PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  —Albert D. Richardson,

  Beyond the Mississippi (1867)

  Kansas is the only state I have encountered that has made a census—even an estimated census—of the number of its tree inhabitants. For its 86,276 square miles, the population of trees has been set down as about 225,000,000. . . . How many are Osage orange trees nobody knows. But the number must be high.

  —Edwin Way Teale,

  Journey into Summer (1960)

  There is something primitive about the name “barbed wire”—something suggestive of savagery and lack of refinement, something harmonious with the relentless hardness of the Plains.

  —Walter Prescott Webb,

  The Great Plains (1931)

  Prairie and sea plant no other hedgerows than the sky.

  —William A. Quayle,

  The Prairie and the Sea (1905)

  The true character of the spirit of an age is better revealed in its mode of regarding and expressing trivial and commonplace things than in the high manifestations of philosophy and science.

  —J. Huizinga,

  The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924)

  You must never undertake the search for time lost in the spirit of nostalgic tourism.

  —Gregor von Rezzori,

  The Snows of Yesteryear (1989)

  [Captain Henry Brandley] was charitable, kindly, a big man in every respect, and left an honored name in his part of Kansas.

  —William Connelley,

  Standard History of Kansas and Kansans (1918)

  In the Quadrangle:

  Hymer

  Twenty-four years ago in a secondhand shop, I bought a mantel clock with Roman numerals, a small Seth Thomas made of oak; its brass pendulum, knocked about for nearly a century, by chance had taken on the features, down to the grin, of the man in the moon. The clock didn’t run until I cleaned the old lubricant from its gears and reoiled it, and then, once again, it began keeping good time, slowing down like a tired worker only on Sundays when I rewind it. Whether it was my cleaning or the idiosyncrasy of the clock itself I don’t know, but it distinctly goes tock-tick, tock-tick, as if its hours flow in reverse. Had American Indians—whose notion of time is so much more unified and unlimited than the European conception—ever built clocks, I think theirs would run like this one, its hands moving forward while its voice speaks backwards. If, in your sleep, you sometimes dream of, say, a dead parent living again or of yourself as older or younger than you are, then you may have an inkling of the breadth and depth and oneness of Indian time.

  A few years ago while I was watching the moon-faced pendulum grinning and tock-ticking, I began wondering who before me had watched it: what had things been like in that other house when the clock was new and the pendulum smooth and featureless? From then on, merely watching old Seth was not enough for me, so I tried to dream up a past for it, but, without my knowing a few certain details, it was as if the clock had no real past at all. What I wanted was at least one definite fact about its former days that could underpin my imagination (even Sherlock Holmes needed Dr. Mortimer’s walking stick to recreate him, to imagine him). When I next passed through the Illinois town where I had bought the clock, I stopped to ask about its history, but the shop was out of business, the owner gone, and I was cut off from Seth’s first hundred years, cut off from the dreamtime it carried; now it was a book with pages forever fused, not to be read again. In the quarter century or so it has tock-ticked for me, of course, it has begun to carry my own dreamtime, those nights and days that have given a certain lunar terrain to my face too, but that span isn’t deep enough: I am grown beyond wading, and now it is fulfilling only to swim.

  The American disease—and I’m quoting someone I can’t recall—is forgetfulness. A person or people who cannot recollect their past have little point beyond mere animal existence: it is memory that makes things matter.

  At about the time I began poking around in Chase County, my father had a stroke just as he was happily telling me over the phone of his plans for a Thanksgiving visit. Several days after that moment of suddenly garbled speech that marked its happening, he still wasn’t sure who I was; he recognized me only as a man and not as a son. It was the most difficult thing ever to pass between us. One afternoon, his speech not yet unjumbled, I gave him a pencil and asked him to write who he was: in fear, afraid of his aphasia, of failing and what it would mean, he took it and, slowly, unsteadily, marked out his name, his once well-formed letters, which I had tried to emulate as a boy, now tumbling into each other, falling down. I asked him to write my name. He faltered, then he did it, and I asked him to put down what I was to him: he did nothing, seemed confused, his expression the same as when the physician had pressed alternately to his left leg the point or eraser of a pencil and asked whether it was sharp or dull, and my father, slurringly, could only guess. Then he began moving his right hand, the other good now just for weighting the paper, and he marked down something. Uneasily, I picked up the pad, and I could make out, My boy. I looked at him. The right half of his face was smiling. For a while longer, anyway, we had escaped the obliteration of our shared past, the thing that bound us.

  Not long afterward I walked in the hills around what was once the town of Hymer, Kansas, but that abrupt and painless temporary erasing of my father’s memory was most of what I encountered here. A few days ago, I returned to walk again, now trying hard to step out of my own dreamtime, and I worked to see:

  The quadrangle has the common Chase topography, vales and uplands. Diamond Creek, largely the outflow of Diamond Spring on the Santa Fe Trail seven miles north, runs the length of the quad at a north-northwest angle, and, to the south, Middle Creek (precisely midway between the Cottonwood River and Diamond Creek) comes in almost due east-west, and these creeks and their tributaries, as water does everywhere here, shape the course of things. The Superior branch of the Santa Fe Railroad, now little used, follows Diamond Creek, and the only two roads of consequence keep to the fluvial vales and their cultivated fields.

  In Hymer, the only hamlet the quad has ever had, the Saffordville Syndrome is complete, and a casual traveler passes through unaware that the little 4-H building is the relocated and rebuilt depot, the last vestige of the village. In one sense, there never was a Hymer, Kansas: the town name, actually, is Hegwer, but a postal clerk misread the original handwritten application for a post office (scrawl the word and you’ll see how the misreading happened), and residents never bothered to correct it, perhaps because they thought themselves lucky to get away with Hymer, considering that the fellow who had suggested his wife’s maiden name of Hegwer was Kasimir John Fink: to ask for a correction could have meant ending up in Finkville.

  Kasimir (here pronounced Keezmer), a yodeling German immigrant, came into the county from the California goldfields in 1858 with five silk top hats and not much else. He built a cabin along the perpetual flow of Diamond Creek and began courting Medora Hegwer, who worked in a Council Grove shop serving the Santa Fe Trail trade, but she refused to marry him because his cabin had a dirt floor. One morning Kasimir John took his ox wagon up to the Grove and bought a load of lumber and a marriage license, and that afternoon he returned to Diamond Creek, his bride perched atop her future oak floor. Some years later, after Kasimir John came back from the Civil War, he and his sons quarried stone on their place, constructed a lime kiln, cut black walnut and burr oak, built a large home, and lined the walks with lilacs and roses. The house, abandoned now, inexplicably faces into the north wind, but, even yet, in June the lilacs are thickets countians drive out to see, breathing the sweetness, sniffing old Kasimir John’s world.

  It was toward the Fink place I was hiking, telling myself some of the old Hymer stories to keep from thinking about my first disheartened walk here, from remembering how fast memory can be stricken and how easily goes with that erasure the only thing we can take to our deathbeds, the only thing that we might be able to slip across to the other side—if other side there be. But I couldn’t leave myself
and enter the land, and I grew irritated that I was turning the jaunt into some kind of hack-jack self-therapy, and I cursed the dismal Hymer sky. I thought, walk in the stories of this place: Medora Hegwer Fink’s sister, Henrietta Boenitz, coming into the county with her thirteen children, most of them trooping behind the oxen-drawn wagon; her refusal to build a fire on the ground (Hegwer women were persnickety), and her asking husband and sons to take down the new stove she had just bought in St. Joe and set it up along the trail; Henrietta, in the crowded wagon, bedding down the youngest girl in the butter chum; all of them taking comfort in the dust of wagons two days ahead of them and two days behind; and, after the family settled in, some Kansa Indians slipping up to the cabin one night, their faces blackened with charcoal for war, and chanting and dancing around a tall pole dangling a blond scalp, only to disappear with the darkness.

  But the stories didn’t work very well for me, and I walked on, the sky dimming like my mood. Then I remembered that in the little rucksack I carry on my tramps, somewhere among the notebook and pencils, binoculars and magnifying glass, camera and canteen, field guides and raisins, was a thing I’d bought a few days earlier and still had not used: a truck side-mirror, the small convex kind you stick on. I’d recently read about an eighteenth-century traveler’s device called a Claude glass that served to condense and focus a landscape and make it apprehensible in a way direct viewing cannot. When the English poet Thomas Gray first crossed Lake Windermere, he reserved his initial view of the other side for his Claude glass by blindfolding himself on the ferry. Maybe my mirror could rearrange things and show me, so memory-ridden, what I was having trouble seeing.

  I pulled out the thing and walked on slowly, watching in it the hills compress and reshape themselves into something different, and what happened was strange and invigorating: in the glass the Chase prairie somehow took on the aspect of my first views of it, and I began to feel again the enchantment of those early encounters. By looking rearward, it was as if I were looking back in time, yet I was looking at a place where left was right, a two-dimensional landscape I could see but not enter: the prospect was both real and impossible, it was there and it wasn’t, and I entered it by walking away from it. If I turned to look, it was gone, something like the reverse of the old notion that when we turn our backs the universe suddenly disappears, to reappear instantly only when we look again. If I extended the mirror far in front of me, I—or a backward image of me—joined that turned land, a dreamscape that could exist only in my palm, a place behind I could see only by looking forward: I was hiking north and traveling south. And then, stumbling along as I was, I realized that ever since I’d come down off Roniger Hill and begun walking my grids I’d been traveling much the same way, and I realized that forward or backward didn’t matter so much as did the depth of the view, a long transit at once before and behind: the extent of cherishing depends upon the amplitude of the ken.

  My grid walking half complete, I understood this: I’d come into the prairie, this place of long and circling horizons, because of a vague and undefined sense that I lived in shortsightedness; I saw how the land, like a good library, lets a fellow extend himself, stretch time, rupture the constrictions of egocentrism, slip the animal bondage of the perpetual present to hear Lincoln’s mystic chords of memory. If a traveler can get past the barriers of ignorance and forgetfulness, a journey into the land is a way into some things and a way out of others.

  The dark north sky kept coming on until it gathered the light as if bagging it, and I lit out for cover, the wind flattening the grasses as if treading on them and small, fierce raindrops like spines angling down hard, and I breasted a ridge above Diamond Creek north of where Hymer had once been, came to an old rock house, unroofed, unfloored, unwindowed, and I sat down against a wall in the shelter of the hypotenuse of windblown rain. The house, a compact L, was of cut and dressed limestone blocks of regular size, the quoins nicely bush-hammered, their craftsmanship now peculiar in its isolation and collapse, and I wondered whether the stonecutter had ever imagined a day when his work would come to this, a shell empty but for the rubble of the roof and plastered walls, an immense buffalo-gourd plant taking the interior as its own. Had the mason ever imagined his work inhabited only by wet sky and a vegetable with a human-like root? I could see in the stone of the west threshold gently curving striations cut by a door opening and closing, opening and closing, the kind of marks a glacier leaves as it grinds across an expanse of living rock, and cut small but deeply into one wall, this: 1889—ninety-nine years earlier; the second generation here (the first having no time for stonemasonry beyond hearths and chimneys), the one inspired by the courthouse to carry its perdurable craftsmanship into the open prairie with rock homes the third generation would begin leaving for balloon-frame houses. These abandoned Permian stone places, despite their unpretense, partake of timelessness from the rock, the material of cathedrals and castles and capitols, and their decay seems sadder than that of a wooden derelict because the hopes and labor of their builders appear to have fallen farther. Plaster had broken away to expose the date hidden high on the wall, and that suggested the mason had indeed imagined someone coming along when the stones would start their return to earth; but, as though he thought his work signature enough, he had not left his name.

  A pickup rolled by at a good speed down the valley road below the house. Idling out the storm, I took my pencil and notebook and figured where that truck would be if we pointed it into space and let it roll along at sixty miles an hour for ninety-nine years, permitting the driver only stops for gas and a few interplanetary cheeseburgers: halfway to the sun. At a mile a minute, that’s how far I was from whoever chiseled in that date, that mileage stone. And what if I got up from this house and walked—time out only for naps and milk shakes—for ninety-nine years? I’d be a million miles away.

  We measure distances short and long with time—a six-minute walk, an eight-hour drive, a star twenty light-years away—so maybe we should also measure time with distance: it changes things. A million miles on foot is farther than ninety-nine years ago, and perhaps a truer indication of the gap between me and the fellow who laid up the wall now warding off the rain-shot wind. I had no face for him, but I did seem to have his hands in the cut stones, and I sensed him in the very way I wanted to do with the first owner of my Seth Thomas clock but could not, lacking even the simplest of evidence—a fact or two salvaged from the universal amnesia that wants always to take from us what we have endured to learn, forever seeking to pry away that long root of our humanness.

  I sat. I didn’t need, really, to know which particular lintel of limestone the mason laid up when he was thinking of that pretty woman who had turned to look at him, or which rock dropped on his thumb and thereafter left it a prophet of damp weather, or which course he mortared the day when he kept hearing his dead father’s perpetual advice on taking time to lay things true: those details weren’t necessary here for dreamtime. Just the blocks themselves, his handmarks still evident on them, were sufficient, and his old stony presence on the prairie hill was enough to extend my walk by a million miles.

  Underneath the Overburden

  Within our blood move spirals of genetic inclinations bobbing like old messages in bottles cast into the sea: when I was eleven or twelve and scribbling out some kind of theme, I mentioned that I wanted to become a writer and a stonemason; the teacher asked whether I didn’t mean writer or geologist. I didn’t, and she thought the combination unlikely, but then neither she nor I knew about Robinson Jeffers. When I became the one, I didn’t entirely forget the other but subsumed it by laying amateurish rock walls here and about from time to time. One day my father mentioned that his great-grandfather had transposed the Old Testament into couplets, a task that sounded so appalling to me that I got curious about the man, my only forebear ever to make a dollar by writing. I went in search of him, David Grayston, and found an English immigrant who earned his way into the West by doing stonework on the Erie Canal; I
came across evidence that he descended from people who, for generations, had worked with a gray semiprecious stone found in Yorkshire—hence the name Grayston.

  I followed his trail deep into the Ozark hills and eventually came across a woman nearly a century old who remembered Grayston’s accent and the stone troughs and herbal remedies he made and sold from his wagon; later I found a copy of some lyrics he wrote, ones accepted by the Missouri legislature as the state song; but his biblical versification I’ve not yet seen. Having discovered this fellow of rocks and words, I felt I’d fished out and uncorked one of the bottles bobbing in my bloodstream, and David Grayston’s message was: My pen and chisel, their marks are upon you.

  I went in search of other occupations of forebears on my English and Irish sides. Not one of them followed any field that I have utterly no capacity for or at least interest in: no mathematicians, electricians, mortgage bankers. Now, I confess there is room for error here, since, if any of us goes back just twenty-five generations, say to the time of Chaucer, standing behind us are two parents and sixty-seven-million-and-some grandparents. Still, I like to think that in a cultural way ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and I believe that I would never have written this book without a stonecutting, versifying great-great-grandfather. Perhaps I’d never have written at all, and surely I’d never have sought out this particular piece of prairie, because, after the thrall of the grassland itself, the thing that lured me here was stone architecture: the adroitly laid rocks of the courthouse, the Cedar Point mill, and the bridges, banks, homes, fences, cattle chutes. Once I came to understand that these things were only one expression of what undergirded the place—geologically, biologically, and historically—then my quest turned toward the bones of the land, toward the hard seed from which this prairie and its peoples grow. Whenever we enter the land, sooner or later we pick up the scent of our own histories, and when we begin to travel vertically, we end up following road maps in the marrow of our bones and in the thump of our blood.