PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Until Black Hole XTK Yields Its Light

  Even before I came down off Roniger Hill that early morning many months ago with an image of a topographical grid in my head, the materials of this book had been moving about and arranging themselves like iron filings: I, a magnet, moved and they shifted but kept various patterns. After a few months I began to see what would fill these seventy-six chapters, although usually not how I would do it. There was only one exception, a renegade chapter that kept jibing about, slipping from quadrangle to quadrangle and, at times, even leaving the county altogether; but I wrote steadily along, slowly removing the places where it could veer off until, finally, I pinned it in this distant corner of the county, this far reach of the book.

  Whenever I found a topic to give to it, to fill it with, the chapter would appear to hold that subject steady for a day but then, the next morning, the material would vanish as I realized it wasn’t really what I was after. It seemed as if some trade rat of the soul would creep in at night and quietly carry off the shining subject and not leave in exchange even so much as a pinecone or deer turd.

  Editors and fellow writers said forget it, go with seventy-five chapters—after all, who would miss one? The answer, of course, is that I would, and, now that I’ve raised the issue, you would too. Whenever I’m writing and fail or foil my instincts, I end up in regret. I began calling the chapter The Black Hole: a thing with a mystic gravitational field so intense its light can’t escape to reach me. I can’t see the damn thing, but I know it’s there.

  What I’m setting down now, then, is not the subject of this chapter, unless you want to consider topiclessness as a topic. I could, of course, pick up any number of subjects to fill out the grid, things in the county I haven’t addressed: chiggers, bankers, school athletics (the Bulldogs came within a game of winning, for the first time, the boys’ 3-A state championship in both football and basketball this season), the county attorney, a mammoth bone recently washed out of a creek bank, alcoholism (as in most rural places, a considerable problem), the big salamander that crawled from a courthouse wall and startled hell out of me, the Presbyterian woman preacher, dugouts, hopper-dozers (Model A’s with a big catcher and trough of oil below, once used to “bulldoze” grasshoppers off crops), a night ride with a deputy sheriff, the farmer who refuses electricity. I’ve talked with more than ten percent of the countians, although no more than ten percent of even those three hundred appear in this book, yet all three thousand residents know at least one good tale or detail. Sometimes whom to include was easy: Whitt Laughridge introduced me to an elderly man in the Wagon Wheel one noon and told him I was writing about Chase, and the first thing the old fellow said was, Don’t go putting me in no damn book. And the reverse, He hasn’t talked to me yet, or the pretty woman who leaves notes on my windshield, inviting me to drop by.

  These people and things are absent not simply because a book can’t include everything (it’s three times the length I set out to write) but rather because my explorations quite early began forming into a gestalt that seems to control what I am capable of writing about. My common sense may advise including, say, the rodeo at Strong City—after all, many people believe it to be the essence of Chase County (I find it show biz and hokum, but then those are important topics too); it’s even revealing that Strong City may now pretend to be a cowboy town when in fact it began as a railroad stop (there used to be a big roundhouse and, still today, the brick depot is one of the distinctive buildings in the county). No, this gestalt permits only what it wants. It determines. You see, then, I’m not entirely in charge of this work, an occurrence writers commonly discover when they’re on the right track.

  So, this chapter doesn’t exist: I’ve been thinking about doing what Laurence Sterne did in Tristram Shandy and printing an entirely black page. I like the idea because then the topic would be here, and all I—or you—would have to do sometime is remove the portion of ink that isn’t the topic to let the chapter stand revealed, the way a stone sculptor chips away only what isn’t his sculpture.

  I keep having various ideas about what this black hole might mean: maybe it’s an emblem of all the Chase material I haven’t found or that hasn’t found me. Or maybe it’s a darkness waiting for a future light, material to come later, the kind of thing that will make me say, why didn’t I hear that one five years ago? (If this is so, and if I and the book are still alive some years down the road, maybe I can fill the hole not as a follow-up but as a hope fulfilled.) Or maybe this chapter will one day be the spot to answer questions surely to arise: What did this book do to Chase County? What did Chase County do to the book? (Recently people here have talked to me about having an autographing party to raise money for 4-H and the historical society, perhaps in the courthouse, the one building where virtually every countian who’s ever lived has been, and I like the idea, what with all the ghosts there: Sam Wood, Harry Brandley, White Thunder God, Indians, Knute Rockne’s inquestors, the lynched prisoner, a future vice president, governors, and common thieves. I’ve said I’ll do it, but citizens are wondering whether to hold off until they read the book.) At other times, I’ve considered the chapter a place to insert a kind of internal and preplanned afterword I might complete, say, a decade from now, when the new millennium begins, a tenth-anniversary celebration where I’ll tell you the outcome of the loomings here and the fates of some of the countians you’ve met. On other days, I see it as nothing more than a small exit, a dark at the top—or bottom—of the stairs, or, perhaps, the kind of opening a Native American weaver leaves in a blanket for the spirit in the design to find release and travel on beyond.

  When I’m writing and come across something I don’t know the answer to, I pencil in XTK: Unknown To Come (XTC makes ignorance sound like ecstasy). This chapter is a big XTK. But, so that I don’t cheat you of the outcome, or at least of its raw material, I include as best I can now a Tristramian answer on the next page. Have a go at it yourself. Perhaps, I having failed, you are to be its author:

  CIRCLINGS

  From the Commonplace Book:

  Circlings

  I like Kansas—that is, natural Kansas—better than I had expected to.

  —Horace Greeley,

  An Overland Journey (1859)

  There is a look about men who come from sojourning in that country, as if the sheer nakedness of the land had somehow driven the soul back upon its elemental impulses.

  —Mary Austin,

  The Flock (1906)

  Our last instruction to our new explorer and frontiersman is to hold ever in sight his final goal—to reveal within our innate country a land in which to live, a symphonious environment of melody and mystery.

  —Benton MacKaye,

  The New Exploration: A Philosophy

  of Regional Planning (1928)

  The greater number of landscapes I explored, the more it seemed that they had traits in common and that the essence of each was not its uniqueness but its similarity to others. It occurred to me that there might be such a thing as a prototypal landscape, or, more precisely, landscape as a primordial idea, of which all these visible landscapes were merely so many imperfect manifestations.

  —J. B. Jackson,

  “Concluding with Landscapes” (1984)

  Such concepts as karma and circular time are taken for granted by almost all American Indian traditions; time as space and death as becoming are implicit in the earth-view of the Hopi, who avoid all linear constructions, knowing as well as any Buddhist that Everything is Right Here Now. As in the great religions of the east, the American Indian makes small distinction between religious activity and the acts of everyday: the religious ceremony is life itself.

  —Peter Matthiessen,

  The Snow Leopard (1978)

  The truly wise person kneels at the feet of all creatures and is not afraid to endure the mockery of others.

  —Mechtild of Magdeburg,

  The Flowing Light of the Godhead (1265)

  Our faith imposes on us a
right and duty to throw ourselves into things of the earth.

  —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

  The Divine Milieu (1957)

  What we are all more or less lacking at this moment is a new definition of holiness.

  —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

  Human Energy (1969)

  In the same way that civilized men had cleared the earth, pruned back the forests, planted villages, towns, and cities, so had Christianity stripped its world of magic and mystery, and of the possibility of spiritual renewal through itself. In cutting down the sacred trees in the mystic groves, in building sanctuaries on the rubble of chthonic shrines, and in branding all vestiges of ancient mythic practices vain, imperious superstition, the Church has effectively removed divinity from its world. But its victory here was Pyrrhic, for it had rendered its people alienated sojourners in a spiritually barren world where the only outlet for the urge to life was the restless drive onward—what Norman O. Brown has called the desire to become. Eventually this drive would leave the religion itself behind.

  —Frederick Turner,

  Beyond Geography (1980)

  We deeply require an earthy spirituality.

  —Matthew Fox,

  Original Blessing (1983)

  So I ask myself if I can still remember

  How a myth began this morning and how the people

  Seemed hardly to know that something was starting over.

  —Thomas Hornsby Ferril,

  Westering (1934)

  We must come to understand our past, our history, in terms of the soil and water and forests and grasses that have made it what it is. We must see the years to come in the frame that makes space and time one.

  Our philosophies must be rewritten to remove them from the domain of words and “ideas,” and to plant their roots firmly in the earth.

  —William Vogt,

  Road to Survival (1948)

  The ancients, one would say, with their gorgons, sphinxes, satyrs, mantichora, etc., could imagine more than existed, while the moderns cannot imagine so much as exists.

  —Henry David Thoreau,

  The Journal (1860)

  Vague migratory longings spring up which find fulfilment in reflection and study. Instincts, sensations, inclinations bequeathed to him by heredity awake, take shape, and assert themselves with imperious authority. He recalls memories of people and things he has never known personally, and there comes a time when he bursts out of the prison of his century and roams about at liberty in another period.

  —Joris-Karl Huysmans,

  Against Nature (1884)

  The imaginative experience and the historical express equally the traditions of man’s reality. Finally, then, the journey recalled is among other things the revelation of one way in which these traditions are conceived, developed, and interfused in the human mind.

  —N. Scott Momaday,

  The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)

  Above all else, the world displays a lovely order, an order comforting in its intricacy. And the most appealing part of this harmony, perhaps, is its permanence—the sense that we are part of something with roots stretching back nearly forever and branches reaching forward just as far. Purely human life provides only a partial fulfillment of this desire for a kind of immortality.

  —Bill McKibben,

  The End of Nature (1989)

  This is the immense threat—that when we lose one set of connections we end up severed from all connectedness.

  —Tony Hiss,

  “Encountering the Countryside” (1989)

  Live in fragments no longer. Only connect.

  —E. M. Forster,

  Howard’s End (1911)

  The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.

  —Wendell Berry,

  The Unsettling of America (1977)

  Forgetfulness of having been would be a break in the chain. We mean absolute forgetfulness; for the possibility of momentary forgetfulness, in which the persistence of the personality loses nothing, is proved by sleep. Our life on earth is probably a kind of sleep. The immortality of the soul is nothing other than the universal cohesion of creation ruling the individual as it rules the universe.

  What this cohesion is, what this immanence, is impossible to imagine. It is at once the amalgam out of which solidarity is born, and the self which creates directions. It is all explained in the word, Radiation.

  The interweaving of creatures with their emanations is creation. We are simultaneously points of arrival and points of departure.

  —Victor Hugo,

  The Toilers of the Sea (1866)

  One achieves a slow, indelible intimacy with place, learning to match its moods with one’s own. At such times it is as if a destination had awaited us with nearly human expectation and with an exquisite blend of receptivity and detachment.

  —Shirley Hazzard,

  “Points of Departure” (1983)

  The prairie path leads to the sky path; the paths are one: the continents are two; and you must make your journey from the prairies to the sky.

  —William A. Quayle,

  The Prairie and the Sea (1905)

  [Black Elk said:] Black Road and Bear Sings then sang a song, and all the others sang along with them, like this:

  Father, paint the earth on me.

  Father, paint the earth on me.

  Father, paint the earth on me.

  A nation I will make over.

  A two-legged nation I will make holy.

  Father, paint the earth on me.

  —John G. Neihardt,

  Black Elk Speaks (1932)

  Over the Kaw Track

  One thing remained to do, something I’d long intended: try to follow the southern Kaw Trail through Chase, the track once running from the Neosho agency down over the county line, just west of old 13, continuing on to cross the Cottonwood at the ancient ford near the mouth of Diamond Creek, then heading out slightly southwest toward the Arkansas River. Although other tribes probably used the route long before the Wind People, it’s the path they followed into their Indian Territory exile.

  And so, one Tuesday in mid-October, I gathered things up, including my friend, whom I’ve mentioned but not yet named. I call Clive Alexander Livingston Ralph “Scott” Chisholm by a moniker he likes, I think, because it seems to combine a vaguely Christian honorific with a historic northeastern Native American name: the Venerable Tashmoo. By birth he is Canadian, with some Ojibway blood, but he went to school in Iowa to study divinity and ended up as a college teacher of writing and an adept poet, who too often lets himself be distracted from what he does so well, render things into words. There’s something Indian in him beyond persuasion, a periodic but stubborn silence that’s part of his best and worst, a condition he unleashes and tethers with much effect.

  I wanted him along on the three- or four-day ramble not just for our old friendship, but even more because, a few years earlier, he had retraced—alone and on foot—the route the Mormons followed in their mid-nineteenth-century exodus from Omaha to Salt Lake City, or, as things were then, from Winter Quarters, on the Missouri River, to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. Although some of the thousand-mile Mormon route lies just north of the Oregon Trail in Nebraska, the course is virtually the same. His walk took him ninety-one days, only a week less than Brigham Young’s 1847 passage. For some time the Venerable had been writing a book about his journey, and he liked nothing more than conversation about foot travel, the West, finding one’s way into the land.

  We set our packs on top of my car and stood beside them on Broadway in Cottonwood: the first person to get curious would likely be the one to haul us to the county line. Gil Haug, with the Soil Conservation Service, drove up, asked the inevitable question, and ten minutes later was driving us north. At the dividing section-line fence, the Venerable and I struck out until we reached a point I judged to be either on or quite near the old track. Early-day countians described the trail as t
wo or three paths a couple of feet apart running remarkably straight, usually along ridges, from ford to ford, but today the hills are so cut up by cattle and vehicle trails it’s impossible to specify any particular path as the Indians’. Even so, the track we intended to follow was not a narrow, trodden depression, but a direction—one of the compass, of history, of the spirit. We were hunting the idea of the trail.

  I’ve never begun a trip with the Venerable but that he didn’t start by repacking his gear, and this one, after a dozen steps, kept the pattern. He is, though not tall, bigger than I am, and he always totes larger burdens. The bag he was about to carry across thirty-some miles of the Flint Hills I considered more of a chifforobe than a pack, a thing that can change one’s destination from a place to a hernia. The clodhoppers he wore crossing Nebraska and Wyoming were the largest and heaviest pieces I’ve ever seen outside of the Frankenstein monster’s boots: I called them his Karloffs. For our little journey he wore lightweight hikers even though his rupture sack bulged with matériel including a miniature spatula, a whisk, a bottle of Bryant’s Kansas City barbecue sauce, three press cards, and a selection of gadgets from mail-order catalogs: attached to various implements he must have had six magnifying glasses, five corkscrews, and three fish scalers. He did not carry binoculars, camera, microcassette recorder, or a real notebook—I had those—but he did have the lone compass.