When I first came to Chase, Drinkwater’s mill so fascinated me I at once began asking questions about its history and seeking permission to go through it; a week later when I was again home I received a letter offering the stone mill to me for eight thousand dollars. The next few days I walked around the house and planned how I’d restore it while honoring its listing on the National Register, perhaps make it into a restaurant resplendent with prairie history. When reality finally took hold of me, I declined with real regret, in part because I feared for the mill. Last year, it sold to a young physician in Wichita who plans to repair and stabilize the building, dam, and machinery solely because he loves the beauty and history of the mill; he told me: I want to leave the grain dust and cobwebs.
Now, at this moment, I’m parked in front of the mill on the corner of Main and First: Cedar Point has six streets running east and west and four running from the river south; the railroad and U.S. 50 bend around it on the north and west, but enough out of sight so that travelers never see the village unless they turn off the highway. It’s half past eight in the morning, starting to ram, and I’m sitting in the back of a small van I’ve traveled in for fifteen years, a clipboard on my knee. I’ve pulled the curtains halfway to conceal me as I watch through the rear windows. I’m on assignment.
A couple of days ago a man in Cottonwood said to me, Nothing happens anymore in Cedar Pointless. For years I’ve made a practice of seeing “nothing” because I believe the American idea of “something” usually ends up harming our perceptions and use of the land. The late New York City photographer Ruth Orkin took pictures over the years of a most ordinary intersection below her upper-story apartment across from Central Park and eventually made them into a book. My assignment here is to compress watching and time by observing intensively for twelve hours—arbitrarily no more or fewer—and enter village life only as an unseen observer. We say, “If walls could speak, the tales they’d tell”: so, visualize me here as a wall, mute and impassive like those in O.H.’s old gristmill; or, if you prefer, I’m a hunter waiting in his tree-stand to nail his quarry—like him, I must sit downwind. I’m armed with a full load of patience, a small bag of French-roast espresso coffee, and a box of Fig Newtons.
The American novelist John Gardner, I think it was, said there are, really, only two plots: a stranger rides into town, and a stranger rides out of town. Because I’ve parked my truck around here before and thereby given it a kind of invisibility, maybe I’m inventing a third, the ultimate story: a stranger at one and the same time does both. My friend, writer Jack LaZebnik, claims there is but one plot: death approaches.
My clipboard is ready, my pencil finger itching, and I’ve warmed up with a couple of tallies:
Six pickups have passed, two autos. I’m trying to decide whether brick walls getting wet and elms and cottonwoods moving in the wind count as action. (No, that’s scenery.) Jot it down anyway; always get full information. Today, for a change, I have the time and comfort to write my notes neatly and fuss words down ever so tidily. Just so.
Nine o’clock: I’m firing up my backpacker’s stove to make the espresso—not a little prissy cup but one of size—to keep me alert in the sweet thrum of rain on the steel roof and the silent mesmerism of trickling windows. My snug parlor fills with the splendid scent of brewing coffee, I hear the Santa Fe roll through the cool gray morning, and I sit warm and dry (and if I don’t watch it, coziness is going to overwhelm me). Ah, life. Why haven’t I done this before, be a passive reporter who sits back and lets stories come to him? What’s with all this county walking? (Prop up the feet.) Here he is, a practitioner of Zen journalism, raking minutes and details into perfection as if in a sand garden.
Ten o’clock and I’ve just added another stroke to the PU tally; everything is in perfect array inside my unapparent post, and already I have a sense that even now, over the junipered hill, the cedared point, a stranger is about ready to ride into town, and some story will begin. Yes, we have only to wait.
Ten-thirty: The rain, probably, slows activity. When the day clears something will break, nothing spectacular, of course—after all, this is Cedar Point—but some commonplace, small yet marvelous, will open, something otherwise to pass into oblivion unremarked but for Doctor Invisible’s magic bullet of a pencil that will capture it for permanent display like a trophy head: every detail is extraordinary when seen in its own deep colors. Sharpen your weapon and have it ready.
Rain: in July of 1951, the great flood stranded the Santa Fe El Capitan four days just outside Cedar Point. A woman fell ill with a gallstone attack, so Billy Brant, a young rancher south of here, puttered up in his small Cessna and landed it on a section of dry highway near the train, where a boat brought the woman to him. He flew her to an ambulance and then returned with milk and diapers for the stranded babies. A month later New York called Billy east to honor him, and three months after that he and his brother went down in the Cessna, both of them killed.
And in another July, this one in 1890, Santa Fe engineer Charley Cogswell stopped his train near Cedar Point, strode off into a pasture with an empty bottle, milked a cow, and returned to feed a squalling infant aboard.
Ten-fifty: another pickup, actually one that passed earlier. I’m starting a new category, WD: wet dogs.
Not far from these scenes and not long after World War One, there appeared in Chase the first rock sign—words spelled out in stone across slopes facing roads—this the only commercial one; the message: TALK HOME—BELL TELEPHONE. It is gone now, but the five county villages with their names spelled out in flinty limestone still retain theirs (although, overgrown as it is, the one above Clements I’ve been able to discern only from the air). I know an amateur anthropologist who holds that you can demark the “real” West by drawing a wiggly line connecting the most eastern towns having their initials in stone on barren hillsides; if he’s right, then you must jog the line far right to include Chase, since it’s the most eastern county to follow the custom (with the half-century-old LANDON 4 GOV sign a bonus).
Eleven-ten? That can’t be right—it has to be later. (Tap the watch, listen to it: running?) Yes. Damn. The enemy of crosscountry hiking is paying too much attention to your feet; the enemy of time hiking is looking at your watch. Advising self: pass the minutes as you would miles—enter the scenery, observe the mountain and see it move. (Why not turn on the radio just to check the time? What harm in that?) No, be here now.
So, the scenery: a stasis of wet brick and stone, leaves and branches. Once Cedar Point was a hopping village of shingled steeples and white gables reaching through the treetops, a main street of false-front shops shoulder to shoulder, where the limestone mill sent out the lull of its cascade, a fall of water you could watch from the old bowstring-arch iron bridge or perhaps from a window of the drummers’ hotel. Now the population is thirty-nine, the brick school closed (last year) and also the major business, a power-mower manufacturer (this year). Today only the post office and bank and a sometime garage and the Methodist church remain alive, yet, in its prosaic way, the village retains a certain eroding quaintness emanating mostly from the gristmill and its ponded river and the persistence of its citizens in keeping their town from ghostdom. When the Cedar Point High class of ’36 held its fifty-year reunion a few seasons ago, the entire group, but for the one who died young, showed up—all ten of them—each still living in the area.
Cedar Point is not yet dead, and, should some enterprise find a new use for the mill or the school or the empty storefronts, it might revive to last as long as Wichita or Los Angeles. There was a time when the government planned to build a dam across Cedar Creek south of the village to form a large lake, and for some years residents told visitors their place was the best town by a dam site. The impoundment has not gone through—may never go through—perhaps thereby dooming the village but preserving a long and lovely valley, a place prehistoric peoples favored, as the abundant archaeological sites attest.
Eleven-something: firing u
p another cup of espresso to electrocute my yawning and keep from slipping into a spell of noddins and bobbins. Sleepy is the polite, if banal, adjective for Cedar Point, but somnolent it isn’t, for it truly lies in the lap of Morpheus; it’s the home of forty winks times ten, the capital of Nod where you can really get down to the business of knitting up those raveled sleaves of care.
Only noon. (Has the damp gotten into this watch?) Settle back, take time in its measure, sharpen your pencil while you have the chance. Right now, over the hill, the stranger may be approaching. Not all things, of course, come to him who waits, but one or two do. (Except, perhaps, in Cedar Point?) No, believe in the stranger. (Godot’s on the way.)
One autumn afternoon following a hard rain, I stood across from the mill on the other side of the river and watched the water roll over the dam. The turbulent current pushed bright yellow cottonwood leaves toward the bank where they twisted around and down into small eddies. The little cones were like lubricious mouths slurping away, and at the bottom of one swirl seemed to be a big pair of rubbery lips opening and closing slowly, opening and closing, swallowing the Cottonwood flotsam. The lips then rose to the surface and with them a pair of bulgy eyes and an obscene orange throat—the lips working, throat gulping—and I realized a big feeding carp hung in the eddy, giving the river suction.
One-fifteen. (Another espresso to get those tissues really electrified?) Thanks, I will. (Fig Newton?) Don’t mind if I do—and yourself? I’ll bet we’re making history on this spot: never before has anyone sat in a truck here and sipped French-roast espresso, eaten Fig Newtons, tallied wet dogs, and talked to himself.
(This watch grinds out the hours as exceeding slow as the mill of God does life.) Come to! Rake moments into a pattern. What would the Zen master say? (What is the sound of one mind snapping?)
Two. (How about a little walk just to stretch your legs?) And perhaps just an accidental stroll into a conversation, an incident, or maybe just the accidental quickening of time with activity? Oh, no you don’t. I am a wall and one day I’ll tell the story now on its way from somewhere. (How about another Newton?) After you. (An experiment like this is enough to drive one into writing fiction.) Thought: if some other observer is here, then I’m his stranger. (There’s a thin tale.) That’s it: think thick. Look across the street, peer into the thickness, sketch it on your clipboard, start with that cast-iron storefront:
Old Mr. Grimwood passed time there by pulling up a captain’s chair under the eave each warm day to sit with a twenty-two rifle: when a sparrow (he called them spatsies) would squirt on him, he’d open fire.
A harum-scarum visitor once passed time here by reading store signs, and when she got to the one above the mill, the one carved DRINKWATER AND SCHRIVER, she asked her husband, What does that mean, “Drink water and shiver”?
Sound of the Santa Fe. The rain drumming yet. Experiment half finished. (Coffee? Drink another and quiver?)
Between the days of stone-ground flour and the arrival of rural electrification, Cedar Pointers converted the flour mill to produce direct-current electricity. Mr. Brunner passed the hours from dusk until ten P.M. by propping back in a chair and dozing, then he’d get up and go to the control board and unplug the town. One night he even threw the school board into the dark when a meeting ran long, and he refused to flip the switch on again, said it was high time to be in bed.
(Is there truth to the rumor that the earthquake, tornado, and numerous fires and floods which have hit Main Street were times of glee here, furnishing something to do?) Not at all. In fact, down at the old Pinkston place, the Anti-Horsethief Association used to stage an annual reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand. (Did they see it as allegory?)
To be honest, now that I think about it, one of the things to do here, over the years, has been to witness death theatrically and actually. (For Pointers, then, sometimes there is but the one plot.) The undertakers bore names out of Dickens: the Grim wood Brothers. Captain Drinkwater’s son, D.F., passed some time here by printing the Cottonwood Valley News, the second issue of which reported the death of his father after he was struck by a bicycle; and not long afterward, O.H.’s partner, Peter Paul, got run down by an even larger vehicle, a Santa Fe locomotive, at the edge of town where Main crosses the tracks. A year after my first survey of the county, at that very spot, four children in the same family died when a train hit their car.
Three o’clock. (Flow about a little nap, just to sharpen the senses?) Stand up, rouse yourself! Occupy the mind! William James once said, Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it. (Yes, but he never watched the corner of Main and First in Cedar Point, Kansas, on a rainy Saturday.) Were the present a hot-blooded woman, this truck would be in shambles, so long has she had me in her unyielding grasp.
Four o’clock. (Or maybe it’s Orwell’s thirteen o’clock.) Take away the stories, the past, and what do you have? (A dulled babbler.)
In the days of Fort Drinkwater, French settlers—including one count who had lost his fortune in republican uprisings—began arriving in Cedar Creek Valley until there were more than sixty families and annual Bastille Day celebrations (the count feigned jollity) and tornado caves stocked with wild-grape vin ordinaire, and at least one cabin full of books and paintings. A few descendants remain yet today, although wine cellars and July Fourteenth fetes and la langue maternelle are so long gone that countians now speak of the Lost French Colony.
A Gallic story: Claude Francis Bichet, a carver of wooden shoes from Dijon, with wife Sophia and young son Alphonse, came into the county in 1858 after Francis spent their last two hundred dollars in St. Joe on an old wagon and a span of poor oxen. On the Bichets’ first night in Kansas, one of the animals wandered off; the next morning, the family could neither find it nor make themselves understood to ask after it. Francis tried to adjust the double yoke on the remaining ox but the thing hung down and choked the animal. All he could think of was to get his shoulders under the opposite end of the yoke and carry it alongside the beast; and so, bent like bovines, le monsieur et la madame took turns plodding next to the ox the 180 miles to Cedar Creek Valley. (How the slow present—like a yoke of another kind—must have hung on Francis and Sophia.) A few years later, perhaps inspired by his parents, Alphonse hitched a ride to Council Grove and returned forty miles on foot, carrying on his back two factory-made windows for the Bichet cabin.
(Speaking of the French, Paul Valéry said a writer’s work is never completed but merely abandoned. Couldn’t journalistic experiments easily fall into a subcategory?) The difficulty with the present is that you can’t shut it off like the past or future—it’s a broken faucet that endlessly drenches you, only to drain away somewhere else, never leaving a deep pool like yesteryear. (Your romanticism is sloshing, my friend.)
The rain, by the way, has stopped, and a man is actually walking up Main—tally one Homo sapiens. All right! He pauses, looks toward the truck. Yes? (What if he comes over? Do we participate?) This experiment is one of utter passiveness. (The Dick Nixon school of reporting: stonewall it.) Here he comes, yes, yes . . . and there he goes. Didn’t even slow down. (You’ve succeeded: you’ve managed to disappear in Cedar Point. Point? You’ve brought yourself down to a point like a receding figure.) The stranger rides into town . . . (And?) He vanishes.
Six o’clock. The hours grind and turn my thin harvest not to grist but to dust.
At last, twilight. The experiment not finished but abandoned, my perception annulled by stasis and able to find small movements but no action, scenery but no scenes, no dramatic question beyond the personal one: will I last this present out?
Eight o’clock. (Start the engine.) If Drinkwater’s old mill walls could speak, I now have an idea of what they would say: It’s been a damn long century and a quarter. And, with their hard-earned tales, they might make another observation: failing to see the distance between the memorable events that comprise one’s perception of the past distorts the hell out of it.
Were the stranger to ride into town at this final minute, I know what he’d say, how he’d put the plot into motion:
Pointer: What brings you into town, stranger?
Stranger: I’ve got a message from Captain O. H. Drinkwater: when you go west to join him, bring plenty of stories.
To Consult the Genius of the Place in All
In Cedar Point I heard a couple of men talking about a plot of ground near the village first planted in 1865, and one said, I remember when that bean field was in alfalfa, and the older one said, Hell, I remember when it was in oats. Today, I know of only a single, small oat field in the county. Like oats, alfalfa and soybeans are not native plants, but, while they don’t quite represent a historical succession, their comings and goings do reflect changes in what we eat and the way we produce it. The Cedar Point oat farmer surely never dreamed of a crop like soybeans growing one day in his field, and that made me wonder what future crop I couldn’t imagine might be there someday.
I knew a man owning land in Matfield Green but living near Salina, fifty miles northwest of Chase, who could have an answer. I’d met Wes Jackson one morning when I walked into the Wagon Wheel Café in Strong City: there he sat with Wendell Berry, the Kentucky writer and farmer; I’d read some of their splendid books, which, like Walden, are about sustainable agriculture with nature as the model. The three of us had come to Chase for a conference on grassland preservation. Wes Jackson, with Berry and Bruce Colman, had just then brought out Meeting the Expectations of the Land, but he was recognized more for a slender and influential book, New Roots for Agriculture, about tilled fields and human survival. We had no time then to talk beyond greetings.