PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  You may wish to account for all of this with some easy, rational explanation; I’ve tried a few myself, but always I return to a belief that the source of my work is not so much reason as something darker and less comprehended, something arising from dreamtime. For the long journey into the prairie that I was just beginning, that obscure medicine had somehow already taken on the form of hawkness. I’m not quite saying that this figure-hawk is supernatural but rather only suggesting a less conscious mind using an emblem to reach toward a vague awareness and push it to the surface where shallow reason can look it over. (Does this sound like self-deception, hallucination? Very well, let the strict rationalist label it that and pigeonhole the hawk.)

  A couple of weeks ago, I was having even more trouble writing another chapter. Then the July heat broke and I opened the windows, a cool northwesterly blew through, ruffling my paper, and I was sitting before the unmarked, lined page, and two hours disappeared in staring and listening to the singing birds; invigorated by the coolness, now I couldn’t blame my trouble on the weather. Among the several different bird voices, I became aware that one came from a red-tailed hawk. I couldn’t see it but for some time heard its high rasping. It was circling close. During the next hour the blank page began to fill, words being called up, lured out, duped into revealing themselves: I, starving, hovered and dropped onto them as if they were plump voles. The next day I had the sketch drafted. I offer this as an illustration of hawk medicine, even if it’s nothing more than a longing conducive to useful delusion.

  This week I’ve been hoping for another approach of hawk-radiance, but nothing comes, and I sit blunted. Have I become hooked on a talon-like voice, become its psychic prey?

  Then very goddamn well, I say at last, maybe I can write around the goddamn problem: I advise myself to try again and this time speak only in names, in pictures—that’s the primitive method. (Have you ever taken a photograph of an aboriginal person and seen him become angry? People not yet completely seduced by European rationalism often believe something strong but beyond the comprehension of reason attaches itself to images and names.)

  I am going only to name and limn hawkness as I have encountered it in the tall prairie, where its form and habits suit themselves so perfectly to the windy and open hills as to make it a familiar of the place. This is a little lexicon, arranged not alphabetically but according to the way I’ve come to see hawk-figure, which in this particular case is the northern harrier, Circus cyaneus. The first dozen entries are recognized names, the other twelve from my dreamtime hawking. (A suggestion: when you finish reading, go outside and find a living thing you do not know the name of and look at it closely and give it one of your own making; then it will become yours to carry into dreamtime because memory depends finally upon what we create for ourselves, and, until we become nomenclators of a place, we can never really enter it.)

  So:

  CIRCUS CYANEUS: freely translated, “circling blueness,” a Latin misnomer, for neither the males nor females are blue and their distinctive flight pattern is actually one of angles (see Zigzagger); but, understood even more freely, the name suggests an aerial circus of feathery acrobats (see Somersault hawk).

  NORTHERN HARRIER: if the country is open, this slender bird may be found nearly anywhere in North America, although it usually isn’t any longer, and the Audubon Society has placed it on its Blue List (an early warning of endangered species); even so, in the Flint Hills it isn’t at all rare.

  MARSH HAWK: an old moniker given by easterners because of the former abundance of the bird over grassy wetlands; pesticides and the draining of marshes have almost made the name another misnomer; today, “prairie hawk” would be better but that already belongs to another species.

  BOG TROTTER: a description of some poetic resonance, albeit of little accuracy, for such an accomplished aerialist; if you want a trotter, look to the ostrich.

  HEN HARRIER: a name used by English settlers; outweighed as she is by a barnyard chicken, an American female cyaneus hunts not so much leghorns as prairie chickens; incidentally, while both of these tallgrass wild birds nest on the ground, cupido takes to the air only when it must and cyaneus comes to earth only when it has to: the grouse a reluctant, sometime bird, the harrier hardly needing legs or feet.

  FROG HAWK: if a harrier lives near a marsh it eats many amphibians; if it’s on the prairie it doesn’t; analog: Bostonians residing in Kansas are not commonly called bean eaters.

  MOUSE HAWK: in rearing its five to eight nestlings, a harrier pair may catch a thousand mice and voles; but many kinds of hawks prey on mice; analog: to call the French “bread people” would mislead you about Italians or Spaniards; some farmers even call the bird “mouser” as if it were an old barnyard cat.

  RABBIT HAWK: since a full-grown rabbit weighs more than a harrier, “bunny hawk” might be more accurate, but then, again, most raptors catch cottontails and hares.

  SNAKE HAWK: nearly any bird of prey could be called this; conversely, several species of reptiles that hunt eggs and chicks of the ground-nesting cyaneus could be named “harrier snake.”

  MOLE HAWK: it will eat a mole if it can find one above the ground; analog: the woodpecker as “peanut-butter bird.”

  BLUE HAWK: for the assumed color of the adult male’s back; a birder who sees a northern harrier as blue has no need of colorized black-and-white movies.

  WHITE-RUMPED HAWK: if you accept that birds indeed have rumps, an accurate name but of little elegance (would an Englishman want to be a “bleach-butted Briton”?); the white band, by the way, which the harrier almost flashes in its low and tilting flight, is diagnostic of the species.

  Now, suggestions for renaming cyaneus:

  SOMERSAULT HAWK: the nuptial flight of the male is a series of nosedives, often from several hundred feet down to within ten feet of the ground; one observer diagrammed it as a UUU seventy times; at the apex of each steeply bent crescent, the harrier will nearly stall before closing its wings, and then, in silence, turn head over tail, plummeting, head over tail again, still falling, only to swing upward at the last moment and barely clear the ground; sometimes also called “tumble hawk.”

  SKYDANCER: a mated pair may fly together, arcing marvelously, one of them rolling over to fly upside down and glide along, talons to talons; also called “ecstasy hawk.”

  OWL HAWK: with a facial disk of feathers that amplify sound, the nearly neckless harrier can find prey by listening almost as well as an owl; in this way, harriers seem a linking species between hawks and owls.

  MORMON HAWK: the male, unlike other North American hawks, is often polygamous; there is evidence that more than two thirds of harrier hatchlings are females, which may account for the polygyny; circumspect travelers in Utah may wish to call it the “Solomon hawk.”

  RIDGE RIDER: even though cyaneus is not a particularly big hawk, the female (larger than its mate) may have a four-foot wingspan that will keep it motionlessly aloft in the gentlest of drafts where she can fix her wings to let wind do the work; speaking of the effortless high flight a harrier occasionally engages in after eating, Audubon said, I have thought that it preferred this method of favoring digestion.

  CLOUD NESTER: the high ratio of wing surface to body weight of a harrier gives it a flight that observers time and again describe as “buoyant”; although Audubon found its flight elegant, he wrote that it cannot be said to be either swift or strong; but it is well sustained; even if the bird usually prefers flying low to high, it spends half of each day airborne, turning winds into perches as if it could grip the currents, something most useful in a prairie where reconnaissance posts are few; buteos and eagles soar, harriers float; these aerial corks may also be called “wind bobbers.”

  HANGMAN’S HAWK: viewed from below in certain lights, the contrast between the dark gray head and its lighter breast feathers gives the male the appearance of wearing a black hood.

  BOMBARDIER HAWK: in their nuptial display, a pair will fly together, the female some d
istance below, and her mate will drop a caught rodent that she, flipping upside down, will catch neatly in her talons; when she begins building a nest on the ground or in a bush (the only North American hawk to do so) the male delivers sticks by flying over and dropping them; once she takes up brooding, he will drop food to her either on the nest or in an aerial exchange: these tactics help conceal the location of the vulnerable nest.

  ZIGZAGGER: the harrier takes its prey by flying only a few feet above the grass, quartering an area back and forth, reconnoitering side to side, cutting diagonals as if loving the geometry of angles, holding its wings in a sharply upward dihedral (the reverse of the prairie grouse); upon seeing or hearing movement below, it halts suddenly as if it had hit an indiscernible wall, hovers, the long wings fanning and harrying (hence its common name) a ground beast into terrorized running and full exposure.

  VIVE-LA-DIFFÉRENCE HAWK: the northern harrier is the only North American raptor exhibiting pronounced sexual dimorphism and dichromatism: the differences in size and color are so obvious that a booming prairie grouse will continue its performance or even attack a male harrier that approaches, but when a female hawk appears the grouse will freeze or flush wildly; she, one and a half times heavier than her mate, has a plumage dark and streaky like a March meadow, while he is the color of an overcast sky; although throughout most of the year both sexes spend about the same number of hours in the air, their different colorings match the element most important to survival of their kind.

  INK DIPPER: moving to and fro repeatedly across the drafts, a male’s long, pointed wings tipped in black look like pens inscribing words on a foolscap of air as if he were amanuensis to the wind; the ancients, trying to read the future in the flight of birds, would surely have held this scrivener of a hawk sacred; sometimes also called “wind writer.”

  SPIRITUS HAWK: to wind, the primal life force of the prairie, Circus cyaneus is the embodiment, the hot-blooded beast: token, totem, transmogrification.

  At the Diamond of the Plain

  When I graduated from the University of Missouri in 1961 with a bachelor’s degree in literature, I had encountered in my studies nothing so absorbing as the mythic Yoknapatawpha County novels and tales of William Faulkner. In the week between my last exam and commencement, I lit out for his territory; I drove an old Ford and took along a friend whom I’d talked into going: he’d heard of Faulkner. From Columbia, Missouri, to Oxford, Mississippi, I rattled on about the Yoknapatawpha books, and Jack told stories about woods and waters (a muddy pond and a snapping turtle chomping off his great toe—that night I noticed he was fully ap-pendaged). As we followed a route of courthouse towns (Hernando, Senatobia, Sardis) into the red-earth piney woods of northwestern Mississippi, I thought I felt a strange presence coming from the land as if Yoknapatawpha were throwing out halos from dreamtime.

  We reached Oxford at dusk, drove around the courthouse square, past the gray granite Confederate statue (the half-wit Benjy always circles it three times in The Sound and the Fury), along the alley Joe Christmas flees down, and to a café called The Mansion, not so much because it was the only eatery open but because it bore the title of Faulkner’s most recent novel. Maybe we’d find him there. Jack could talk immediately and intimately with almost anyone, and he often used his slight stammer to advantage, especially with women. He was at once friends with the waitress and announcing our plans to tour the area, using as guides Faulkner’s books and the map of Yoknapatawpha County the writer drew. I asked whether he ever came into the café. Looking at Jack, she said, I’ve served him any number of times. Before we finished the meal, she had hurried home and returned with a paperbound copy, given her as a tip, of three Faulkner tales. The master had signed it. She said to Jack, What am I going to do with a book? and she gave it to him. He took his sweet time with it before permitting me to trace my finger over the small, vertical signature, and already I was thinking how easy it would be for a stammering college boy simply to disappear in the big Mississippi woods.

  The next morning, early, someone rattled the door of our room. My shorts and face rumpled by sleep, I squinted into the sunrise: there stood a slight man immaculately dressed in a khaki sport coat, plaid tie, and in hand a huckleberry walking stick of wonderful gnarls. He said, I hear you’re wanting to see the county. He was Malcolm Franklin, Faulkner’s stepson. Faulkner himself was away in Virginia. Malcolm, in his early thirties, offered to show us around, and I immediately began a pummel of questions until Jack nudged me and whispered, Whoa, boy! but Malcolm answered everything, shied away from nothing. Off we went, he driving and elucidating the miles of broken bams and tenant cabins and dusty pines with details from the books: the hollow tree Mink Snopes stuffs a body into, the creek where Candace muddies her drawers, the foundation of a barn Ab Snopes might have torched. Malcolm introduced us to family (I looked closely at them for signs of the master—the small hands, the narrow eyes), and he took us to Rowanoak, Faulkner’s antebellum home (but not inside because he didn’t want to betray his stepfather’s privacy), showed us Faulkner’s favored horse, an ill-tempered mare that kicked at us (the following June the beast threw the writer, an accident contributing to his death).

  We went into the woods to visit Walter Miller, called Uncle Buddy, a man who used to take Faulkner along on night hunts (on his first one, Walter said, young Bill got sick from liquor but thereafter stayed sober and listened to the campfire talk of hunters—some of them virtually illiterate—sources of what would become splendid moments in his books). Uncle Buddy led us down to a small spring, the head of Tobee-Tubbee Creek, and dipped up water to add to our dusty glasses of whiskey that cooled the June afternoon; it was a kindly water that made the best bourbon-and-branch I’ve ever put down. We rolled on till midnight when, at last, Malcolm let us go. Until those hours with him, I had never really known what it is to travel into a country, to go bodily into a topographic dreamtime.

  Seldom since have I been so well prepared to see a place, or been so profoundly guided once I arrived. There are, of course, drawbacks to such preparations (disappointment from preconceptions the worst), and I must tell you that isn’t the way I usually went about Chase County, where I liked to use the Columbian method: ¡Madre mía! Look what the hell I just found! But Diamond Spring, six miles beyond the Chase line in Morris County (almost due north of Elk cemetery), I treated differently because the first time I looked for it I ended up only with nightfall. I began reading about the site to get better directions, and I became absorbed and kept reading so that, when I finally did arrive there, I’d already traveled down a couple of centuries of the spring.

  For the second trip I put together a notebook of photocopies of early travelers’ impressions of The Diamond of the Plain, the most famous oasis on the Santa Fe Trail. I suspect there are twice the three dozen wayfarers’ accounts of the spring I’ve found so far.

  At one time in my life, when I planned on becoming a nature photographer, I considered specializing in time-lapse work, an interest that grew out of fascination with before-and-after, then-and-now pictures of townscapes and landscapes. When I saw the number of historical comments on Diamond Spring, a small fountain in a small vale, I realized how its record seemed out of proportion to its physical size, and I began assembling the notebook as a kind of verbal time-lapse rendering of the spring. After I at last reached the actual site, the collected-up timebook saved me from what otherwise would have been the grandest disappointment in my million miles of American travel. Heavy grazing in the Flint Hills has today increased water runoff and decreased percolation into the aquifers so that few springs flow as they once did.

  As a spring (I like the French word, source), the Diamond of the Plain is hardly the largest in the Flint Hills and certainly not on the Great Plains, but if you measure it as a source of written words it stands well with any in the nation, and, as a contributor to the great American historic themes of westering, red-white conflict, slavery, and the destruction of wilderness, it is truly nati
onal.

  The earliest head of the Santa Fe Trail was Franklin, Missouri, now washed away. Diamond Spring lies about a third of the eight-hundred-mile way between there and the terminus in north-central New Mexico at La Villa Real de Santa Fe, the Royal City of the Holy Faith (the oldest capital in the States). The trailhead moved steadily west until it reached Council Grove, Kansas; the local chamber of commerce calls the town “the Birthplace of the Santa Fe Trail,” which it manifestly is not. As that settlement grew more crowded in later years with people, wagons, oxen, and mules, travelers and traders often would assemble their caravans at Diamond Spring, so that it became both chronologically and topographically the last jumping-off point, a place at the pale of white rule, the spot where the short rolls of prairie hills yield to the much longer and broader and bowl-like swells of the Great Plains. Beyond the Diamond lay uncertain supplies of water, grass, and safety: from the spring westward, the trail passed through the fierce land of Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowa. In many ways, Diamond Spring was to the Santa Fe traveler what Plymouth, England, was to the Pilgrim—the last home port.

  Now: I’ve planned my arrival at the site to a late afternoon in April, a common time for westward-bound travelers to arrive, since the spring was the first stop out of Council Grove, sixteen miles to the northeast. I’m walking down the private lane that serves the Diamond Creek Ranch, where I’ve asked from a cowhand permission to enter. The road passes just north of a worn two-story frame house, on past an old barn, and drops down a slope into a shallow hollow to ford a wooded creek, and then heads into broadly open country with a view similar to that of an April a century ago.