PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  —George Douglas Brewerton,

  Wars of the Western Border, or, New

  Homes and a Strange People (1860)

  On the levee at Kansas City stood a sort of omnibus or wagon, used to convey passengers to and from Westport, upon either side of which was painted in flaming capitals the words “BORDER RUFFIAN.” Standing about in groups, or running in every direction, were numbers of the men who claim for themselves that gentle appellation. A description of one of these will give the reader some idea of their general characteristics. Imagine a man standing in a pair of long boots, covered with dust and mud and drawn over his trousers, the latter made of coarse, fancy-colored cloth, well soiled; the handle of a large bowie-knife projecting from one or both boot-tops; a leathern belt buckled around his waist, on each side of which is fastened a large revolver; a red or blue shirt, with a heart, anchor, eagle, or some other favorite device braided on the breast and back, over which is swung a rifle or carbine; a sword dangling by his side; an old slouched hat; with a cockade or brass star on the front side, and a chicken, goose, or turkey feather sticking in the top; hair uncut and uncombed, covering his neck and shoulders; an unshaved face and unwashed hands. Imagine such a picture of humanity, who can swear any given number of oaths in any specified time, drink any quantity of bad whiskey without getting drunk, and boast of having stolen a half dozen horses and killed one or more abolitionists, and you will have a pretty fair conception of a border ruffian, as he appears in Missouri and in Kansas.

  —John H. Gihon,

  Geary and Kansas (1857)

  Idealism must always prevail on the frontier, for the frontier, whether geographical or intellectual, offers little hope to those who see things as they are. To venture into the wilderness, one must see it, not as it is, but as it will be.

  —Carl Becker,

  “Kansas” (1910)

  In the Quadrangle:

  Homestead

  I’m not going to hide this from you: I don’t much like the Homestead quadrangle, lying as it does with all the mystery of a checked tablecloth, its section lines marked so clearly by square fields and roads cut into the high and flattish topography that they show up in satellite photographs. To drive the gridded acres here, except for a single mile in the most northeastern section of the quad, is always to be aligned perfectly with true north or precisely ninety degrees off it; that there are only four compass headings on the Homestead roads is an emblem of this area of wheat and milo and some overgrazed pastures, a forlorn place filled with evidence of mankind but mostly empty of men: a dried-up water hole on the veldt where you find only tracks of its inhabitants. In this place, I end up talking to myself to disrupt both its desolation and my sadness at seeing the grid so heavily laid onto the land. The lines I look for are imagined ones linking seens with unseens, heres with theres, nows with thens. I’ve wondered whether I could ever set this quad before you in some fairness to it and its oddlings, things I’ve had a hard time finding. I haven’t even been able to learn the origin of the name Homestead beyond its being three widely separated wooden buildings—school, community hall, Friends meetinghouse (the post office is gone); this is the only quadrangle that never had anything you might call a village, and today there are barely enough residents for an ice cream social.

  One evening I sat in a small and dreary motel room, where I stayed from time to time, and studied the topographic map of Homestead, stared at this piece squared into Jeffersonian perfection. I saw how all but one of its eighteen section lines had a road along at least part of its length; looking at its pattern was as interesting as staring at a wire hog-fence. For a fellow laying out his little travels around a grand grid, I was baffled with the imaginary become real, inked lines turned to cut-in roads, and I disliked that perfect scotching of the prairie which imprisoned the place and fenced me out; it was a net to ensnare the land and haul dark mysteries like a load of pilchards into the light (as a caught fish learns, the important thing about a net is not the interstices but the web of lines). In my time in the quad, I could never find a way to escape through the gaps into where the real place might lie, and I seemed equally incapable of turning the grid into a screen that might sift out artifacts.

  I stared at the map and got annoyed and cussed it. I poured out a couple of inches of straight cornmash made along the Missouri River from limestone spring water, and I went outside to the ice machine; it was broken, so I muttered back to the shabby room. Then I remembered several smooth rocks I’d picked up in the quad that morning, and I brought from the car a couple the size of grouse eggs and rinsed them and put the cool stones into the tumbler of bourbon. If you like whiskey and prefer it truly neat, cold rocks are better than melting ice. I set the map up again and sipped and listened to the clinking stones, the whiskeyed rocks, the rocked whiskey, and I recalled an afternoon some weeks earlier when I’d dropped a chip of Chase County limestone into a glass of cider vinegar and watched it fizz, and, over the next couple of days, saw the rock disappear by a third: the county dissolved.

  I rattled my tumbler and watched for another transformation, rolled the stones around, jiggled them, and sipped in full hopes I was drinking some of the bones of the quadrangle I was fenced out of. In the sixteenth century, Europeans ground up dried flesh and bones of Egyptian mummies and infused them into concoctions they drank to ward off death. You see what I’m suggesting about some prairie elixir curing my dead-end approaches to Homestead: if a traveler can’t penetrate a place, maybe it can penetrate him; sometimes he must let his theres come to him.

  I tried not to look at the map but rather to watch it so that it might assume a presence, but it lay motionless, full of ink barriers. I walked around it, circled it, and I took out my homemade Claude glass and turned it on the grids, now tiny curving things almost disappearing in their smallness, and then an idea: why not erase the lines?

  The only way I knew how to accomplish that was to go back into Homestead at night and noctivagate the encroached quad, let darkness conceal the intruded place, let my dimmed vision turn a graphpaper land into a blank sheet that might open to dreamtime. After all, no place on a map carries more mystery than its blanknesses, the terrae incognitae old cartographers inscribed with “Here Be Strange Beasts.” Night travels permit you to forgo certain baggage—pretenses, preconditions, assumptions—and they can let you cut loose from some moorings, even go a little loony under the privacy of darkness: when you disorient yourself, the country changes, often for the better, and sometimes you can then encounter it directly. Purblindness might work.

  So, the next evening I went out to erase the barrier, to slip through it, to circle the mystery somehow, let the spin of night hours hook me around the place to show me its nether side; maybe I could find a way to travel it as a moon does its planet. Then, perhaps, would arise oddities of the Homestead night.

  Now: I am walking, and it’s just that time when owls take to their perches to wait for the last drop of day when even their silhouettes disappear into edgeless night and you can’t distinguish wings from the dark carrying them. Like the owls, I’ve dozed much of the afternoon to earn wakefulness. I’m starting out from near a small tree that I came across last October: the thing was bare and empty then as now, its stark isolation stopping me. While I sat some distance away trying to sketch it into a notebook, a robin flew in, and the tree looked as if it had sprung a new leaf, an autumn-colored one; then came another robin, and some more, and quickly a dozen leafed the tree in orange feathers and got it with song: the Mysterium calling, flaunting itself and its sleight of hand. Then the birds were gone, the whole thing so astonishing that some minutes later I could doubt I had actually seen it.

  I’m using the remembered power of the tree as a doorway, and I’m walking, kit on my back, a small flashlight (to write by) around my neck, a cottonwood stick in hand. On down the graveled road, off onto a grassed lane, the moon still far from rising, the grid not yet disappeared although subdued like a map stained with india ink. I’m p
assing a squared grove of coffee trees, sure evidence of a house once here (in this county, clusters of the three C trees—cedar, catalpa, coffee—are virtual tombstones to vanished homesteads): settlers grew coffee trees for fenceposts and sometimes ground up the large brown beans and brewed them as a substitute for coffee; Plains Indians, using syringes made from animal bladders and hollow leg bones of prairie chickens, dried and pulverized the bark and mixed it with water for an enema. I am walking: a couple of miles west of here is another kind of tombstone, a rock tablet over the spot where eight men died when an airplane fell out of a windy sky in 1931.

  The road blurs in the descending night, but it’s still an evident roadway, marked out on one side by a line of Osage-orange hedge grown huge, and I’m working to see the lane in its fullness, not as a flat line of two dimensions but a thing running in three—or four—dimensions, a cartographer’s mark encircling the planet: the due-west course I’m on could be the first leg of a journey to Yosemite and on across the sea, to Yangyang, South Korea; over the Great Wall, into the Chinese interior, across the Caspian Sea, down the length of Turkey, past the Parthenon, into Palermo, Sicily; along the southern edge of Don Quixote’s La Mancha, the Atlantic, the Azores, Baltimore. This road is not an isolated parallel but a piece of the conflux of the greater grid, a planetary circumscription to read: far in front of me right now a Korean must be walking toward his noon meal, and behind me in the dawn an Athenian coming from a tryst, and along this line someone lies sleeping in Maryland. A road become a long circumferential is less forlorn than a short dark strip a walker finds himself on. Stopping to make a note:

  Straightness in Kan illusion, short-sightedness—grid here not plane figure but chunk of webbed circles—isn’t it obvious squared-up Kan isn’t planogram but piece of sphere? Kansas is bent.

  I cross under a fence into a harvested sorghum field that should have never been plowed into this erodible slope (countians call tillage broke land—the meaning ramifies). The furrows and stover are bad footing, and I fall and have to grope for my stick. And on, scaring a prairie chicken into a shattering batter of wings. With my stick leading my plowed-field gait, I look like a walking tripod. A rustling: switch light on: a little, humpy, quick-footed shadow rolling from side to side: raccoon.

  Back to the road again, moving along too fast, slowing down, under another fence, stopping, pulling out a small pad from my kit and sitting down on it in the dewed grass. (A walker displaces the territory as a swimmer does water, but a quiet sitter is a dropped stone and his ripples subside and water laps back in: submergence.) Yesterday I heard that a period of meteor showers has begun, and I lie back, arms behind head, a cushion of flesh, and I watch, but only the slow slippage of stars. The darkness is as complete as it will get and the silence the same, so perfect that a lier-back can listen for the planets in their transit, but what I hear is my watch ticking down. (Thomas Merton wrote, Whose silence are you!) I smell the sweetness of fallen hedgeballs: eyes yield to ears and nose, an animalizing of a man.

  Heavy scratching in the dry grass: in the flashlight beam a large beetle that neither speeds nor slows nor diverges from its own course toward Yangyang, and behind it another bug angled to miss the entire Far East, and then a cricket hopping onto my leg: lie still and the place will swarm you. As a secretary of under-life, I make notes of these things. Boston Corbett, after he shot down John Wilkes Booth in Virginia, came out to Kansas where he would lie on his back, rifle locked toward the sky, and shoot hawks; I’m lying here in hopes the stars will shoot. The quiet is so immense that it is oppressive, and it seems the whole prairie has paused to listen to me—my breathing, heartbeats—and this is the peril of night travel: it can remove everything around you and throw your attention back inward as if darkness were a black mirror. I am here to go the other direction, to find not an egocentric orbit but an eccentric one. Self-advice: escape, heed the sky as the countians do.

  Then, across the blackness, a slash of keen-edged light, and it’s as if I’ve been lying inside a great gourd deftly sliced open by a long and gleaming blade that quickly withdraws. Then there is another meteor, its track shorter and less bright, and, over the next minutes, more star-chips glancing off the black dome, hail off a tin roof, but all this falling in universal silence. From the west an owl call, then a high and wavering warble of a coyote, a yipping answer, then the owl again, and it seems the white intrusions have stirred things into turmoil, the silent dark abruptly strung with light and voice; then it’s all finished, and it’s one more moment you could doubt you actually encountered, an occurrence of no more substance than a dream remembered.

  I am walking, following the roadway by feet rather than eyes, checking my compass: southward this section line is a path to Corpus Christi and the ruined Zapotec pyramids of Monte Alban, and: the Pacific (just missing the Galápagos—Melville’s Encantadas, Darwin’s finches), the South Pole, Indian Ocean, Mandalay, the Himalayas, the western desert of Mongolia, the white heart of Siberia, the North Pole, Lake Winnipeg, and Fargo, North Dakota, and home again, home again: Homestead.

  Eastern sky warming in yellow light, moonrise begins, breaks the horizon, still a few days from fullness but big in the low sky (only in coming up and going down does its size fit the prairie). I can see the road for some yards ahead now, and it grows even brighter, strangely so, and behind me gravel crunches: a car approaching, slowing alongside, stopping, the sheriff’s deputy saying, Where you going, fella? I can’t resist it: I’m on the road to Mandalay. He says, You mean Cassoday? I’m unable to think of a believable explanation for walking an empty, isolated lane at two in the morning, and he says, Are you from Missouri? (how does he know that?) and, yes, and, Is that your vehicle way back there, XZW-064? Yes, and, Aren’t you that there book writer? Yes, and he nods, that apparently explaining everything, and he rolls on, slows again, and calls, Of course, this road don’t go through to Cassoday, and he’s gone, and I’m thinking how a fellow widely considered a half bubble off plumb gets out of much tedious explanation.

  At three o’clock the moon disappears behind a cloud bank. I haven’t encountered much, and I head back to my starting point. In the car, rolling gently, the headlights glaring off the road and reflecting across the dashboard, and then (how could it be?) a silhouette scurries across the dash, and I’m coasting, stopping, reaching slowly for my flashlight, and there in the beam, on the passenger seat back, are two minutely gleaming eyes. Both of us, I and the mouse, frozen. And then it, without panic, is gone as if I’d dreamed it too. I’m opening doors, emptying the car of maps, books, cameras, tape recorder, everything into the road, then I’m inside and thumping the seats, crouched and stamping and yelling the mouse out (and thinking, if the deputy comes along now, even being a book writer won’t account for this).

  Rain begins to fall, and I’m packing up again, and off down the road, headlamps glaring: it’s a night of small eyes giving me back my beams transmuted into green and yellow and red cabochons, and I wend a slow course among the gemmed heads, and they watch, I watch, we all watch, an eye-laden night. Next to me a scrabble of sharp feet and a small arched silhouette across the dash again, and around to the seat top beside me. Why does it keep moving toward my head? Is it going to run for the darkness between shirt collar and back of my neck? I’m trying to figure what a man does with a live rodent under his shirt, tiny claws into his flesh, the panicked scrambling of them both for an exit: two cornered creatures. I’m about to be vermined. I’m driving sixty-five, the car yawing in the loose gravel, and I force myself to slow (not so many men die from mice in their shirts as from speeding on rock roads), trying to enforce a calm, trying to reason: how could it get into the car? Think! A true fleder-maus?

  On the road a possum makes an accustomed dangerous, unhurried, stupid crossing, then another, hunched and pulling and gnawing, its hairless rattail a stabilizer, yellow eyes glowing, and I’m speeding again, wondering how I got so far from the highway. Am I circling? I’m driving with my shoul
ders drawn forward to pull my collar against my neck, hunched like an old geezer, and I’m thinking, a mouse on the floor is a mouse, but a mouse at eye level is a beast, and I’m remembering how George Orwell’s Winston Smith was terrified into Big Brother’s conformity by torturers holding caged rats to his face. I’m reasoning, or trying to, how could (really now) a mouse get into a car? Surely there’s no unknown species, some rare leaping prairie kind attracted to automobile dashboards. At least it isn’t (is it?) a wood rat, which will take to a vehicle as readily as a teenager. This all must be the workings of a mind that has stayed up too late, exposed itself to too much moonlight. A thing imagined. (Do I hear gnawing?)

  Then the darkness suddenly fractures, and out of the jagged rupture flies a sharp and intense light, and then it’s gone like a lantern dropped overboard; then thunder, big raindrops hitting hard, and: fracture, flash, blast: and again. At the wheel a hunched madman stamps his feet to keep a varmint at bay, his radio socking out hard to terrorize things into immobility. Then the sweet asphalt of highway 13, and speeding again. Up the county, north, east, neck aching from the distorted and ridiculous posture, rain bashing down. At long last, the glow of Emporia. I’m into the all-night market and trying to find the right aisle (Health Aids? Pet Supplies? Sporting Goods? Cleaners? Where’s Verminalia?) The clerk punches the cash register: one chunk of longhorn, one mousetrap. Apparently accustomed to bizarre purchases at four in the morning, she says nothing but only looks at the wet man with the lunatic eyes.

  I am driving back through the rain-blown night toward my dismal room, and on the car floor beside me is a set trap. Here, mouse. Shoulders still up under my ears. Down the highway: on the road to Mandalay where the flying mouses play, and the moon comes up like thunder.