She set out the steaks and rice and broccoli, and I said that I’d heard she had one of the biggest ranches in Chase among those who run their own cattle, and she said, somewhat absently, I suppose, and then, People here sit around and compare how poor they are, see who’s the worst off. I mean, being successful in this county is suicide. Nobody wants you to succeed. People get together and tear you down, and that used to bother me until I realized it wasn’t just me they tore down—I saw that, if they could chew me up and spit me out as a potential failure or whatever, they wouldn’t even pause before going on to the next person. They’ll get around to you too. I just don’t understand it: they talk about economic development in Chase and at the same time they don’t want anybody to achieve anything.
I said someone had told me that in spite of all the low-income families here, there were a dozen countians worth more than a million dollars out of a population of only about three thousand, and she nodded and said, But this is still a great county for not taking risks and not having a good time. Before my parents moved away, they belonged to the Over Forty Club, and all they did was have good times. There’s nothing like that around now. A lot of these people don’t know what they have because they’ve always lived here, and it’s the only world they know so it looks typical and ordinary. That’s sad.
Later she would say, Last year a colt was born in the early morning, and I was there with it. That afternoon I was in New York, on Broadway, buying a ticket for The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Lily Tomlin’s one-woman show. I was standing in line with trash blowing around, bag ladies limping by, everything shoulder to shoulder, and I was thinking of that wet colt in Chase County, Kansas, and I felt I knew how different this place is and what it’s worth. I love New York, and one of the reasons I love it is that it shows me what I have in this county.
To the end of helping city people explore the tallgrass country and understand where their Whoppers and tenderloins come from, for several weeks each year Jane opens the Homestead to a few women; for sixty dollars a day, a visitor can eat and sleep in the old south ranch house on Thurman Creek and loaf about the prairie, or she can join the crew and help work cattle, even down to castration. Jane said: I like people, but I live where there aren’t many, and I want to share some of this prairie—a few people at a time. But to get outsiders to see the beauty, they have to ease back and stay for a while. This place comes to you slowly—or maybe we come slowly to it. I want women to see the reality of my operation, and, if they’re not afraid, they can watch a pregnancy check or watch the electro-ejaculator go up the bull’s rectum, and they can help measure testicles to determine if he’s fit to service my cows. People should understand at this basic level what has to happen to put a burger in their mouths. The women who come in here are great. They ask all the questions you hope nobody will ever ask, like “How do you make silage?” They don’t mean, how do you cut and pack it—they want to know how caramelization works. They want to know about drugs and chemical enhancements in my beef, and I tell them I use antibiotics only by injection. They’re necessary to inoculate against pinkeye and influenza, and I put antibiotics into cattle feed only during the three weeks of stress following weaning. Hormones I don’t use at all, and no ear implants. I tell these women they should get after the cattle industry because too much shit goes into beef—not nearly as much, of course, as goes into hogs. If it was feasible now, I’d raise only natural beef. I’d feel better about organic meat, but ranchers’ traditions and consumers’ unwillingness to pay a few cents more makes it difficult. When the Europeans announced they wouldn’t buy American beef because of possible dangers to humans from animals laced with hormones and drugs, I cheered. I mean, when will we wake up?
After we finished the meal and pushed our chairs from the table, she said, There’s no public access in the Flint Hills worth talking about so my “internships”—the real name is Prairie Women Adventures—help out, and I have some control over who explores my land. I think a private response like this is better than the prairie park, even if I can only take five or six people a week.
I said, you’re an assault-rifle radical until the park comes up, and then you turn into a shoot-that-clock reactionary, and she said again, Inconsistency is just great. You know that my grandmother was one of the leading park opponents, but I’ve never been opposed to maintaining grassland, although I am against overrunning the place. You’ve got two million acres in Yellowstone, and now they’re moving out bears instead of Winnebagos—that’s mismanagement I don’t want to see happen here. She was warming up, and what she took to be my view on issues may have altered her words somewhat. I like Aldo Leopold’s idea of stewardship: just because the recorder of deeds says the land is mine doesn’t really make it mine, but in this county I’d rather admit I’m a feminist than an environmentalist. People tolerate me—they even expect me to be a feminist, but being an environmentalist is just not an acceptable mode of behavior, although one day ranchers and conservationists are going to be on the same side. Already we both agree that the place can’t be opened to Winnebagos or tourist strips and still survive.
For the third time the phone rang, and for the second time she said, No, he’s here, and when she sat again, she said, I’ve learned that I can’t get the land to do what I want it to do. Mostly I have to follow what it wants to do, so it’s my responsibility to learn how the prairie lives. If the land wants fire, I give it a match. I’m a manager, that’s all, and basically what I am is a bug manager—what I’m really interested in is my cows’ digestion, and that’s a result of microorganisms in soil and water and stomachs. Basically, this is a bug ranch. Don’t thank a rancher for your steak, thank bugs.
I leaned toward the floor and said, thank you one and all, and she groaned and with her pink sneaker kicked my chair. She said, Look: one day I’m going to write an essay called “Maggots and Rattlesnakes,” and the idea will be that we’re all in this together, even the things we may not like. Maggots are an integral part of my world where I have dead animals and disease. I need all kinds of decay—my business depends on it. My crop is really grass, and cattle are just the means to harvest and package it.
I said that not everyone here saw things that way, and, especially, the absentee landlords did not seem to act as stewards, and Jane said, The bad thing about absentee ownership is the system of payments where the managing cowhand receives a check from the cattle owner and then the cowhand pays the landlord. We need to reroute it so that the cattle owner pays the landlord, who will inspect the pastures to protect her investment, and then she’ll pay the cowhand. The way it is now, in the short term, overgrazing gives more dollars to managers and cattle owners.
I asked whether absentee owners didn’t often treat their land like old-time bonds where all the investor did was clip a coupon and send it in, and she said, It’s hard to care about what you don’t see. A couple of years ago I wanted to double absentee owners’ taxes, which would have included Evan, and the county treasurer said she’d go along if I could convince my father. Well, goodbye to that idea. Jane sat quietly for a while, I picked up the plates, and she said, If anyone anywhere should be environmentalists, all of us here should: if we lose the land’s productivity, we’ve lost our hope of living on here.
Out along the near tracks the Santa Fe horned and dieseled through Bazaar, its noisy regularity a kind of Big Ben to the hamlet. She said, Ask one last question and then go home, and I asked what was so special about the Flint Hills. Picking and handling her words carefully as if they were newborn, taking her time, she said, These hills are so everlasting. I get bored with the work sometimes but never the place. But you need an excuse to stay on, and ranching is one we all understand. And a moment later: I’ve come to see that if I sit still, things and people will come here. Even canners like you, and she was quiet and then said, Maybe that’s the religion I left Kansas to find. There was a silence, and when I thought it safe, I said, and then you tapped the heels of your
ruby slippers three times, and she let fly a pink sneaker, and she said quietly, Nevertheless.
After I was out the door and in the cool and dewed night, a chuck-will’s-widow calling from a wooded slope, I noticed for the first time her Jeep license-plate letters: IMNXTC.
Beneath a Thirty-Six-Square Grid
Items found, things dug up, oddments of the grasses like shards under a digger’s grid:
CRIBBING ARISTOTLE. Earth, air, fire, water: the fruit of these ancient elements here is tallgrass, and from it proceeds the way of life.
THE VIEW FROM THIRTY THOUSAND FEET. If, in June, you look down from a jetliner on Chase County, ninety-five percent of what you see will be grasses—native, alien, cultivated, wild.
ONLY ALFALFA IS NOT. Of the four major crops here, three are grasses—wheat, sorghum, com. The major pursuit, beef, absolutely depends on grass. You can see how, given the present American diet, grasses stand between us and hunger.
IN ABSENCE OF POISONS. In North America, tallgrasses probably began evolving about twenty million years ago, most likely in tandem with herbivores, against whose teeth grass has not the usual vegetative defenses of toxin or spine but instead only cellular structures containing silica—microparticles of “sand”—that strengthen the plant and also wear down the teeth of grazers, a defense that would seem as effective as a holdup victim’s breathing hard on the gunman’s cold pistol to corrode it. Yet, if you take a field knife of finest steel and cut a couple of armfuls of prairie grass, you’ll find the blade dulled as if you’d dressed out a buffalo.
ERTHS. The soils of the American grasslands, according to one old taxonomy, belong either to the Prairyerths—lying generally east of the ninety-sixth meridian in the North and the ninety-seventh farther south—or to the more western Blackerths. Chase County lies among the Prairyerths close to where they meet the Blackerths of the mixed-grass region. Tallgrass is to Prairyerth as cypress to swamp, caribou to tundra.
SNAPSHOT. I am on an upland in a fine stand of little bluestem and some buffalo grass, a place of full light where the only shadows are poor, tiny, fleeting: a few leaves of wild indigo, a spider web, the flight of a bird.
WHY THE BREADBASKET. The Prairyerths and Blackerths are deep soils, lightly granular, relatively nonacid, unleached, with full stores of humus and minerals. Weathering (wetting, drying, freezing, thawing) and deeply penetrating roots (especially those of the grasses) that “stir” the soil provide nearly every element favorable to plant growth. This mixing of climate and earthen crust has made the middle of America the most plenteous agricultural region on the planet.
THE WESTERINGS. The signature of the long prairie, big bluestem, probably originated in the valleys of the Appalachian Mountains, although its character is better suited to the climate and landforms farther west; its migration recapitulates the grand plate movement of the crustal rock it comes from, and it’s also an analog of human passages: red and white.
ETYMOLOGIES. Unlike unrelated and non-native “Kentucky” bluegrass, the name bluestem is self-evident if you look closely at the lower end of a leaf where it branches away in purplish blueness from the stalk; you will also understand an earlier and more accurate, if less elegant, name: bluejoint. Look at the seed head of spread prongs on big blue and you’ll understand its other names—turkeyfoot, turkeyclaw—and watch the heads of little blue turn to white silkiness in the autumn and you’ll understand its other name—prairie beard grass—and its Latin generic name: Andropogon, man’s beard.
FORGET THE BLUE GRAMA. Of the nearly seventy species of native grass growing in Chase County, the cattleman cares about five: big and little bluestem, Indian grass, switch grass, and side-oats grama. Many ranchers consider that a sufficient diversity.
LIKE THE CHINESE ARMY. On upland ranges away from wooded vales some ninety percent of the vegetation is grass, yet three quarters of the species are nongrasses: the dominance of grass lies in its bulk, not its variety. The native forb with the largest number of species, about as numerous as the grasses combined, is the aster, yet its members are nearly invisible.
SNAPSHOT. I am up on a ridge. In spite of the rise and fall of the hills, the grass gives such openness that it distorts elevation and turns this land into mere length and breadth, into an apparently horizontal place, a myth you can truly dispel only by walking crosscountry.
WERE IT NOT FOR ROOTS AND CUDS. The work of Chase is the turning of soil and cellulose into humanly digestible carbohydrate and protein. If this immense conversion of sugars were to fail, only a half-dozen quarrymen could earn a living.
VESSEL OF WRATH. Although humankind’s most commonly concocted beverage, beer, comes from a grass, the native grasses of the tall prairie are too deficient in sugars to serve as a source of brewing malt. Were Kansas known for barley instead of beef and wheat, local notions would be different, and Carry Nation would not likely have chopped up her first saloon thirty-five miles from here.
HEKA HO! GENERAL CUSTER. With its growth tissues protected, tallgrass attracts grazers and fire to itself, thereby turning apparent enemies into allies that help destroy seedling trees and non-native broadleaf plants, the real rivals of long grass: the Kansa inviting in the cavalry to subdue the Pawnee.
THE ANTHILL PRINCIPLE. Some tallgrasses keep sixty percent of their weight underground and seem to treat the world of sunlight as alien and dangerous, a realm to enter as a spinster does the stock market, venturing only a portion at a time on a few blue chippers, yet ready, if they fail, to cut her losses and get out. Big bluestem invests germ so conservatively that some prairie botanists have never found in the wild a big blue seedling.
THE LESSON OF BEASTS. The survival of mammals on a grassland where cover is scarce depends upon at least one, commonly two, and sometimes three facilities: herding, burrowing, running. Native peoples dominated the plains when they developed all of them: clans, earth lodges, horses.
SNAPSHOT. It has just rained, and I’m walking a drenched crest where the little bluestem has turned nearly to amethyst, as it does on a wet October day (people accustomed to city lawns are surprised to see tall prairie respond to autumn with subtle hues of cinnamon and wine, like an oak-hickory forest, and showing more rich colors in some years than others, like maples). This hill has no intermedi ary horizon of trees so I am the highest thing, a solitary projection, and the roundness of the sky seems nearly accessible: the grasses allow me the illusion I can raise my arms to stir the bowl of heavens, and that notion makes my blood regret the long, ancestral years of skulking in the forest.
NO SOFT FOCUS. In the early days of settlement, when countians used the words flint hills, they meant upland pastures as distinct from cultivated bottoms, but the term broadened and came to include the whole of the two-hundred-mile-long, east-central rumpling across the state. Academics’ later attempts to name the region the Bluestem Hills failed, and that’s odd, since flint breaks farm implements, slices tires, cuts up stock, injures people, and contributes virtually nothing to the natural exchange that makes the land abundant here. It’s as if we were to chuck out the several epithets of Lincoln—Honest Abe, the Great Emancipator, the Man Who Saved the Union—and happily call him Old Wart Face.
THE ORTHOPTERAN CHORUS. In October the dominant sounds in the tall prairie are the raspings and clicketings of grasshoppers, katydids, and crickets; everywhere among the long stems cling translucent-winged, jointed-bodied creatures with serrated jaws that can eat the hickory handle of an ax. Like a cook who wants her pie eaten but not gobbled and so leaves a few pits in the cherries, grass laces its moist cellulose veins with silicon it takes from Permian stone: seawater become rock borrowed by bluestem to blunt the jaws of bugs.
WHAT ZEB SAID. After Zebulon Pike explored the center of the Heartland, he wrote in his 1808 account: From these immense prairies may arise one great advantage to the United States, viz: The restriction of our population to some certain limits, and thereby a continuation of the Union. Our citizens being so prone to rambling and e
xtending themselves on the frontiers will, through necessity, be constrained to limit their extent on the west to the borders of the Missouri and Mississippi, while they leave the prairies incapable of cultivation to the wandering and uncivilized aborigines of the country. In 1871, General George Custer said in My Life on the Plains: [The] tide of emigration . . . advanced toward the setting sun, slowly but surely narrowing the preconceived limits of the Great American Desert and correspondingly enlarging the limits of civilization. At last the geographical myth was dispelled.
LIKE AN APOTHECARY. From the first, countians have believed that limestone imparts to the grasses their remarkable capacity to fatten elk and antelope, bison and cattle, and the earliest geological report on Chase, by Major Hawn in 1865, attributed the thick stands of bluejoint to gypseous clays and spoke of several theories scientists were offering for the link between “gypsum” and the robust vegetable economy: the mineral serves bluestem as gastric juices do a stomach, stimulates its circulation like a tonic, supplies an invigorating spritzer of water and carbonic acid, promotes soil fermentation like yeast, fixes ammonia as calcium does bone, or acts as an exciting power to the saps like powdered unicorn horn to the old lover.