PrairyErth

  I’m taking a water walk, hiking down among the intermittent streamlets (on this summer day they are just damp fingerings) that converge somewhere in here to set the river off on its ocean course: down to the Arkansas, the Mississippi, to the Gulf, which will return it on laden, leaden clouds. I’ve been reading about Chase waters, and I’m here to blend books and facts. Because the oldest visible things in the county lie along this river dell, I keep finding beginnings, and these rocks keep bringing me back to water, the fruit of the wind. (Had we named our planet more accurately, we might have called it Hydro.) I’m coming down an eroded escalator, dropping deeper into an extinct Permian sea, a narrow warp in time in this warped seabed, each step a thousand years further back, and I’m moving from the era of the great Permian extinctions toward the yeasty abundance of Carboniferous life lying below me, some of it liquefying into combustibles. From a clinkered slope I’ve just picked up a fossil, a shark’s tooth, a small crescent that looks like a tiny leaping dolphin; for two hundred million years it has lain locked in the shale, and now it moves again in my sweaty, salty shirt pocket as if it were once more a piece of a saw-toothed maw gliding along in the time when these rocks could be swum. Every so often it sticks me, seems to bite my chest as if to get to my blood. When it had its last meal, the Appalachians were rising, the Rockies were at sea level, and the continents lay sutured into Pangaea. Chase County is forty-six hundred miles from Paris, but then it was about three thousand miles closer.

  I’m walking down into an old marine world: in their journals, early white travelers wrote of the prairie, using a single metaphor as if it were the only one possible—the ocean of grass—and no wonder, since this land is like the sea and it is of the sea. The characteristic shape of the hills, the stacked trapezoids, takes its substance from the old ocean and its form from rain and ice; the prehistory of Zebulon Pike’s and Stephen Long’s American desert is a study of waters. I’m a hiker through antique seas that have become stone cages of a marine zoo: crinoids, bryozoans, brachiopods, gastropods, pelecypods, ostracods, trilobites, and vertebrates that left behind only their razory teeth. But most abundant of all are fusulinids, single-cell invertebrates now turned to calcite tests that are almost the signature of Cottonwood Limestone. (In the walls of the Chase courthouse and the capitol in Topeka, those billions of things appearing to be grains of wheat were once creepers of the sea. Kansas paleontologist Christopher Maples told me, Fusulinids were incredibly abundant—the housefly of the Permian: they came along, went bonkers, then got snuffed in the Permian Extinction when seventy percent of the taxonomic variety was wiped out. Their evolution, beginning to end, was very rapid.)

  I must for a moment speak in numbers: the average annual precipitation here is thirty-two inches, and that means the square mile surrounding me gets five hundred million gallons of water dumped on it yearly, enough to fill the new water tower at Cottonwood Falls twenty-five hundred times. The entire county receives about four hundred billion gallons a year, and that would fill this square mile to a depth of nearly two thousand feet. Things vary of course: in the flood year of 1951, 768 billion gallons came down, and two years later during the big drought only 261 billion gallons. In the early days especially, the number of farmers tended to rise and fall with the precipitation—the more of one, the more of the other—and neither the apocalyptic horsemen nor mechanization nor the lure of city jobs has so pushed people out as inches of rain.

  The main watercourses of Chase look like the sprung tines of a fork thrust into a squarely cut piece of beefsteak that is the county, and ninety-five percent of the surface water leaving here goes out eastward on the central tine and handle, the Cottonwood, and on to the Neosho and the Arkansas. The Verdigris River, hardly more than a brook in Chase, drains only some thirty square miles of the county as it cuts, in leaving, an upside-down L. Of its 280 miles, just a dozen lie in Chase, one of them now under a small impoundment. The upper Verdigris is very much a Hills creek, with its peculiar color of transparent gray like faded flint, that hallmark hue of these upland streams. Sometimes the water runs a shade closer to oxidized copper, and I think the word verdigris, “green-gray,” describes it well, but I’ve read that the name comes from the Osage Indians, who today live south of here and who call it Wa-ce-ton-xoe, “gray-green-bark-waters,” perhaps an allusion to shale banks the color of sycamore trunks. As does the etymology, local pronunciation allows interpretation: VURR-duh-gree, VURR-duh-griss, and my own preference, like rainfall, varies from day to day.

  Walking again: I’ve come to a mossy seep, not far above several runnels resolving themselves farther down the hollow into a confluence that I take, at least on this dry day, to be the headwaters. The seep is a lateral crack, a long crevice like a slender something left between the pages of a closed book. I can’t insert even a finger, but still the broken ledge drips, tick-tick-tick, like a water clock, and I set my tin cup under it, and now the seep goes ting-ting-ting, a small bell. I wait. The snow-on-the-mountain hasn’t marked my hand, and I’m not branded, and I’ll have no acid scar to tell stories about. Ting-ting-ting. This county is a leaky place, its stone sea shot through with fissures and fractures, concavities and crannies, holes and vugs, crazed layers of jointed limestone between strata of shale, all of it like a stack of sliced bread holding water until there’s too much, and then draining itself in hidden slopes. This one is a mere dripping—now it goes tuck-tuck-tuck—but, twelve miles west of here, Jack Spring, the biggest in the county, lets go about a hundred gallons a minute, so it takes old Jack, drawing from the largest cave system in Kansas, nearly a decade to return what falls on its square mile each year. There are many other springs, and most of their cold pools sprout a toothsome and peppery watercress; in season, I’ve munched my way from spring to spring as if pub-hopping. West of here also rise several artesian wells, one of them once strong enough to push its water up to the second floor of a nearby farmhouse. These hydraulic details matter, since a summer-flowing creek in an upland pasture can be miles away; the ranchers’ old solution was a stock tank and windmill, but the Aermotors and Dempster Annu-Oileds are gone like last year’s rain, and now bulldozer-cut ponds, cheap to build and maintain, pock the county. Thoreau thought a lake to be the earth’s eye; if he’s right, then Chase County, born blind, now sees better than Argus.

  The cup, tock-tock-tock as if again counting time, overflows, and I drink my Adam’s ale and set the tin noggin back to catch a draft for my hot neck, and once more, ting-ting-ting. Years ago the citizens of Cottonwood Falls laboriously laid a four-mile-long cypress pipeline to tap water from a spring in the distant hills; I’ve drunk the cold sweetness from that western rock and eaten the watercress there, and I understand why they went to the trouble in that day when people attended to the tastes of water as the Irish do their stout. You can still see the cypress pipes here and there, but they are full of mud. The town drinks now from the not-so-sweet Cottonwood alluvium, a water so hard, a woman told me, that she might as well wash with gravel.

  My cup fills, and the droplets, like a campfire, mesmerize me: the patter, the patter, the pattern, the pattern, slightly changing, the patter, the pattern. Tick-tick-tick-tick. I’m down in a hollow where a river begins, I’m between ledges where a source drips steady as if being long and slowly wrung, I’m between layers of rock and shale, they between gone seas; the wind carries in the rain, the water flushes along organic acids that eat the permeable stone back into liquid and send it again toward the far father sea; the solids come in and head out, just pausing; all around me are absorptions and percolations, everything soluble, the grasses sucking the mutable rock and transpiring, everything between forms of liquidity, and all things forms of liquidity: the harrier a feathered bag of nutrient waters falling onto the furred sack of sapid juices, thirsty for hot rodent blood it can turn into flight; and what was I but a guzzling, sweating bag of certain saps waiting to give up its moisture: press me dry, powdery dry, and you’d have a lump of mineralized soil, about
enough to pot a geranium.

  Tell me, O Swami of the Waters, in a word, what is the essence of life? Saith he, Borrowed.

  By Way of Spelling Kansas

  A couple of sentences of personal testimony (thoroughfare readers not happy on byways may proceed to the next chapter): I’ve carried one name for all of my life and another one for twelve years less than that, and I’ve come to see that while the two names attach to the same man from the epidermis out, on the inward side—the soupy side, my physician grandfather called it—the names point to men of different inclinations, dissimilar alignments, fellows of unlike silks whose souls are as chalk to cheese. One is a kind of dreamer who often darkly transmutes and even undoes the work of the more orderly man, the one who always squeezes the tube from the bottom, always wipes his shoes before entering. Actually, I believe there are more than this pair: when the Populist congressman “Sockless” Simpson of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, misspelled his hometown while running for office, he said, I wouldn’t give a tinker’s durn for a man who can’t spell a word more than one way. I think I’m like that about interior selves.

  Many tribal Americans believe that a person turns into his name, partakes of its nature in such a way that it is a mold the possessor comes to fill. When names lose their first meaning, as they have to most Americans of European descent, that mold becomes only a handle for others to move us around with. I think places also take on aspects of their names, at least if they touch something genuine to begin with. If you’ve never visited the twin towns of Chase County, I could give you a quick tour of each and then ask you to say which is which, and you would not call Cottonwood Falls Strong City or vice versa. They have filled out their names, become them. A decade ago, before the big feedlot at Strong closed, that town filled out its name in an additional, olfactory way.

  Imagine: I set before you two bouquets of prairie flowers, both pinky white. One dangles elegant blossoms like little trumpets while the other has only small, tightly clustered blooms that you must look at twice to notice. I ask you to guess which one is larkspur and which bastard toadflax. The names, appearances, and your responses converge: larkspur is the one of obvious beauty. But what if we go beyond appearances and I ask you to eat the fruit of one, to take of its essence, and I tell you that one is poisonous but the other used to be an Indian dessert? You must choose, and, while you do, read on.

  Another question: in a word, freely associating, speak your response to the name Kansas. Now, what if the state carried one of the other labels linked with it: Quivira, Osage, Shawnee, Arapaho? Years back, someone proposed the territory be called Cherokee. Do these labels fit your response? On maps, Kansas has been Terra Incognita, Nuevo Mexico, Louisiana, Missouri Territory, Oregon Territory, Nebraska Territory, Indian Territory, Platte Country, and the Great American Desert, and its epithets have been Bleeding and Drouthy, and it’s been the Grasshopper State and the New Garden of Eden. There’s some historical accuracy in all of these but little in this one—Kansas—and the confusion from the misnomer shows even today when the people here insist on calling the Kansas River the Kaw while pronouncing the Arkansas River “Our Kansas.” Ethnographers call the eponymous Indians the Kansa, and the native people now call themselves the Kaw.

  For years my grandfather practiced medicine in Kansas City, Kansas, in the lower Kaw Valley—never the Kansas Valley—and he missed no chance to correct anyone who dropped a syllable and pronounced his town “Can City” (he also insisted that the double s in Missouri was a sibilant, as in Mississippi); but there is precedent for calling the city, state, river, and tribe Can. There’s also precedent for calling them Camps, Ka-Anjou, Kamse, Kay, Konzo, Quans. Had history bent in a slightly different course, the professional football team on the Missouri side of the Big Muddy could have been the Chanchez City Chiefs. The possibilities increase when you include names whites have confused with the word Kansa: Accances, Arkansaw, Excanjaque, Okanis, Ukasa. To have adopted any of these dozen versions would have changed more things here than just maps and phone directories, because never can the image belonging to Karsa be the same as that of Kathagi or even Kunza.

  In this territory, Coronado sought out the Guas (probably the Kaws), La Harpe visited the Canci, Bourgmont met the Ecanze, George Sibley traveled among the Konsee, and the Lewis and Clark expedition encountered the Kanzus (the most accurate spelling for our pronunciation) but they and their men spelled the word eleven other ways. That eminence of historical thought, Francis Parkman, on his map of the area identified the natives as Kanisse. None of these men spoke the language of the Kansa, a Siouan dialect, and today we are not sure any of the earliest explorers asked the people what they then called themselves, a different question from asking other tribes or whites what they called the Kansa.

  I’ve come across 140 ways to spell Kansas, and, if you include the confused Ac-, Es-, Ex-, Ok-, Uk- forms at times applied to the tribe, I’ve found 171 variations that employ every letter of the alphabet except b, f, and v. The question comes up, if whites couldn’t get a three- or six-letter name correct, what else couldn’t they get right? The meaning of the word for one thing: Kansa and its forms have been translated as wind, windy, wind people, south wind people, those-who-come-like-wind-across-the-prairie, swift, swift wind, swift river, swift water, smoky water, fire people, plum people, disturbers, troublemakers, filthy, and cowards. Dispense with the freak translations like the last four, and you have a people defined by three of the four ancient elements.

  Six full-blood Kansa, all men and all but one over sixty-five, are still living but none of them can speak more than a few words of the old language; they use almost exclusively the word Kaw for the tribe even though they know their parents called themselves Kōn-say (a spelling I’ve never seen except in my own notes); the n comes out almost as a w and the second syllable nearly disappears, so that you can imagine an illiterate French trapper believing he heard “Kaw.” The first uncontested written reference to the tribe appears on Pere Marquette’s 1673 map where the word is Kansa. In nearly all of the 171 variants, one thing remains constant: a voiceless velar usually followed by a nasalized ah. Whatever butchering of this basic sound by whites, the Kansa seem to have accepted it, and one uppity Anglo said the people tolerated the word Kaw because they were so degraded, but I wonder how many Indians he thrashed for mispronouncing his name. Tact is a more plausible explanation for their tolerance.

  The six surviving natives, most of whom live across the state line in Oklahoma near the last Kaw reservation, accept “People of the South Wind” or “Wind People” as the meaning of the name, even though that definition derives from a time long ago when the Kansa, with the Osage and several other now separate tribes, belonged to a bigger Siouan group living in the upper Ohio River Valley (some ethnologists believe those people were descendants of the ones who built or later used the great earthen mounds of that region); in the early sixteenth century, this larger tribe moved down the Ohio to the Mississippi and then up the Missouri, fragmenting as they migrated, until the Wind People arrived at the junction of the Kansas River with the Big Muddy.

  Even before the great migration, the word Kansa referred to a gens whose totem was the wind; that the Kansa would one day give their name to a state famous for its winds is only a wonderful coincidence, although to me it goes beyond: in the Siouan family of languages, the Four Winds, the Great Mysterious, is commonly Wakan or Wakanda. Yet the everyday Kansa word for wind is quite different: ta-dshe, and the Osage form—the two peoples understand each other as a Kentuckian does a Cockney—is ta-dse. The Osage called the Kansa Kan-the; in my Osage dictionary (for the Kaw there are only a couple of old word lists), the term for swift is kon-tha-gi, plum is kon-dse, horse is ka-wa, and human being, a common translation of many tribes’ names for themselves, is ni-ka-shi-ga-ego (ni means water or river).

  I suppose, over the last four centuries, that this place called Kansas has come, like a murky chunk of softened glass, to fill the mold of its name, and I believe th
at today we see it through that now hardened form descended from unlettered explorers, careless map printers, and travelers and settlers who deemed red people worth no name but heathen. Had any white asked, we might have learned more about the name the Kansa may have once called themselves: Hutanga. We might also understand what it meant to them instead of having to rely on a twentieth-century Osage dictionary: “big fish” or “big water-dweller.” Now, whatever links may have once existed between the word hutanga and the Kansa’s most sacred object in historic times—a conch shell—are lost.

  Given the erosions and eradications of history, I incline to Sock-less Simpson’s view: any people who can spell their homeplace only one way probably aren’t worth a tinker’s durn, and I append the 140 variations of the name for the Wind People as homage to their richness:

  Cah Cau Kansais Kathagi

  Can Caugh Kansars Kau