ANDROPOGON AND MEN’S BEARDS. From wind comes the sea, from it shelled creatures, from them stone, from it grasses, from them the bison, from it the hunter: a Plains Indian sometimes speaks of the grandfather winds.
SNAPSHOT. West of Bazaar and north of Den Creek, the grasses lie over the hills like a blanket over a sleeper, retaining the dominion they once had everywhere about. They slow my walking although this surface growth is only three months old; yet, below ground, the root systems are older than the big cottonwoods in the hollow. The prairie hides its age by peeling off its face every year and showing each spring a new one, but the cottonwoods can only swell, gnarl, extend, and break. Humankind has long seen trees as reflections of itself, and we have imagined gods in them and cut deities and holy objects from them; we will eat and build with grasses but not worship them, will see them as metaphor but not divinity; it is this separation, I think, that can create such unease when we confront the prairie. Gods may rise from oceans and clouds, but I’ve heard of none rising from grasses, and this is peculiar because, unlike oceans or heavens, grasslands so evidently die and are reborn, and because, although less evidently, they are the place where our kind was made.
O BRAVE NEW WORLD. Big bluestem spreads over the prairie mostly by cloning itself through lateral underground stems, its rhizomes having the capacity to replicate themselves for a century or more; it also, but less frequently, reseeds itself through sexual means, so that a slope of big blue contains both clones and seedling offspring. Could a man do this, say a Shakespeare, his precise genetic duplicate could sit down today and share an ale with his great-great-etcetera-grandchild.
HUMDRUMITY. If we judge from their many journals, nine teenth-century travelers in their first miles of crossing the prairie were astonished, appalled, and confounded by the grassed endlessness west of the ninety-fifth meridian even though they were expecting it; but their awe almost never opened to perception, turning instead to recitations of numbed miles over grass, grass, grass, from here to Tedium.
CAVEAT EMPTOR. During one year of especially good rains, Cottonwood Falls realty agent Whitt Laughridge tried to show a prospective buyer some pasture, but the bluestem was so high they couldn’t see the tract. He told me: We drove into it and had to turn around and drive out. He didn’t buy it, so I guess he didn’t recognize it as pasture.
THE BOOK OF NATURE. Grasses and broadleaf plants coexist closely by sharing light and soil nutrients at different levels and different times of the year; in spite of relentlessly fierce competition, species so balance themselves that a big increase of one at the expense of others hardly happens unless there is outside disturbance. In mature grassland the communities are diversely full yet in equilibrium, but I haven’t heard of any prairie politican seeing or caring to apply the parable.
THE LAST DEFENSE. The third-greatest enemy of the tallgrass is not fire, disease, herbivores, high wind, heat, cold, ice, freezing, or flood—it is drought, the force that shapes the prairie, the power that grasses roll their leaves against and counter by treating the world above ground as a treacherous place to be only tolerated, as if they understood the prepotency of drought over their second great enemy, trees. Against the biggest enemy, Western man, they have a lone defense of waiting him out, surviving in neglected pockets like those World War Two Japanese soldiers who were still creeping out of jungles a quarter of a century after the surrender.
SNAPSHOT. I am atop a hill that opens onto a circle of horizon without a single tree interrupting it. Over the last fifty years it’s become a view harder and harder to find here, and I have yet to meet a longtime resident who does not say that there are more trees than ever before: seventy-six-year-old Frank Gaddie of Bazaar said, It’s got so I hate a tree. When I first began looking around the county, I found the wooded vales, several of them reminding me of Vermont, the loveliest places in Chase, but since then, while I’ve not lost my pleasure in wooded hollows, I’ve come to cherish absolute treelessness.
THE RED AND THE WHITE. Range biologists classify species of praine vegetation as “decreasers” or “increasers” according to the response of a plant to agricultural practices. All of the native tallgrasses are decreasers when faced with heavy grazing, trampling, frequent mowing, plowing, even fertilizing. With their decline come the increasers, the imported grasses—fescue, brome, bluegrass. Decreasers, increasers: bluebirds, English sparrows; prairie wolves, hounds; ghost dancers, Moral Majorities.
BLUE BABIES. Unlike native grass, an alien increaser frequently needs fertilizer and irrigation to survive the vagaries of the prairie. The last time I stopped for gas on the turnpike, I saw a small sign on the door: Matfield Green Service Area has exceeded the 10.0 mg per liter limit allowed for nitrate in drinking water, and it warned of cyanosis, a disease caused by, among other things, fertilizer runoff.
BRAZIL. A burr oak here may live 150 years and take fifty more to decompose; for those two centuries it keeps most of its nutrients locked within itself, giving up only a smidgen each autumn in its acorns and leaves; but that superficial mat of fallen vegetation—if it isn’t carried away by wind or rain—inhibits circulation of water and air and allows only a shallow recycling of nutrients. Although an oak sends down a deep taproot, the tree scarcely alters the subsoil, and that’s why earth in a cleared forest can quickly lose its shallow fertility: had the Heartland been largely woods instead of prairie, America might now be what the Amazon is becoming.
LEVIATHAN. A clump of big bluestem penetrates deeply into the subsoil and carries some nutrients up and deposits them and hauls others down and stores them; the old passages of decayed roots open the soil to percolation and aeration; the brief cycle of an individual plant accelerates the process, while the thick surface network of rootlets (something that can hardly be washed or blown away) sponges up moisture and foods: in these ways the tallgrass builds soil from rock debris. As a whale surfaces for air, so big blue comes up for sunlight, but it too belongs mostly to a netherworld.
GO-BACK LAND. After pioneers had all the rich bottom acres in tillage, the second generation of countians began breaking sod on less steep hillsides and planting corn, oats, wheat, barley; for a time the plants grew on the marginal cropland, and, just before the great drought of the thirties hit, about eighty thousand acres here were under cultivation. Because most of the plowed land lay in the protected bottoms and nearly all of the remainder of the county was grass-covered, Chase fared better than many other areas; nevertheless, when the dust years finally ended here, one quarter of the cultivated acreage, mostly slopes, was on its way back to grass. It was as if, said an Oklahoma biologist, Nature had withheld rain to rid herself of the unworthy.
SNAPSHOT. On a rare day of near windlessness, I am sitting on a ridge that opens toward two smaller hills so similar they seem reflections. Unlike a forest, a grassland lets sound carry, and I can count distant prairie voices: a harrier, a meadowlark, an upland plover. Each calls in plaintive phrases as if it admitted the prairie solitude into its notes. When the air does move, it pulls from the bending grass around me a soft outrush like a deep breath slowly vented, the wind giving voice to the grass, and it lending a face to the wind.
Within Her Pages
Elisha Mardin of New York came into the county in 1859, only four years after the first white settler, and made his home a few miles northeast of Bazaar and began buying livestock primarily for market in Chicago. In 1861, when he was twenty-eight and full-bearded and thinking himself well enough established, he went to Bloomington, Illinois, and, two weeks before Christmas, married Elizabeth Ann Frank. She was eighteen, small but sturdy, attractive. Sometime in 1862 Elisha brought his Quaker bride in a wagon to Chase, where they set up near Bloody Creek and lived for a decade and witnessed the clearing and tilling of the bottoms, but the upland they saw only in its aspect of the last ten thousand years.
On May Day, the bride began keeping a diary—a small thing, three by five inches—to my knowledge the earliest surviving record of daily life i
n the county. Elizabeth’s entries cease the day before Christmas, and there is one three-and-a-half-week hiatus in October, and one November page is missing. Her 210 postings, the longest no more than five telegram-like sentences, are all in the plainest of declarations, without punctuation, and in a homemade and changeable spelling; her cursives are here tidy but elsewhere collapsing as if she were tired or writing on her lap; the entries are dispatches from a quiet prairie frontier during a time the country was fighting its internal war. She apparently kept no later diaries, although Elisha maintained one the following year, his beginning a week after Elizabeth’s stops and mostly covering livestock busi ness, with occasional mentions of choring around, burning pastures, sowing flax (a crop now unknown here), trading with an Indian for a pony, building a branding pen, helping home friends pretty tight, drilling with the militia. In May he writes this typically terse entry: I went up to the falls et) over to Bazaar after a band of garillas got back about two oclock in the after noon. But what had he seen?
Elizabeth shows herself doing traditional tasks of a frontier wife, often helped by a hired woman, and this suggests a modest affluence. She writes with a detachment that has the strength of direct and unadorned statement, and, other than weather, she rarely evaluates anything: the woman who appears within her pages is one adjusting quickly to the prairie; if she is happy to see her walls plastered or a new cellar cemented or a cistern dug, she keeps mum. From time to time she does speak of weariness and not feeling well, but otherwise she and Elisha and her friends enter and exit as if in tableaux vivants. Her lack of intimacy—except for two expostulations of loneliness—suggests that Elizabeth recorded only what she was likely to forget rather than, say, her sorrow at the unexpected death of her helping woman’s husband. Although writing just for her own ends (on her birthday she remarks merely on sewing and weather), she still confides nothing that could embarrass her in front of someone coming along later, such as a voyeur from another century.
Seen together, her little penciled accounts go against the conventional notion that pioneer life was all toil and burden, an eking out of drudging survival and little else: Elizabeth’s pleasures may have been simple, but they were abundant. Where Gabriel Jacobs’ inventory suggests days of hard work, Elizabeth’s pages reveal horseback trips out to Jacobs’ Mound, canoe rides on the Cottonwood, and overnight visits with friends.
Here is a month of entries, May to Christmas, 1862:
Sunday, May 4: was home all day reading a book it was a very plesant day
Wednesday, May 7: I helped to wash we had a large washing I got very tired lisha came home it was a plesant day
Friday, May 9: Molly and I ironed all day Elisha went to town [Emporia] I am so lonsome it is a plesant day
Tuesday, May 13: I was in bed all day nearly till in the evening then I worked at the babies skirt it was so warm
Saturday, May 17: it was very unplesant day I did not do much of eny thing only to help do the cooking and do the patching
Wednesday, June 11: Koke [a friend] Elisha and me went up south fork a goose berrying it was very warm we went on horseback
Saturday, June 21: 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
Tuesday, June 24: I cut carpet raggs there was to gentlemen here for dinner it was a plesant day they commenced the cellar
Tuesday, July 1: Molly and I washed in the fore noon we fixt the clock so that it would run
Thursday, July 3: We baked some cakes and roasted a pig to take to the fourth it was a plesant day
Friday, July 4: we went to the dinner we had a good dinner a good speach there was a good menny folks there
Monday, July 7: I was not very well I had dreadful soare lips finished the cellar went to the garden
Wednesday, July 16: I made a sheat and cut out a pair of drawers for Elisha it was a plesant day
Tuesday, July 22: I made me a under waste I went to Fowlers and took tea and went to Prathers and stade all night
Tuesday, August 5: I worked at lisha shirt Elisha went to Emporia coke killed a pig Molly and I dressed it
Saturday, August 9: Molly and me went after plumbs and grapes I got a letter from Sarah [her sister who would later join her]
Saturday, August 16: I don the ironing and picked the grapes for pies
Monday, August 18: I done the morning work swept the yard we had company Mr Davis and Mason
Wednesday, September 17: Mandy washed Miss Jacobs [Gabriel Jacobs’ daughter] was here I went with her to Mollys Frank took sick
Sunday, September 21: I wrote a letter to lin [another sister] in the fore noon and went to Mollys in the evening Frank died in the night
Monday, September 22: I went to Mollys and done the work was there all day came home and went back sat up all night
Tuesday, September 23: I went to the graveyard went to stouts for dinner came home and was very tired and sick
Wednesday, October 29: I was at home Elisha was sick tended to Elisha worked to my quilt Manda came home
Monday, November 17: I lined my muffetees Elisha and linly went to Emporia Hodgin went to Gipson for some eggs got a dozen and a half
Thursday, November 20: Manda washed and I worked at the shirt in the fore noone and then I done the other work
Monday, December 1: I fixt me a skirt ready to quilt I had a sore finger I could not sew
Tuesday, December 2: I did not do much of any thing only tend to the work
Friday, December 12: we cleaned some of the [hog] guts for soap grease it sprinkled rain
Sunday, December 14: at home all day we rendered out lard in the morning it was a glumy day
Friday, December 19: I baked ten pies and fore kakes it was a very plesant day we had rain in the evening
Saturday, December 20: The folks went home I went to bed at eleven and slept till four
Three days before Christmas, Elizabeth left on a long visit to her parents in Illinois, and Elisha later joined her there briefly. In his diary of the next year, he mentions Elizabeth not even two dozen times, yet in the memoranda section of her diary she copied out this:
Remember me Oh
pass not thou my grave
Without one thought whose
Relics there recline
The only pang my bosom
dare not brave
Must be to find
forgetfulness in thine
Her early entries about making baby clothes and her frequent spells of not feeling well suggest a pregnancy, but their first child was not born until a decade later when the Mardins had moved forty miles south, out of the county, to Eureka; none of their three daughters ever heard anything about a miscarriage, and they believed the baby clothes were gifts, perhaps to be given along with the meat the Mardins took to war widows in Emporia. Elisha, despite his numerous entries about being sick, lived to be eighty-three, but Elizabeth died a few weeks short of her fiftieth birthday.
I first read her diary, in typescript, on a flight to Los Angeles; as we flew over Chase County, I thought how odd to hear Elizabeth Mardin’s words in a machine she would have found incredible and how, surely, she never dreamed her hours of boiling hog fat and baking wild mulberry pies would one day move in the mind of someone riding five miles above her homestead on a morning so pleasant the sky showed the edge of darkness of deep space, that indigo of stratospheric flight. Seated next to me was a friendly and loquacious woman well into her eighth decade in whose face I imagined an older Elizabeth. When she spoke, as if to remind me of her presence, she put her hand on my wrist, and I was surprised how something of so little flesh could be so soft, so heated, but her insistent conversation at last led me to pass her the typescript for, I hoped, a long and close reading. When she finished somewhere above the Mojave Desert, she returned Elizabeth’s diary and said, How far we’ve come from it all.
On the Town:
A Night at Darla’s
I am sitting at the bar, a comp
act L-shaped thing of ten stools, and I am by the wall, almost pressing myself against it as if trying to be invisible, but that’s foolish, since I’m jotting down items. Such activity in this place is most conspicuous, but ducking into the men’s toilet for notations is out of the question, so I’m trying to disguise my scribbling by occasionally copying figures from a State Board of Agriculture Annual Report manifestly open on the bar. It’s just past six in the evening, and conversations flow past me, riffles against a creek-bank stone.
I’m in Darla’s Fun Center, called the Long Horn Bar when I first visited Chase, the only taproom left in Cottonwood, and one of three in the county. A century ago the taverns here bore English pub names: the White Swan, the Blue Goose, the Dolly Varden (a woman’s hat, a dress, a trout, or a coquette in Barnaby Rudge), and the distance between Dolly and Darla may measure how far we’ve come. Darla’s, a few doors down from the Emma Chase, is a couple hundred feet beyond where the tip of the courthouse cupola shadow ceases on the winter solstice. Above the front doorway is a Pepsi sign holding a ragged starling nest, and inside the door and tossed down is a paper dinner plate; on it in a mixture of upper and lowercase letters: bAcK aT FiVe. The smudged paneling on the walls seems more to bespeak the age of the building than to cover it, and near me, just beyond arm’s reach over the bar, the cash register stands open as if brisk trade didn’t allow for time lost opening and closing it. There are nine customers here—three are ten-year-old boys playing the video game—and there’s the bartender, an ursine man of late middle years whose air of apparent menace is undermined by his perpetual lifting with his tongue and thrusting forward his lower denture, which then unrolls his nether lip; occasionally he removes his plates altogether to make a grotesquerie of his face to amuse the boys. He smiles seldom in spite of his wisecracks, but he suffers more from annoyance than anger; he wears an adjustable billed cap that says FECES OCCURS, and I think of grammarians who’d like to counter with hats reading SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT.