PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  I grumbled while he repacked, and a big ledge of overcast I didn’t like the look of let go a few drops before breaking apart as if it were old, crumbling limestone. Canada geese called and cut their usual piece of the alphabet across the sky, and he looked up, and I said the beyond calls us, marks the route, letters it, Vorward! Off we went into the grasses, the katydids sweetly rasping, a sound I’d come to love here second only to the dismal weep of an upland plover in spring. When we dropped down across the first woody hollow and sent up two dozen prairie chickens, the Venerable froze to watch their long glides, and he said, A bird couldn’t fly like that in the woods. Their flight is a revelation of their terrain: smooth and undulous.

  —Undulous? I said.

  Undulating is too harsh.

  The hollows kept drawing him into them—a woodland man must ease into the prairie—while I kept to the ridges where the Kansa moved. I suggested that we were having a go at participatory history, and he asked what that meant, and I said it was an effort at joining in, at trying to recapture a sense of what’s gone before us, to act on history. He said, I’m participating in valleys.

  When he came up again onto the ridge, he huffed out, I just saw an eagle nest down there the size of Kankakee, and he described a tree-borne wood-rat lodge. If the Olympic Committee ever introduces a competition in conclusion-leaping, the Venerable has gold-medal potential. I rambled on about the pack rat and told him its scientific name was Rattus packalottus, and that the subspecies that builds only in the back seats of field-abandoned sedans is Rattus buickiensis.

  He said, Homo bulliensis, was gone again down into the next hollow, and I admired the labor of his descents and ascents. The Venerable has something of the build of a bison: a large and powerful humping back tapering to a small rump, short legs that give him surprising speed, dark eyes not quite sized to the head, and a little pointy chin-beard. That day, when he bent at the waist to look at something, the configuration was nearly precise, and, for those early miles, I mostly saw him not at all or some distance off as a bisonlike silhouette.

  He came up behind me once, deliberately, to make me jump. I told him of the old countian who said the Kaw could sneak up on game because they walked easy and didn’t have kneecaps that wiggled like a Caucasian’s. These hills ought to tighten up anybody’s knees.

  A mile farther he pointed to the southwest, toward Big Mound. How far off is it?

  —Tomorrow. For tonight, I hope we can find a spring.

  Set a pace, not a goal. If a spring’s there, it’s there.

  Together we went down a ridge and back up, both of us pulling hard, our kneecaps wiggling, and I singing,

  Oh, there are no hills in Kansas

  Not even one at all,

  So if you take a tumble,

  You don’t have far to fall.

  When the terrain eased again, he said, Walking in a forest, you don’t see enough country, and walking on the flatter parts of the Great Plains, you see too much. But these prairie hills give you just enough land to put under all that sky. I wouldn’t call this place vast—it’s just balanced. And if you get tired of openness, you can take to the hollows and close up the sky, but you don’t forget it. One of the best titles of books about the American West is Sky Determines. And, god, does it.

  Then he was gone again, off down a hill. When he came back up he had to adjust the chifforobe. Before they had horses, how did the Kaws carry their loads?

  —Even after horses, women and dogs did much of the hauling. In 1819 Thomas Say described ten-year-old girls carrying burdens nearly equal to their weight. Of course, they tried to avoid participating in the mysteries of the hollows.

  I like the way the terrain forces a kind of continuance—you can try to leave the old trails, but the land pushes you back onto them. Sane people repeat, the mad go astray. But, somewhere, the first person to find the best trail had to be a madman. God, after a couple of hours I’m already headed back into an American Stone Age.

  —With a whisk and three press cards.

  On we went. He asked, What’s that steady sound, that long nicketing?

  —Katydids.

  Did they just start up?

  —About four hours ago.

  I’d forgotten how walking unbuttons you. You can’t walk unconsciously for long—things thrust themselves right into your ears, up your nose. When you’re on foot, life vibrates. By the time we get to the bottom of this county, I’ll be hearing the hell of the place.

  We went on, listening, and I watched his response to the tall prairie as much as anything. Occasionally, he’d ask the name of a grass or plant, and, for the ones I didn’t know, I gave him my own names: piss weed (smell it), itch grass (rub it on your wrist), nut-megolium (taste it).

  Once he said, This place isn’t virginal, but it doesn’t seem to have been had too many times. As he spoke, I stopped dead in my tracks, he asked what it was, and I pointed to the grass ahead. It changes color. He stepped closer. It’s a big circle, a disk.

  —It took me months to stumble across my first buffalo wallow, and now you’ve done it in your fifth hour.

  The grass was a circumference slightly faded from its surrounding like a new moon. We sat down inside it, the Venerable fascinated. I called it another palimpsest and said there hadn’t been any wild bison in the county since about the 1830s.

  When you realize what it is, then you know for certain the buffalo were right here on their backs, rolling. Then, God, am I sitting deep. He lay back, rolled like a bison, paused as they do, looked upward. I don’t see anything except sky. I feel the earth, but I don’t see it.

  —Coronado, when he was close by hunting Quivira, reportedly said something like that.

  We think of ground being at the bottom, but this ground is in the middle, or, nothing less than at the bottom of the top. I could be floating.

  We pulled out some raisins and peanut butter and flour tortillas, and ate lying down.

  How do you know when the prairie is in you?

  —When you see a tree as an eyesore.

  He whistled low, pointed up at something: turning a high circle that seemed to reflect the wallow was a massing of red-tails. He said, A boil of hawks—the journey begins under good medicine.

  When we were pulling on our packs again, he looked for the birds but their circle had drifted too far south to see; he said, We live on this continent without knowing what it is or where we are. Off he went, and I knew his course only from the prairie chickens his trespass stirred up.

  I found him again, now perched on a ledge. I feel as if I’ve been walking down the backbone of America.

  I said I felt as if America had been walking down my backbone. Somewhere on the far western side of the Spring Hill Ranch, we went down a grassy draw, came to a spring reduced to a small pool by the dry autumn, the watercress unpalatable. An owl rose from a lone willow and turned its neckless flight south, and I looked at the Venerable and said, Well, Brigham? He said, This is the place.

  The draw, although holding only a few scattered trees and a fringe of scrub, was sunken enough to get us out of the wind and conceal our campfire: flames on the prairie draw people as a cottonwood does lightning. We set the tent up near the willow, and as we worked, it dropped little golden spears on us. The Venerable assembled supper, inventing, as he cooked, a dirty ditty about muskmelons and boys’ procreative urges. I built a fire, then cut two staffs out of a thicket of rough-leaf dogwood. The small trees, shrubs really, tend to grow straight and of a consistent diameter, so that in its first years it provides light but strong shafts the Kansa and Osage used for arrows. In April, its blossoms yield an exotic fragrance as if someone lighted a joss stick of cheap Chinese incense. I talked about the tree as I shaped the handles of the staffs, and, around mine, cut in a ring to mark the first day. The Venerable looked at it: Circles, circles.

  He once worked on a Great Lakes ore boat, and he said how the terrain today reminded him of water, then he sang poet Charles Olson’s line:
“The fulcrum of America is the Plains—half sea, half land.”

  A confusion of breaking clouds and setting sun turned the horizon to a brief, purplish circle of its own, then it was gone, and we sat down before the little fire, its slow flames seeming not to dispense the light but to gather it from the darkness as a dry cloth does dampness.

  He said, I found it hard to walk straight today. I think I kept looping as if I were walking on a big sphere that forces you into a circle. I didn’t feel Jefferson’s grid at all, not even when we crossed a fence. Straightness is a Caucasian’s illusion. Einstein may have said that space is curved, but Indians already knew it. Your lovely grid is a great bending.

  —An obsolete word kept turning in my mind today: habitance. I think my travels here have been into habitance.

  I had gathered some ticklegrass before sunset, and I stood up, misdirected his attention toward the moon, and said, O Great Mysterious, evidence yourself! and dropped the dry grass onto the fire, and, in a moment, it snapped and scintillated, and he said, I love it.

  To coax him into real conversation, I rattled on about campfires not allowing you to do much but talk, listen, dream; I went on about how people must have first found their way into other dimensions by means of firelight. Didn’t campfires create stories? He pulled out a thick, stubby Mexican blunt in a maduro wrapper, put a brand to it, rolled it in his wet pucker, and I asked whether he thought a cigar named Fellatio would sell. He said to light my fussy pipe and let the smoke do the talking, so I did, and we sat there in full-bellied contentment.

  After a while he said, When I was crossing central Nebraska on my Mormon Trail walk, I started to feel shrunk. I don’t mean the weight I was losing—that’s only a metaphor. I felt insignificant, but never nonexistent: my point is that I felt more existent. When some of my ignorance about the land began to decrease, when I started learning names and recognizing things—this was a pasque flower, that was a Franklin’s ground squirrel, or whatever—my loneliness from feeling separate disappeared. Desolation was the hardest part of the walk.

  —That and lifting your Karloffs.

  Those goddamn boots are a picture of what I’m talking about: massive things to protect me from the earth. But god, the companionship that was there.

  From where we sat, we could see Polaris directly ahead and the Great Bear circling it as if bound to a stake.

  Quit the hell scribbling in that notebook and say something. If you build a fire, feed it. Ask me why a person should walk crosscountry.

  —Tell me.

  It frees you from wanting to own it. It liberates you. I have a theory: once Native Americans got the wheel and gave up walking, they started thinking about owning the land, just like whites. If Tecumseh had owned a Chevy, he’d never have said selling a country was like trying to sell air or the clouds.

  The Venerable fired his cigar again, stoking himself now: When I’m on my deathbed, a shriveled little walnut of a man, I think I’ll be remembering my walk across the plains, not because it’s the only grand thing I’ve ever accomplished but because it was the longest time I ever really linked up.

  He pushed some wood into the fire, and in the minutes of good light, I worked again on my notebook. He asked, Can you put all your walking here into a nutshell?

  —Reduction is deception. Have you ever seen Hiroshige’s series of Japanese woodblock prints called One Hundred Views of Edol I think I’ve been trying to accomplish what he did.

  But I want to know why you came out here.

  —The question is, what drew me out here, and the answer to that is the book. Ninety-nine-point-nine to the ninth decimal of what has ever happened here isn’t in the book. Its two hundred thousand words are my nutshell.

  The old convenience of hiding behind the truth.

  —All right, then: sacred—by that I mean venerable, Venerable—sacred understanding comes not from bearing witness but from being a witness.

  I think you need both. In our own ways, we all do. The being requires the bearing.

  In the dewed morning I went down to the small pool to wash, then built a fire, using the only dry tinder I could find, an old sparrow nest, and the Venerable ladled out eggs with barbecue sauce and grilled dried tomatoes. We said little. When we rolled up the tent, he composed another verse to his dirty ditty, this one about laughter as saltpeter (Laugh ladies, laugh, then them naughty boys can’t do you no harm), and off we went.

  Struggling, I barely made it to the top of the first hill and had to stop. While I adjusted my pack to get rid of whatever was gouging me in the hip, I found two chunks of limestone the size of encyclopedias. I said nothing, because in his cook kit I’d coiled up a three-foot-long shed skin of a rat snake.

  We had trouble finding ridges running our way, and we felt yesterday in our legs although I thought my kneecaps wobbled less. Up the steep pitches, I sang, “Oh, there are no hills in Kansas.” We would reach the top, take aim on a distant ledge or a sapling or merely a change in the color of the grass, and strike on again. Once he checked the compass, and I asked were we wandering. This isn’t a walk—it’s a stagger.

  We stopped for a snack, and I told him how the old Kaws loved apples: one white traded a double handful for a pair of beaded moccasins that had taken weeks to make.

  I think I saw an antelope. Is that possible here? It was. Have you eaten antelope?

  —Never have, but Horace Greeley said its flesh was tender and delicate, the choicest eating he found in Kansas. It was the only animal here, so he claimed, that could boast of either grace or beauty.

  The words of a narrow, eastern pinch-ass.

  We came down along Gannon Creek and past an old cowhand’s place and onto a road where we saw him working in a corral. He didn’t return my wave, and in a few minutes he roared up in his truck to demand what we were doing, and I could mollify him only a little, so we just walked on. The Venerable asked if that was typical, and I said hospitality could be a different thing here than in the rest of Kansas.

  Maybe this isn’t Kansas. Maybe this place is only in Kansas.

  We followed the north branch of the Santa Fe tracks down to highway 50 so we could cross the Cottonwood on a bridge. Abruptly he said, I’ve got to have a cheeseburger. And a milk shake, I said, and described at length what they would taste like. Then I realized he was serious.

  —We’re supposed to be recapitulating a piece of the Kansa experience. We’re walking under the assumption that you don’t really discover America until you gain some sense of its first people. A cheeseburger is only going to dispel everything we’ve earned.

  He sat down on a guardrail, his expression fixed. I started off, stopped when I didn’t hear following footfalls, and turned around: he stood along the highway, thumb up, displaying something in the other hand. I walked back. He was showing to passing cars a wallet-size press card.

  —Have you lost your wits?

  He said nothing. I sat down on the guardrail, relieved that we would soon have to hike on. I talked at him: even if drivers could read the card at seventy miles an hour, his dusty beard and halfdemented expression of junk-food hunger would keep them moving. After a while we went on up the road, the Venerable in a silence only the dead must know, and we crossed the river, came to a farmhouse with a pump in the yard, where he filled his canteen. Mary Cahoone opened her door, and he asked her to take us to Strong City. I put my face in my hands. She got her car keys, and my heart sank. Off we went to Buck’s, and the Venerable whispered Milk shake, and I yielded to my fate. When we walked in, the teenager behind the counter looked at me, my face surely twisted between annoyance and café hunger, and she said, You the one dragging the cross down the road?

  —No, just him.

  What cross? the Venerable said.

  Some nut from Arizona said Jesus told him to drag a cross to New York City.

  The cook called from the grill, But he had a little wheel on the bottom of it—I saw it.

  The Venerable shook his head. No, you’
re not putting a little wheel under me.

  We ate our cheeseburgers stacked up with extras, drank our milk shakes in silence except for my griping about one of us reading a newspaper when the goal was to slip the present. He ignored me as he did when I said if he ever went on a vision quest he’d have to do it in a booth at a Dairy Queen. Finally I said loudly, all right, now get us the hell back out there.

  He persuaded a filling-station attendant on his way home to drop us off at the state lake, not far from where we’d left our trail. Seeing the picnic tables, the Venerable argued for setting up camp right there. I began ranting about cheeseburgers, cross draggers, and sleeping on top of pulltabs and candy wrappers. I jerked on my pack and headed out, but, going under the park fence, I tangled up my gear in the barbs, and the Venerable had to free me. I got up cussing, threw my bag over the fence, insulted his devotion to real walking. He said nothing but crossed the fence, and we were again into the grasses.

  After a mile, I slowed down and turned to call back my apology. He said nothing. I asked if I could get off the hook.

  You’re off, you’re off.

  To recover our equilibrium, I forced some commentary, how the Kansa hated fences across their trail, how they would open them up, how whites refused to recognize generations of prior free passage although their own laws depended upon precedents.