Horses and mules? I asked. Are we going back to the nineteenth century? He smiled at that.
We may have an alcohol-powered baler that’s pulled through the field by horses, and stationary engines to provide highly efficient belt power for jobs like threshing, but that doesn’t mean going backwards. We may also have microprocessors attached to drills for different applications of fertilizers. Some horse-drawn Amish buggies have digital clocks in them. We’ll employ a lot of sublety and sophisticated technology, but, clearly, we’ll also need a new sense of who we are, one that allows us to reintroduce some old technologies and not feel terrible about ourselves. This new sense will ask us to do more physical work, to use more of our own renewable biological energy: instead of jogging—there’s a response to a Paleolithic disposition—we’ll use that energy to produce something.
Once we come to see that we can no longer dose ourselves in the service of the industrial paradigm, then the question is: how far can we go with it? Today Americans use one-point-eight times as much energy to sponsor nitrogen fertility as we use for traction. This happens because we use natural gas as the source of nitrogen fertilizers. We’ll see that it’s to our advantage to use manure, both green and cow, rather than anhydrous ammonia. We can use legumes to replace nitrogen and carbon. Potassium and phosphorus and the other minerals, we’ll need to replace mostly by returning human and animal wastes. To fail at any of these steps is to go back to mining the land.
And pesticides and herbicides? I asked.
If we introduce synthetic chemicals to get at some bug or pathogen or weed, we’ll have to see it as a potential assault on life and ourselves. Redwoods, ospreys, Holsteins, or humans—we’re all made of the same twenty amino acids and the same four nucleic-acid bases. We all had one origin. The major consideration here is not to put any chemical into the environment that our tissues have no evolutionary experience with. We must regard any new synthetic chemical as guilty until proven innocent.
We may want to get into real flood control, where we say, “We’ve got a twenty-year period coming up and the probability of flooding is one in this many times, so let’s open the gates and let that fertility into our Chase fields rather than allow nutrients to head for New Orleans.” In Europe, up until the 1940s, many hill farmers would haul the bottom furrow up to the top of the slope each year. They understood it’s better to carry earth back up the hill than the bodies of malnourished children to the grave.
Let me try another run at this. The price of concentrating our sources of energy, as well as the idea that we can’t afford the risks of nukes, and even the notion of getting the water out of the cheese before taking protein and fat to town—all of these imply a resettling of America. The end of the fossil-fuel epoch will mean the need for many more people in small communities across the land. Cedar Point or Matfield Green, with their closed businesses and school buildings, are victims of an “unsettling of America,” to use Wendell’s phrase, victims of an industrial economy which created an industrial mind that destroyed their community and their local culture. Remember, high energy destroys information of the cultural and biological varieties. Conversely, I believe that a lower energy budget can lead to a kind of reculturization of folk. I’m working on a book now called An Education to Take Home, and that’s what we’ve been talking about—going home.
We’ve probably always had a little something in us causing us to wish for a neighbor’s land rather than a neighbor, and a society built around a fossil-fuel-powered industrial paradigm made that possible, and thereby validated greed in ways seldom available before. Now the time has come to call that avarice for what it is, sin, and then maybe we can find ways to reward another Paleolithic instinct, the urge to help a neighbor. That too is in us. Sooner or later, we come to this question of how to resettle the land. I’ll defend private ownership, but it’s simple-minded to say that the best ownership is always private. There’s some land that should be collective for the good of the community.
I said that Chase County homesteaders who came to claim a quarter-section at first treated the uplands as pastures held in common, but Americans today have difficulty in looking at history or evolution for ideas to solve problems.
We hold a churchyard cemetery or a city park in common and we make no fuss over those. Trouble comes when we feel our voices are being left out of managing the grounds—that’s why we don’t like big government. In all this, scale is crucial. Our Paleolithic urge to help a neighbor works as long as the scale isn’t too big or the neighbors too distant. One of the things that makes an Amish community viable is that there are no owners of large tracts. There’s a story about an Amish man who bought eighty acres and a friend asked him, “Can you make it on eighty?” and the man said, “I don’t know—I know I can make it on forty.” That’s an Amish paradigm.
I spoke of a mental rope around Chase County as a way of concentrating on what comes in and what goes out, a reminder to ask, how far can we go in exporting nutrients for dollars! How far can we go in exchanging protein for VCRs? Right now Americans are trading topsoil for Toyotas, and the deficit shows in both the budget and the land. Our ecological accountant will watch these things. He may tell us that to cut our deficit we’ll have to rebuild some of the little electrical plants on the Cottonwood River.
Like the ones that used to be in the old Cedar Point or Cottonwood grist mills up until a few years ago, I said.
When you have that mental rope in place, it forces you to think about closing all the loops, the cycles. Last spring I was in Strong City with a waste-management expert from Santa Barbara. He looked at those Dumpsters in Strong, and he said, “Do you know where the money they make goes? Chicago.” He said the twin towns could buy a truck, hire two or three people, and keep that “waste money” right there. To him the Dumpsters were mines. Now that’s a form of mining we should be doing. If we overcome our ecological illiteracy and see that answers are more cultural than technological, we can start thinking about how to take advantage of the mysteries of community and tribe and our Paleolithic longings.
I mentioned that a thing once possessed can’t be done without: in our evolution, when we found a better way to throw a pot or a better oven to fire it in, our chances for survival increased. But there can come a time, especially when resources are abundant, when an adaptive trait goes too far and becomes maladaptive.
I asked, a woodpecker beak needs to be only so big? A longer one will eventually extinguish the bird?
Well, the human mind is incredibly wily when it comes to economics. People catch on fast when things get down to dollars. One of those old schoolhouses in Chase County might just be a place to gather people and develop a new world view about the second coming of the homesteader. It might be the ideal spot to explore an agriculture that can run not so much on human cleverness but on the wisdom of nature. The benefits would accrue to the land and the farmer and much less to industrial overlords.
Concerning the Glitter Weaver
One morning several years ago when I was living in a small rental house in a Missouri field, I got out of bed to answer the phone. I picked up the receiver, sat down on the couch, and a mouse leaped from beneath the cushion onto my bare foot and vanished into the kitchen. I felt its claws on my skin. I called into the phone, Hold it! while I lifted the cushion: in the new sofa was a gnawed pit, and laid out neatly like nested spoons were five pink mouslings, unhaired, eyes unopened, each uttering faint squeaks, their tiny barbed mouths opening and closing to find a hot teat. Good god, I said to my friend. In irritation, revulsion, fascination, I described what I’d found. With full seriousness, he said, The mother won’t come back now that you’ve upset her—you’ll have to raise them. Raise them! I shouted, and then, Will this new couch make them a goddamn good enough nest?
For the previous three months, figuring we all could get along in some form of commensalism, I’d shared the house with mice and tolerated feculence and pungent dried urine in a shoe, accepted waking in the nig
ht to see a rodent inches away scratching around the lighted face of the clock. Calm down, my friend said. They’re only frigging mice. It was, of course, future frigging that gave me concern. I put the squirming nestlings onto a dustpan and carried them outside to die in the sun, but then decided a coup de grace was more “humane” (that word we use when we’re about to do something worse than bestial). I took a brick and, with one fell stroke, jellied them.
From that day on, rodents and I have had our territorial disputes, both in houses and, twice, in my little on-the-road truck; since that morning, I’ve been a setter of traps. I tell you all this so you’ll understand my surprise when, on one of my early trips into Chase County, I found myself becoming curious about wood rats, small beasts as engaging as any here.
Still, I can’t imagine that you would want to join in what I’m doing now: trying to disassemble a wood-rat nest built along and into a low rock ledge not far from Cedar Point. After all, who cares for rats? They are things we care against, like blackflies and ticks, only bigger. Last night I called my mother on her eightieth birthday and, in the course of our conversation, mentioned my plans for today. She, who often despairs of the materials that go into my writing, said, Oh, William! (Her maternal disappointments always turn me into William.) Can’t you find something uplifting to write about?
In all my time in the county, I’ve seen many wood-rat nests but never, even once, the animal, so for me it’s a kind of living fossil, something like the fusulinid tests I see in the Cottonwood Limestone of the courthouse walls, and I believe in its existence as I do in extinct sea critters: because of what they have built. For similar reasons I also believe in history. I’m trying, as I pull at this stick nest, not to break the pieces because I hope to tell you the precise number the rat has used, and I’d like to discover how the animal has interlaced them to make disassembly so difficult. I’ve wanted to do this since my first guided tour through the county several years ago when Larry Wagner, the Tallgrass Prairie Park advocate, gave me a wonderfully informed two days here. As his father bounced us down a lane in southern Chase, we passed an isolated Osage-orange tree: twelve feet up in it and woven among the branches was a huge conglomeration of sticks, enough material to fill a couple of fifty-gallon oil drums. If pigs could fly, they would build nests such as that one. Larry said it was a wood-rat lodge, but it looked more as if a crazed beaver had decided to go arboreal. I’d seen wood-rat nests before, but they had always been inside abandoned houses and outbuildings, at the bases of trees, along rock ledges and inside caves, and once even in the back seat of a derelict Buick. He could have told me, as believably, that a robin would just as soon build its nest at the bottom of a pond as in a tree.
Not long afterward I returned to that aerial nest and tried and failed to climb the thorned limbs. (The wood rat, weighing about a pound, is a native of this region but Osage orange is not, yet the rodent now takes to hedge like an eagle to a snag, and it may help spread certain trees into the prairie.) I found a long stick and poked at the lodge in hopes a resident would scurry out and reveal itself, but nothing stirred. Later I said to myself, you spend fifteen years killing rodents and then expect them to show themselves to you? You might as well wrap yourself in neon, the blood lust they must smell on you. Perhaps, but I’m not an eater of their flesh, as are some native peoples of the Southwest (the meat, so I hear, is better than quail).
Now: I’m laying the sticks of this rock-ledge nest in stacks of ten, but with all the breakage my count will be imprecise. It has taken an hour of untangling just to get four piles.
Countians call these animals pack rats or sometimes field rats but never trade rats, a name more common farther west. The number of citizens having a story about them is comparable to those people with tornado tales, although their favorite rodents are the rather rare black squirrels, found around here only in the twin towns. Pat Sauble, whose farm of classic stone buildings is nearby, told me of his father one night years ago hearing slow and heavy footfalls on the stair leading up to his bedroom in the old farmhouse; he lay and listened, then, with trepidation, rose quietly, got his gun, and crept to the head of the steps: he saw a wood rat struggling backwards down the risers and tugging a gunnysack with several potatoes in it: thump, thump, thump.
More commonly, wood rats keep their distance from people, and most of the big nests in Chase are in the relatively isolated southwest corner of the county. For this reason, as much as any other, the animals are not usually a nuisance unless you leave a vehicle unattended in a pasture for a year as one countian did: when he went to move his old pickup, he lifted the hood and saw nothing but sticks massed exactly into its shape as if they had been poured into a mold. And Frank Gaddie of Bazaar left a truck out for some time and then drove it into Cottonwood to have it worked on; when the mechanic put it on the rack and lifted it to look at the undercarriage, he found himself nose to snout with a big-eyed wood rat and whunked his head in recoiling.
These timid and reclusive animals, which keep a certain distance even from their own kind, are mostly nocturnal, occasionally crepuscular, rarely diurnal, and many countians who think they have seen one in broad daylight have, in fact, seen a Norway rat—the so-called house rat (Rattus norvegicus)—a destructive non-native species that has spread over all of America.
From a distance, the indigenous eastern wood rat does look something like the European rat, but it belongs to a different family and its habits and behavior are signally distinct. What Walt Disney did to the house mouse to turn it into Mickey, evolution has done to the pack rat to distinguish it from distant Old World relations: its ears are bigger and rounder and fuzzy, its tail shorter (but long enough to curl around its feet when it sleeps) and furred and not hairless and scaly; its face is a little blunter, its eyes larger and more innocent, its pelt softer and thicker and prettier; its belly and feet are white so that when it stands it looks as if it were wearing a tux and spats. But its milder disposition renders it no match for a house rat, and some of its aggressive behavior consists of nothing more than grinding teeth, vibrating lips, or rhythmically stamping feet (Thumper in Bambi). Unlike norvegicus it will not cram together or eat swill or live in filth: a wood rat in the wild usually has a separate chamber in its lodge, and special locations outside, for a latrine. (I know some Native Americans who have their own private understanding about why imported European species are so vile yet so successful.) These characteristics coupled with its preference for solitary life make it a winning little pet. John James Audubon wrote of a female and her three young he kept: They became very gentle, especially one of them which was in a separate cage. It was our custom at dark to release it from confinement, upon which it would run around the room in circles, mount the table we were in the habit of writing at, and always make efforts to open a particular drawer in which we kept some of its choicest food.
The pack rat earns its name from its habit of picking up objects, especially its kleptomania for bright and gleaming ones, and building them into its lodge: a bit of broken glass or china, a button, coin, bottle opener, small screwdriver. It is this avidity for glistering or metallic things that often makes it unnecessary for a farmer wanting the rats out of an old barn to bait his traps. A few years ago, a man living near the county line went to his shed to start the tractor but the ignition key wasn’t hanging on its nail, and he couldn’t find it anywhere about, so he had to write the manufacturer to get another; when he was cleaning an outbuilding the following summer, he found the old key and also some missing tools in a pack-rat den. He said later, I believe if the little devil’s legs had been long enough to reach the pedals, he’d have taken the tractor too.
Dawn and Donald Kaufman, zoologists doing research in the northern end of the Flint Hills, wrote a monograph entitled “Size Preference for Novel Objects by the Eastern Woodrat Under Field Conditions”: on several nights they set out tinfoil balls of four different sizes at various distances from lodges and learned that the animals preferred to make off wit
h small and medium spheres when close to the nest but, farther away, took the biggest ones; the Kaufmans concluded that the cost of transport increases with distance and object size and . . . large items are of greater net value than small items at the greater distance; that is, if you have to walk a mile to the grocery you’ll probably return not with one peach but a bagful. I assume that’s why Sauble’s wood rat quite sensibly carried off the whole gunnysack of potatoes.
The other common name, trade rat, derives from the rodent putting down some ordinary object it’s hauling to the lodge in exchange for one more unusual it happens across: campers have awakened in the morning to find a pocketknife or compass traded for a pinecone or deer turd.
Yet wood rats are fussy about what they allow in their dens. One researcher noticed a laboratory specimen carry a certain stick out of its nest box; he put it back, and the rat dragged it out again, and the observer returned it, and right back out it came; after a dozen times, the scientist gave up.
The scientific name, Neotoma floridana, so I’ve read, literally means “new-cut + of Florida”: a new species with cutting teeth first identified in Florida. But other accounts relate that members of the Lewis and Clark expedition were the first to write about the wood rat in 1804, when they were along the Missouri River in northeastern Kansas, and that Meriwether Lewis gave the earliest description during the winter the men spent near the Pacific coast in 1806. (It is almost certain that William Clark preserved several specimens of floridana and sent them downriver to Thomas Jefferson; of the 122 animal species and subspecies then unknown to science the expedition discovered, the eastern wood rat was the first.) Some years after Lewis wrote his description, the rodent received its scientific name. Now, I’m not so much as even an amateur Latinist, but I’ll still suggest another translation, one that may be correct only as a double entendre or, at the least, a pun among classically educated men of the early nineteenth century who knew their Vergil: “interweave-cut/pack + glittering,” that is, freely, “cut-and-pack weaver of glittering things.”
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