantly), John Bradbury (very palatable even in a raw state), Henry Brackenridge (something of the taste of the turnip, but more dry), Thomas Nuttall, Edwin James, George Catlin, Prince Maximilian (a wooden dish was set before each of us, containing boiled beavers’ tail with prairie turnips . . . it did not taste amiss), Charles Murray, Victor Tixier, John James Audubon, Edward Harris (more Farina than a Ruta baga), Father de Smet, Rudolf Kurz, Randolph Marcy, Isaac Stevens [a soup, made of buffalo and Typsina, a species of turnip . . . was rich and greasy but quite palatable.)
We are dreamwalking so we can call forth breadroot for you to see, but I must tell you, in all my ambles about the county I’ve not found it often, and I’ve fretted over its decline, but a friend and botanist, Kelly Kindscher, has given me some hope: when he hiked across Kansas six years ago, just northwest of the county he found an Indian breadroot coming into blossom right in a forgotten rut of the Santa Fe Trail. So, the esculence shows its doggedness.
North: Amorpha canescens: say this word as we walk, speak it, and try to call forth the thing named: te-hu-to-hi. It is Ponca and means “buffalo-bellow plant”; te-hu-to-hi came into blue flower when the far-distant bison bulls came into rut and the cows into heat, a concomitant passing of seed by blossom and beast, and so te-hu-to-hi was an almanac showing the people when to head for the hunting grounds.
White settlers heard the long and slender lateral roots snap on the blade of their breaking plows, pop sharply like old bootlaces drawn too tight, and they named the plant prairie shoestring. Other homesteaders, seeing the gray hairiness of the leaves, called it lead plant and believed it drew its color from ore deposits beneath it as if its deep roots worked the alchemists’ dream of transforming lead into a kind of prairie gold. Now, take the leaves home, dry them slowly, steep them, and, from their leaden color, watch appear a golden tea of pleasing taste. The native lore says that also from those leaves can come a tonic for pinworms, a wash for eczema, and it says the stems can provide a moxa for neuralgia or rheumatism (if you have courage): take a dried sprig, strip it, wet one end to affix it to the place of discomfort, light the other end, and let the stem, like a slow fuse, burn to the pain. If you wish to approach health more spiritually, crush the dried leaves to a powder, mix in a bit of bison tallow, tamp and light it in a sacred calumet, and send your prayer for health with the smoke rising skyward.
When John Charles Frémont crossed Kansas in 1842, he wrote of the prevalence of lead plant, and Lieutenant John James Abert four years later on his exploration said it was so abundant he usually didn’t record its presence. When botanist John Weaver studied the tall prairie two generations ago, he found lead plant still abounding, in some places sixty plants to a
square meter and growing thicker than the bluestems. But you and I, were we to leave the dream walk and hike the actual land, would find a county cut by cattle trails: Amorpha indicates healthy prairie, and its absence reveals severe disturbance to the original vegetation, and this loss is significant, since its deep leguminous roots fix nitrogen in soil. Nothing so demonstrates that this is land under domination of white men as springtime hills absent the purple flowers of lead plant (and, again, you see how rangeland and native prairie are as different as pasture to a feedlot). Were tribal people to return, it would be a lean land they would have to live on.
I must tell you this: last year a county farmer, complaining about the Kansas Fish and Game Commission restocking areas of the Flint Hills with native animals, said to me, What the goddamn hell are they doing putting antelope back in here for? Everything we worked a hundred years to get rid of, they’re bringing back. No Anglo engine, not even the plow, has so effectively cleared the Hills of their old diverse abundance as the steer: to harvest all the prairie into franchise burgers is a respected practice, goes the thinking, and to some the setting aside of a portion where nature can answer only to itself is waste rather than the creation of a seedbed of biological diversity for a future time. Survival here means getting through next Monday, and children born on Tuesday will later be on their own. Another countian: What kids don’t know, they won’t miss.
PrairyErth Page 26
