PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Heavy clouds came in and quickly absorbed the light, and we set up the tent in a place not really of our choice. Wood was scarce, and we had to make do with a couple of discarded fenceposts, but, when I pushed the end of the first one into the fire, I enjoyed the symbolism. I also threw on a couple of dried cow pies, but they didn’t burn worth a damn, and we talked about eastern women arriving in Kansas in the 1870s and scouring the grassland for bison chips—sometimes politely called bois de vache—and picking them up at first with two sticks until the women toughened and used their hands. Once I’d read an archaeologist’s report on the BTUs in bison scat.

  On two occasions the Venerable and I have gone to England to walk and to drink traditional ales. As we sat at the fire, he asked how a pint of Abbot’s Ale would taste now. Figuring I was safe from any countian driving us to Bury Saint Edmunds, I said, oh, to be in England now that Abbot’s there.

  I’ve been thinking about English landscape today: that tidy garden of a toy realm where there’s almost no real wilderness left and absolutely no memory of it. Where the woods are denatured plantings. The English, the Europeans, are too far from it. That’s the difference between them and us. Americans derive from recent wilderness, although I’ve never liked that word—I feel wild in cities. He examined the bum on his cigar, often a prelude to a pronouncement: Wildness makes for civility. After a pause, Would you call these people civil?

  —By your definition, in proportion to the wildness left here.

  That night it rained hard, but a wind the next morning dried things, which was fortunate, since we had a mile of ungrazed grass to walk through that fetched up to our waists. The Venerable asked what the state bird of Kansas was, and I said the meadowlark, the same as five other western states. That’s disappointing. I’d have thought it would be something bigger, wilder—a hawk, or at the least a prairie chicken.

  —Fifty states have totem birds and not one is a raptor.

  We’re a Caucasian nation of titmice.

  We moved steadily in the easy weather, the hill climbs seeming now little more than part of the trail. On our travels, it takes a couple of days for the Venerable to unhitch from work and custom before he really enters the journey. Besides his companionship, I’d wanted him along for the possibility of his preacherly outbursts. I thought he might be ready, so I tried to prime him with a lecture of my own: how we needed a new generation of ghost dancers who could infuse in all of us an Indian interpretation of the great chain of being. He listened but mostly walked until, northwest of Bazaar, we came onto a section-line road edged with Osage orange. When I saw him turn a fallen hedge apple into a soccer ball and boot it to me, I was ready to prime him again. I started up about how the link here between the health of the land and human welfare was so immediate—the people so directly dependent on the prairie—that I was continually surprised to see the exploitation they tolerated or engaged in; what kept things going for them wasn’t really true husbandry or stewardship but their small population.

  We pulled up under a big hedgerow to eat and repair our heels, and the Venerable at last launched one, and this is the gist: You use the word loomings, but the looming I see here is the power in the prairie itself. I feel it every step. It’s inexorable. For every human violation, here and everywhere, we know that somewhere the land is subtracting from our account, and when it falls low enough, the land will foreclose on us. It holds our mortgage. It owns us. We’re stupid serfs trying to overthrow the manor.

  The other day you got going about “the little brown church in the vale as the imposthume,” and as usual you didn’t get to the heart of the matter. The canker isn’t our medieval religion—it’s our failure to grow out of it or reinterpret it in the light of changed times. The real imposthume is dualistic thinking: splitting and separating things rather than seeing the web. We turn creation into good or evil, body or soul, man and nature. Change those conjunctions to prepositions and see how the medieval disappears—good beside evil, man in nature, body with soul.

  But you did hit on one thing when you said that we’d stay in a fix as long as we continued to believe that alleged archangels are more important than armadillos, but what you didn’t seem to see is the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. Nothing more medieval than those. It’s our pride that separates us from God, says the Christian, and the ecologist can also say it’s pride—and greed, sin number two or three—that separates us from creation and allows us to believe that only we could possibly be the children of God. That belief alone makes us a deadly species. Exploitation is the fruit of pride and greed, and its consequence is extinction.

  —May I interject something here?

  No. Our extinction will be a tragedy, not in the newspaper or cosmic sense but in the literary one: pride and blindness bringing down the protagonist. If we could put on productions of the world’s fifty greatest plays to an audience of eighteenth-century Native Americans, the one they would truly comprehend would be Oedipus Rex. But let me ask you, how would it play this weekend in Strong City?

  —My interjection is that Emerson thought that the view a people held toward nature determined their institutions, but now the opposite seems to be at work.

  And it’ll continue until preachers start speaking up about a new ecological Christianity to replace our old egological one. Of all the loomings you talk about, that may be the biggest. Indians didn’t worship armadillos, but they did honor their existence because they respected what produces life. Even these stones are on their way to becoming bone.

  The wind was rising. The Venerable said, Let’s walk, Willy. We went down the lane, left it for the grasses, came again to a short stretch of road and a farmhouse and a pump where we filled our canteens, talked with the owner, who was considerably amused by grown men hiking down-county, then we struck out again, and the canteens never felt heavier. Water, wind, hills set against us, sat on us, and we came into a vale that left no exit but a steep ascent. We stopped, dreaded it, made it bigger. I wanted to get it behind us, so I went up, using my left arm to push off my knee, my right arm leaning hard into the staff, and I was too weary to sing about no hills in Kansas. At the top, a slight depression deflected the wind, and I lay down to wait. Up came the Venerable looking as if climbing bone by bone. His tiredness worried me, but when I could make out his expression, he was smiling, and after he sat down he said, I loved that effort up flat Kansas. He pulled off a shoe and sock to bandage a toe. What did you say about the Flint Hills giving you a chance to catch your breath?

  —A man who travels by horse said it. I go along with Zeb Pike: “My feet blistered and very sore.”

  The Venerable put a damp foot close to my face, but I was too tired to do other than stare at it.

  —You’ve got a narrow, bending line, fed by others, running from your toes to your heel that’s almost a map of the Kaw Trail. It looks like something you walked into your sole. The next time we get lost, we’ll just consult your ripe foot.

  Do our skins separate us or link us?

  We took off again for a mile or so until, against the far eastern horizon, with binoculars we could see the old Indian monument on Roniger Hill, and in a hollow we made camp against a steep southern slope dropping down to a dry wash. I went for wood but all I could find was a crumbling pack-rat nest and a broken Osage-orange fencepost. The air was growing cold. I laid out a small stone bench against the ridge, put our bed-pads on it, and lighted the fire. The Venerable thought the site looked like our first camp, and it did, but I said the tree this time wasn’t a willow but a little cottonwood.

  I think we’ve been circling.

  I was carving in the third ring on my staff. I said, what else?

  Our meal was dehydrated rations he’d found on sale in an army surplus store.

  —The word for this slumgullion is vile.

  General Sherman didn’t think so.

  A coyote called a far song, and I said I was leaving my supper for him, and I pulled out a half pint of Missouri sourmash. Th
e Venerable looked at it almost in anger. You’ve had that all along?

  —We weren’t ready for it. We hadn’t come far enough.

  What do you mean we, Tonto?

  I poured two good measures, added some well-water and a few raisins for sweetening, and set our cups over the fire. Hot toddies against the night, I said.

  He pulled out a Mexican blunt, I stoked my pipe, we watched tobacco smoke rise in the cold up to, it seemed, the Big Bear so low now on the horizon. The fire defended us from the heavy dewfall. Would you say we found the old track?

  —No. Blindly crossed it, yes. Often, I think. We’ve been entangled in its lines the whole way.

  We sat listening to the night, its voices growing fewer as the air cooled.

  —Tomorrow the hills level out.

  Tomorrow the tour’s over, Chief.

  —For me, a six-year tour here is over.

  Would you say you’ve found revelation?

  —I’d say I’ve found a place willing to reveal itself. I think that’s worth more, even if it is easier to come by. Swami say, “River gift, not answer.”

  Swami also say, “Lift cup, drink Missouri sourmash, honor river.”

  And, with the flame-blackened cups, we did, and we watched the fire, then lifted them to the wood rat that long ago hauled in our heat, and, when its sticks were gone, I pushed in one end of the old hedge post, and we lifted cups again, and the Venerable said, To the Wind People, and the damp post hissed like a serpent, spit sparks, resisted its going.

  Then came something I’d never seen before: a bird flew into the small cottonwood, and from its silhouette against the moon I could see it was a jay. We stared at it in disbelief, and finally the Venerable whispered, Since when do birds fly into campfire circles?

  —Isn’t just a bird.

  The Venerable slowly stood, pulled me up, raised his arms, I did too, palms outward, and he said, Old ones.

  A circled presence, like a miasma, pressed in, and how long it remained I don’t know, but a meteor, the slowest falling one I ever saw, dropped right across the Great Bear like a thrown spear, and then the circle seemed to loosen, and things regained their accustomed positions, dispositions. The jaybird was gone. I pushed the last of the hedge post into the coals. Tashmoo emptied his toddy: In all my life I never encountered anything like that. What brought them in?

  —Memory.

  Ours or theirs?

  Yes, I said.

  In Thanks

  As well as those named in the chapters, I thank these people:

  Jack LaZebnik (writer and maker of writers), Larry Cooper (may the future one day sprinkle his grave with Bembo, “the noblest roman of them all”); Robert Overholtzer, Marya Labarthe, Guest Perry, Erica Landry, Peter Davison, Lois Wallace; and: Bertha Baker, Glenn Baumgardner, Cathy Beaham, Hank Beetz, Patt Behler, Mary Helen and Tom Bell, Helen-Ann Brown, Pat Broyles, Rex Buchanan, Marguerite Buffon, Orville Burtis, Jr., Jean Shaft Butler, Howard Cahoone, Sharon Cahoone, Jim Cauthom, Wayne and Ruth Childs, Alice Clareson, Frances Clark, Joseph T. Collins, Mike Cox, Barbara Davis, Beulah Day, Tom Dennison, L. D. Dobbs, Richard Douthit, Gretel Ehrlich, Helen Norton Evans, Wayne Fields, Robert L. Foster, Lee Fowler, Joyce Garr, Don Giddings, Gayle Graham, Zula Bennington Greene, Martha Hagedorn-Krass, Mary Lu and Eldon Hainey, Karl Harder, Ken Harder, Dale Hartley, Shirley Hazzard, Mary Hickey, Mike Holder, Susan Holm, Marilyn Holt, Cathy Hoy, Marteil Hoy, Andrea Hunter, Tom Isern, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., the Kansas State Historical Society (for permission to reprint material from its archives), June Kelly, Kelly Kindscher, Judy and Roy Knapp, Joyce Knighten, Clair Kucera, Robert Lindholm, Barbara Livingston, Christopher Maples, Wilma and Dale Martin, Scott May, James R. McCauley, Howard McClellan, Sister Jeanne McKenna, Bruce McMillen, Kathy and Ken Mildward, Jesse Miser, John Moore, Sue Ann Moore, June Morgan, Bob Mushrush, Nancy and Stu Nowlin, Jack Odle, Ramon Powers, Charles Rayl, E. C. Roberts, Gerald Roberts, Donita Rogers, Elizabeth Roniger Rogler, Carl and Ruth Romeiser, Johnny Rufener, Bonnie Short, James Shortridge, Hugh Sidey, Joanna Stratton, Edith Talkington, Sandra Taylor, Gloria Throne, Wallace Thurston, Francis Towle, Jon Weiss, Candia Welch, Jean White, Ruth Wilson, Tom Witty, Jr.; and R. Carlos Nakai and Coyote Oldman, whose Native American flutes transported me far and long.

  The author is grateful for permission to quote from the following sources

  “Tracks of the Wind” by Peter Steinhart Reprinted from Audubon, the magazine of the National Audubon Society

  Discovering the Vernacular Landscape by J B Jackson Copyright © 1984 by Yale University Press

  The Necessity of Ruins and Other Topics by J B Jackson Copyright © 1980 by J B Jackson. Reprinted by permission of the University of Massachusetts Press

  “Kansas A Hard Land in the Heartland” by Leo E Oliva, from Heartland, edited by James H Madison Copyright © 1988 by Indiana University Press.

  “An Interview with Barry Lopez,” reprinted from Western American Literature, Spring 1986. Copyright © 1986 by Western Literature Association

  Black Elk Speaks by John G Neihardt Copyright 1932, 1959, 1972 by John G Neihardt. Copyright © 1961 by the John G Neihardt Trust Reprinted by permission of University of Nebraska Press

  The Sacred Pipe Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux, recorded and edited by Joseph Epes Brown Copyright 1953 by the University of Oklahoma Press

  “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” by Kenneth Davis, June 27, 1954 Copyright 1954 by the New York Times Company Reprinted by permission.

  “About Books Rereading and Other Excesses” by Anatole Broyard, March 3, 1985 Copyright © 1985 by the New York Times Company Reprinted by permission

  About the Author

  Under the name WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON, William Trogdon is the author of the best-selling classics Blue Highways, PrairyErth, and River-Horse: A Voyage Across America. He lives in Columbia, Missouri.