PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  When the janitor made his third sweep past the library doors, the clunk of his mop an announcing of the hour, I reached to turn off the recorder, and Shannon Lopez said, Wait! We need a club where high school kids can go and dance. Everybody complains about drinking, drinking, high school kids drinking. Then that party got busted last weekend, where there were kids down to fourteen drinking. All the adults complain about it, but they don’t do anything. Someone interrupted, They ride their horses down Broadway in the rodeo parade with a six-pack hooked on to the saddlehorn, and then turn around and tell us not to drink. Shannon said, There’s nothing, not one thing, to do on weekends here—I mean, you can go to Darla’s and play pool, play video games, and that’s it. Adults say if there’s a club for us there’d still be drinking. I think it would cut down drinking a lot.

  Suddenly everyone was talking, and Kendra said, Nobody will go to the trouble to get one started, and Shawn, People never take interest to do it. And Dub, There’s just too many older people that won’t accept change, and Ray, Some of them complained about the new pizza place even before we got it. They didn’t want something new—they thought it’d bring in more businesses, more people, and Shannon, They’re scared to open new places because they think it’ll steal business from the places we already have, and Shawn, But new stuff helps improve other businesses. Competition helps.

  I asked whether any of them had urged their parents to get a club started, and they all fell silent, and somebody said, It’s easier just to complain. Glenna said, I always think: why go to a party? All you’re going to do is get in trouble or everybody is going to be talking about you.

  I asked why parties seemed to be so much trouble, and Shawn said, Alcohol. Kids find a dead-end road, and light a fire, and stand around and talk and listen to music, and drink—beer mostly, but some whiskey and schnapps too. Then there was that raid last week. Dub said, During rodeo, the adults block off Broadway and listen to music and drink—the same thing they get after us for on a dead-end road. Jeremy said that the girls liked to stand together at these things and sing along with one special song. When he mentioned it, they all began talking, describing the scene: pickups and cars pulled together, the fire opening a primitive circle in the prairie night, the music thumping, the boys calling out, the girls knotted and singing along, loud and in a peculiar key: “You Shook Me All Night Long.”

  Days later, when I listened again to their words, it seemed I heard a vision of a future Chase County very much like the one they knew, the difference being their absence from it. And I remembered a grammar school teacher here once telling me, I wish we’d learn to love ourselves less and our children’s future more.

  In Kit Form:

  The Cottonwood Chapter

  Now: you are dreaming, walking in your dream, here in the hills, alone. If you continue you will find what I have hidden for you, if you want it. The time is October, and you are far south in the quadrangle, dreamwalking up to a crossroads, and you see the big and isolated cottonwood tree; the massive bole you cannot encompass even halfway around with your arms (its grandness keeps it from ungainliness), its bark furrowed deeply as if plowed, the whole tree stubbed down by the wind, the branches thick as trunks of lesser trees, the lower ones curving nearly to the earth; the leaves, toothed spades, little mirrors throwing shimmered light, dangle so brightly yellow at sunrise and sunset that you can believe you never really saw true yellowness before, not even in ingots hot from the furnace: it’s as if the leaves have used the summer to leach color from the sun, and now, as the days cool, they release their pent heat through their yellow light. Take a book and sit beneath the tree and read and see the pages turn golden as if they too receive the old and sponged-up solar extravagance. The cottonwood grows just beyond the crossroads in a damp draw, and you will find here the dream-kit I have left you, and in it the pieces I’ve gathered but not assembled, because they are to be yours, things for you to put your imprint on, but there are no directions. All I want is to show you some of what is in a name, to cut it open to reveal how meaning accumulates like sap rings in a tree trunk, each year deepening the name, thickening it.

  The writer writes, but there is no real book until the reader enters a shared dreamtime and makes the connections. So: start in the middle and read outward, start at the end and read upward; it is yours to make: design, whittle, cut, snip, tie, glue, trim, rasp, paint, grow vexed, cuss, and pitch it across the room (we will then share one more thing): it is yours to show how the pieces can fit together, perhaps even to demonstrate how the job should be done:

  a few years ago, an easterner moved to the Flint Hills during a drought and worried about the land he’d bought; he went to bed—his first night on the prairie—and outside his window was a cottonwood; a breeze came on to stir the heat, and he heard the sound of rain, and he rose to go to the window: the leaves moved in the dry air, their shaking and soft clattering like raindrops; later he said, The wind in that dry tree was a promise

  the largest cottonwood in Kansas has a trunk twenty-seven feet around and reaches ten stories into the air, and its deepest roots lie another four stories below

  the Plains Indian, at least before the coming of the Europeans, had a use for nearly every part of a bison, even down to its spirit (when the red man finished with a buffalo nothing was left but memory of it, and that he used also); the animal provided him what a white man might find along the main street of a town: food, lodging, tools, medicine, recreation, religion; and these gifts also came from the cottonwood: bison to tree is as river to vale; and, as if to point up the link, sometimes a cottonwood will grow up in the dampness collecting in an old buffalo wallow; Christians may understand the power of such a conjunction to an Indian if they imagine a sapling from the Tree of the True Cross arising from a footprint of their Fisherman

  the eastern cottonwood, Populus deltoides, has other names: cotton tree, whitewood, and necklace poplar, this last from the hanging catkins that look like a strand of green pearls; and, in fact, Indian children tied catkins together and wore them around their necks, and sometimes they dangled catkins from their ears like emerald pendants

  Lewis and Clark accomplished much of their grand expedition seated in the hollowed boles of cottonwoods they cut into pirogues; they carved out two trunks at the mouth of the Missouri River and six more during their first winter stay at Fort Mandan, which itself was built almost entirely, possibly even the chimneys, of cottonwood: the palisades, roofs, tables, benches, beds, shelves; they heated the small rooms with cottonwood, and over its coals they cooked sides of bison, deer, antelope, biscuits, coffee; the next season, when they needed to portage around the great cataracts of the Missouri, they made trucks with cottonwood wheels and spent eleven days hauling eight heavy dugouts, each some thirty feet long, around the five falls

  a Mexican calls the cottonwood alamo

  in June, the Cottonwood River can slow, seeming to avoid the heat of quick movement, and, as if to insulate itself, will lie nearly still and quilted over with the white fluff of cottonwood seeds, and a swimmer comes from the water covered in wet down; unlike many of the other common native trees here—oak, hickory, walnut, hackberry, redbud—the cottonwood depends for its dispersal not upon mammals and birds but upon the two oldest things in the hills: wind and water

  when Illinoisan John Wright in 1842 was looking for a tree suitable to use as a living fence on the prairie, a farmer suggested cottonwood, but Wright said, Something not quite so old-maidish would look better, and he thought that the tree had about it too much primness and mustn’t-touch-me sort of air

  in a single year a cottonwood sapling in an ideal riparian location can grow twice the height of a man

  although things have changed today, this mustn’t-touch-me tree, with its nearly grainless, featureless white wood, once furnished (despite its inclination to warp and check and its only moderate strength) rafts, cabins, bams (studs, joists, rafters, floors, bins, cribs, mows, stalls, troughs, but not shingles or
siding), churches, hotels, coffins, fences (in a big tree are a thousand rails, said an immigrant’s guidebook; but in contact with soil, cottonwood posts seem to melt), wagon bodies, saddletrees, chicken coops, egg crates, strawberry cartons, flour-barrel staves, excelsior, plywood, newspapers, basket veneer, iceboxes, ironing boards, trunks, cigar-box linings, woodenware, matchsticks, ice cream sticks, and (so appropriate for an offshoot of the wind) kite sticks

  the cottonwood has almost no defenses against things eating or cutting it other than its fecundity

  some Plains Indians, like the Hidatsa, believed shadows cast by cottonwoods possessed intelligence and would counsel a troubled person; while all the standing peoples have voice, few are so sweetly loquacious as the gentle and generous cottonwood

  one summer, near the southern county line, a cottonwood outside a boy’s bedroom died, and the rest of the summer he had trouble falling asleep in the new quiet

  the Timber Culture Act of 1873 gave 160 acres of land to any settler who would plant ten of those acres to trees; because a cottonwood requires little care, grows quickly, and stands well against drought, blizzard, wind, and heat, Kansans commonly planted it to claim their free land: it was the mortgage tree

  a countian found his air conditioner not working well; he removed the grille and discovered across the fins a strange gray blanket, and he pulled it away, a perfect rectangle the size of a cradle: it was a knitting of cottonwood fluff; that fall he cut the tree down

  grasses murmur but a cottonwood seems to be the articulating of the tongueless wind: to take comfort in this garrulity is to use the sound and not let it go wasted

  settlers once cut white inner pulp from the tree and made a delicacy called cottonwood ice cream; but no one remembers the recipe, and people no longer know how to eat a cottonwood

  taxonomists cannot agree whether the eastern and western cottonwoods are one species or two or perhaps more; the structural variations in even a single grove may be evidence of genetic drift—a most American thing—or it may be that the cottonwood is quite genetically plastic, an ancient survival device (and an emblem for future continuance); whatever the case, the tree is not likely to become a symbol for the shaved-head, new über-alles boys

  the fragrant leaf buds are fat little resinous things like droplets standing on end, and to break one open is to smell some primitive lowland long before the coming of mankind; from these buds Plains Indians boiled down a yellow dye to color arrow fletchings

  in 1937 the cottonwood became the Kansas state tree; some citizens wanted a flowery something, like the hawthorn of Missouri or the redbud of Oklahoma, and they complained, but there is an honesty to Kansans born of a long and necessary practicality: the legislature voted for a typical, working tree

  its riverine life: sometimes a storm shears off a living branch and it is carried downstream where it may snag along a sandbar and take root; a Missouri hiker recently testified: he cut a staff from a cottonwood and trimmed it to shape and walked all afternoon with it, then stuck it into a riverbank, and when he passed by weeks later his staff had rooted and leafed; Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh and it turned into a serpent; a walker sunk down his stick and it became a tree

  in western Kansas, were it not for the cottonwood, the old plains joke would be true: the state tree is the utility pole

  to cure gastric upsets caused by drinking alkaline water, Indians showed whites how to make a cottonwood remedy; trailman Charles Goodnight, inventor of the chuck wagon (he made the first one out of Osage orange, not cottonwood), wrote that cowhands would get the inside bark, boil it to a strong tea, and drink liberally. It was a hell of a drink, a wonderful astringent, and a bitter dose. But it was a sure shot

  from the sap, early-day farmers made cottonwood syrup

  some prairie citizens believe that a cottonwood calls lightning down upon itself because it carries so much water; the tongue of the great fire-bear lapping up honey

  after the Civil War, when Kansans were building the capitol in Topeka of Cottonwood Limestone (four nouns, one thing), the blocks lay piled about the grounds; when construction finished, landscapers found a fair-sized cottonwood growing next to where a pile of stone had been, and some people said the seed arrived stuck to a block from Chase County (for a tree that moves its generations by wind and water, a seed transported by stone from the old Permian sea was indeed a novelty); others said one of the stakes tying down an old wooden crane had rooted itself; the landscapers left the sapling, and it grew into the preeminent tree in the state: the 1928 book Trees of Kansas has a picture of it on the cover with the caption Kansas’ Best Loved Tree, the Statehouse Cottonwood

  the catkins furnish food for quail and prairie chickens and grouse, and meadowlarks (the state bird) take the silky fluff to line their ground nests, and Indian children pulled the moist cotton out of the capsules to chew like gum

  around the turn of the century, urban people looked for a tree that would withstand coal smoke in their cities, and they found the glossy varnish of cottonwood leaves shucked off soot (rain off the goose), and the trees thrived; in fact, they grew too big for the confines of streets and yards

  in his 1828 description of the western states, Timothy Flint said of the cottonwood, when these are cut in the winter, the moment the axe penetrates the center of the tree, there gushes out a stream of water, or sap; and a single tree will discharge gallons; if there is a rot pocket, this can indeed happen, and the trunks may also discharge a jet of methane that can be lighted like a lantern

  a cottonwood reaches its mature height in the first half of its typical eighty-year life and then spends the remaining years spreading its crown as if it understands what other plains-life needs from it is not verticality but protective breadth; as it opens outward, it prunes its branches, and beings underneath receive a beneficent blend of sun and shade; yet the tree itself thrives on no protection other than a damp swale; not growing well in close proximity to other trees, it seems to want nothing between it and the sun and wind, and, by taking from these, it intercedes for other life: a shield against the blade of the wind, a rampart against the arrows of the sun

  not only Lewis and Clark but also fur traders and frontiersmen paddled into the West in cottonwood pirogues and dugouts; the Kansas Indian trader Frederick Chouteau said that a pair of four-foot-circumference cottonwood logs seventy feet long could be lashed together to carry fifteen tons of cargo; later, Missouri river steamboatmen fired their boilers with cottonwood, and overland travelers relied on it, and surveyors laying out Jefferson’s grid marked certain section corners by driving a cottonwood stake or planting a sapling; the conquest of the West would have happened without the tree, but it would have happened differently and probably less felicitously

  curling the roundly triangular leaves into cones and pinning the edges together, Indian children made toy tepees, and the shape was so accurate that the Lakota holy man Black Elk believed that in an era long before him people had learned how to cut the pattern for a bison-skin tepee from the shape of the cottonwood leaf

  travelers on the Santa Fe and Oregon trails, once past the ninety-sixth meridian, learned to watch the horizon for a grove or even a lone cottonwood: it was a beacon, a beckoning (NEXT SERVICES 30 MILES); since the trees grew mostly near streams, springs, or seeps, they were signposts of water, of grass for animals (one countian describes covered wagons as grassoline-powered), of firewood, of shade, even of news when preceding travelers left notes folded into the bark; a hollow in a bole might hold honey, and the trees gave the woodlanders comfort, joy, and a spiritual relief from the long and unnerving open miles; the perpetual shaking chuckle of the leaves, a liquid sound that could almost quench a thirst, seemed a promise of the mountain forests so far away; for two generations of plains travelers, the cottonwood was a wayside inn

  in the four volumes of the Chase County Historical Sketches there are a few poems written by the citizens, and one third of them are about cottonwoods; this emphasis may deriv
e from the habit of the tree separating itself from wooded vales and taking to draws in the uplands where it assumes prominence by its isolation: to prairie people it becomes an obvious metaphor, a thing to be personified in a land where almost nothing else so obviously can be

  although the cottonwood is to the Osage orange as soft is to hard, round to sharp, chalk to marble, medicine staff to war club, homesteaders used both trees for shelter belts and believed both would increase rainfall (neither tree, of course, can bring rain, but the cottonwood does reveal where the once and future rains sleep)

  a Missourian came into the county and so loved the cottonwood that one spring he went to the river and picked from a sapling some small leaves, sweet and aromatic; he dried them, ground them in a handmill, and ate them on scrambled eggs and poached fish, and others he crumbled in his palm until they smelled sweet and mixed them with his favorite English tobacco to smoke in his pipe

  young Indian women placed the tip of a cottonwood leaf between their lips and pressed the sides of it to their nostrils with thumb and forefinger, and then, expelling their breath through their noses (said the old prairie ethnobotanist Melvin Gilmore), they vibrated the leaf in such a way that very sweet musical notes were produced, birdlike or flutelike