TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102191/1021470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.1 KB | 129 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 95

Walking Old Tom's Grand Grid


In faded towns of central Kansas, ghosts and live inhabitants
sleep squared to the world, neatly, like accountant's figures

By JOHN SKOW


    Chase County, Kans., writes William Trogdon, "is the most
easterly piece of the American Far West." Meaning what? And who,
for that matter, is Trogdon, whose name does not appear on the
title page of his extraordinary and wholly original new book,
PrairyErth (a deep map)? What's prairyerth?

    One question at a time. Prairyerth is an old geological
term for prairie soil. The westerly thinning-out of forest and
the first broad stretches of prairie grass are what make Chase
County a magical place for the author. Eastern travelers feel
edgy here, Trogdon notices, and so do some natives: "The
protection and sureties of the vertical woodland, walled like
a home and enclosed like a refuge, are gone, and now the land
. . . is a world of air, space, apparent emptiness, near
nothingness," where wind blows steadily "as if out of the lungs
of the universe."

    Lungs indeed, the winded reader reflects. But this very
good writer can blow softly too, and listen well, and march
simple sentences usefully across a flat place. This is not new
information to those who read his 1983 best seller, Blue
Highways, a marvelously quirky account of a 13,000-mile
side-roads motor ramble around the U.S. He is better known by
his pen name, William Least Heat-Moon, which comes from the
Osage Indian part of his heritage. His father was Heat-Moon,
meaning July, the hot month; his older brother Little Heat-Moon;
and he himself last and Least. To avoid explaining all of this
repeatedly on his reporting meanders, he goes for everyday
purposes by Trogdon, his birth name from Irish and English
ancestors.

    Blue Highways was a delight, and so, in a darker and
deeper way, is PrairyErth (Houghton Mifflin; 624 pages; $24.95).
In kind and quality, it somewhat resembles Barry Lopez's Arctic
Dreams, and it will not look out of place on the same shelf of
great Americana as its betters, Mark Twain's Roughing It and
Life on the Mississippi. The author's visceral decision to
explore one American locality was an intuitive leap from the
restlessness of Blue Highways. And it was a leap toward the
nation's center. He had seen Chase County's Flint Hills and the
bits of remaining tallgrass prairie as a boy. He was attracted
in part because the historical past was very recent (white
settlement began in 1856) and because the present is isolated
from shopping-mall modernity, so that both are faded like old
jeans.

    His plan was beaverish: to walk, sniff, conn and brood
every one of the county's 12 central grids, 744 sq. mi. on the
U.S. Geological Survey maps. With much satisfaction, he reports
it was Thomas Jefferson who directed that all of the nation
except the already mapped East be ruled into grids, never mind
natural or political borders. "Chase County sleeps north-south
or east-west," he digresses (if that is possible in a project
that depends on serendipity), "the square rooms squared with the
world, the decumbent folk like an accountant's figures neatly
between ruled lines, their slumber neatly compartmentalized in
Tom's grand grid."

    In four years of moseying, he got the feel of the county.
"Emptiness" turned out to be only apparent, and "near
nothingness" jostling and crowded. Though more with ghosts,
often enough, than live inhabitants; the present population of
Chase, 3,013, is about what it was in 1873.

    Trying to look as if he were not eavesdropping, he wrote
down practiced insults by old combatants at Darla's bar, in a
town called Bazaar. She: "You're so dumb, if you fell in a
barrel of tits you'd come up sucking your thumb." He: "You're
so ugly we're all hoping that wind don't blow off your clothes."
In the same town, he finds the spare, waste-no-words diary of
18-year-old Elizabeth Ann Mardin, a bride newly arrived in
Kansas. For June 21, 1862: "I went a goosebarrying in the fore
noon and I went to see the soldiers drill in the after noon it
was a plesant day." For Dec. 12, of the same year: "We cleaned
some of the ((hog)) guts for soap grease it sprinkled rain."

    He sifts the rowdy history of "bleeding Kansas" just
before the Civil War. He notes 140 ways to spell the state's
name, among them Ka, Kaal, Ka-Anjou and Kaw; the last being the
present spelling of the name of the Native American tribe, now
nearly extinct, that lived here before the coming of whites.
Somewhat uneasily, he watches an all-woman ranch team castrating
bull calves. He talks to old inhabitants who tell of monstrous
floods and of hiding in "fraidy holes" -- storm cellars -- to
wait out tornadoes.

    In an old house he finds a mirror "with the silver mostly
gone, as if all its reflections had worn it through." He hikes
to the spot near Bazaar where, in 1931, the Notre Dame football
coach Knute Rockne and seven other men died in a plane crash,
after which local people carried pieces off for keepsakes. A
woman tells him about running a health-food restaurant in a
little burg called Cottonwood Falls: "We never did get the
farmers to eat alfalfa sprouts. They know silage when they see
it."

    Was he ever bored? Hmmm. He tells of staking out the main
and only street of Cedar Point, a hamlet's least piglet of a
town. The idea is to watch all visible action, dawn to dusk,
from the back of his van. But nothing happens. He puts aside as
too metaphysical the lame notion that he himself constitutes
Cedar Point's action for the day. It rains. That's it.

    Except that a journalist who reads PrairyErth asks whether
the van in Cedar Point could be the same noble '75 Ford
Econoline, named Ghost Dancing, that rattled for 13,000 miles
in Blue Highways. "Of course," said the author last week,
sounding pleased. "Got a dead battery now, but otherwise just
fine." Plenty of nostalgic action here. And a hope that with a
fresh battery, Ghost Dancing will have still another fine,
quirky book in him.