I’m now in the last year—I assume, I hope—of a four-year project. In this new book—if you’ll tolerate my calling what is still a manuscript a “book”—I’m writing about a well-defined piece of tallgrass prairie in our mid-latitudes. The work is a narrative account of a circumscribed place, a single county in east-central Kansas. After I began the project, I realized most of the truly lively writing about the Kansas prairie occurred in the nineteenth century: Washington Irving, Josiah Gregg, Victor Tixier, Miriam Davis Colt, John Gihon, George Brewerton. Those authors wrote at a time when Kansas was a topic frequently talked about in the eastern press as an unknown place of marvelous possibilities: a land ripe for agricultural and social experiments. (It was over social issues that the slavery question gave the state its epithet Bleeding Kansas.) If the territory was then a provocative topic, it is otherwise now.
Kansas today is a place seemingly not much suited to a writer in his right mind, because the rest of America assumes it knows all it wants to know about the state. But a region unknown because it’s covered over by presumed knowledge—much of it distorted or downright incorrect—is just as ready for a reporter as one not yet explored. So, my work in Kansas is still a response to the thrall of the unknown, the lure of challenging ignorance—those classic motivations for a traveler. Viewed in this light, I’m following one of the very calls that pulled nineteenth-century writers into the region.
I must say, though, Josiah Gregg or Victor Tixier or Randolph Marcy did not have to face the question “So who the hell cares about Kansas?” So who cares? is always a writer’s most fearsome uncertainty. Whatever the genre, a reader may begin to care if writers will look closely and report precisely and with imagination. If they do, they can reveal how maps today might still be accurately labeled with that traditional Renaissance inscription: Here Be Strange Beasts. A writer’s assiduous examination should expose how little we see of a thing, how poorly we have understood it, how ineffectually we have let it touch our lives. It is such scrutiny that creates the traveler’s ultimate excitement: the realization that if we but have the perception, we are perpetually strangers in a strange land.
After my fieldwork—any fieldwork—my task is then to discover the right voice with a distinct point of view, a persona who takes a certain tone in telling stories. With the job of finding an evocative voice comes the necessity of an appropriate framework to express it. The writer’s search for perspective and structure can yield an excitement like that a traveler happens upon when a close observation reveals the extraordinary within the ordinary. In the instance of my current project, I’ve tried to let my explorations of the geographic territory lead me to a solution of the problems of voice and form. It took two years for a feasible framework to occur to me, but once it did, almost all of the organizational problems with the book were, in a stroke, solved.
Before I explain, let me say that I wanted this new work to avoid an approach I see as the major threat to good travel reporting today: a journey that exists primarily to express the soul of its traveler.
Of books well known at the outset of my tallgrass prairie explorations, two were nationally dominant: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) and The Snow Leopard (1978). Both are fine works despite their following a parlous course capable of leading travel writing into memoir or fiction. In 1983 I used that very descent into self for Blue Highways where the narrator leaves his familiar surroundings and unwittingly at times heads off more into the country of his own interior than into the interior of the country. He neatly submerges into the topography of self for half the journey—and the book—before realizing the futility of that course. The narrator then begins to move from an inward-turning spiral—a conical helix—of his own self-absorption toward a reversed spiral opening outward toward other lives and new places. In Blue Highways the figure or pattern for this route (although not a true helix) is the Hopi “maze of emergence”—a glyph that has served for unknown millennia to remind the Hopis of the necessity to move away from self and into something other in order to become fully human. Otherness! Well might the Hopi maze be cut into the turf of every collegiate campus, chiseled into the facade of every library in this country.
The Hopi maze of emergence
The journey in Blue Highways is initially centripetal—an ever-closing spiral leading inward to a finite locus, a dead end. But as the traveler nears that central, still point, he begins to see the usefulness of—intellectually, emotionally—passing through it to another place where he can follow the lines outward, if not upward. I sometimes visualize the pattern by imagining the apex of a cone held against a mirror, where a traveler moves toward his own reflection but, to continue, must then follow the reflection on outward. (Centripetal motion, you’ll recall, pulls an object toward the center while centrifugal movement throws it outward.) So, the movement here proceeds centripetally into the image of self and then from that still point—a potential cul-de-sac or nexus—the course proceeds centrifugally away from the center.
In my new book—the working title is PrairyErth—I want a course to lead outward from my own observations of a limited place into something larger. I’ve tried to go into the territory, into the tallgrass prairie, and continue on beyond. It is just that urge to move from self into (for want of a better word) non-self that has created difficulties. Whatever I’ve found in the prairie in the past many months may interest a reader not because it’s lain undiscovered over the years, but rather because the narrator tries to perceive it anew and present it so. (In your mind hear the Plato-Pound conflict: “There is nothing new under the sun” versus “Make it new.”) My question in writing this book has been: How do I steer away from self while depending on it almost completely for the discovery and formulation and presentation of the material?
My physical, topographical passage as a prairie traveler led—after two years—to a structural solution for the writer. The book covers only the 774 square miles of Chase County, Kansas. (For comparison, Blue Highways took on a good portion of the three-million square miles that are the contiguous states.) To guide my tallgrass searches and re-searches by car, horse, and foot, I used twelve U.S. Geological Survey 7.5’ Series topographical maps that cover the county almost exactly. One day while I was staring at those dozen sheets laid out on the floor of my study, I saw they looked like a grid archaeologists place over a site to guide excavation. It came to me: Wasn’t I a kind of digger of shards, shards that would help me see and present that place?
That twelve-section grid, I realized, might continually provide an outline that would rarely match up with the pattern of my own perceptions of the territory. In other words, I’d have to leave my interior to travel, as writer, a course determined by an arbitrary, geometric schema. Because this shape would seldom—if ever—align with my own inner pattern, the grid could keep me fenced off from the temptation of the restrictive, encircling lines of self-exploration. Those barrier grids were continual reminders—invitations, actually—to excavate the landscape beyond my own interior topography.
But, having found a possible course capable of restricting self, I had to watch that the emblem did not then annihilate the self. Were I to write as a mere digger of test trenches, I would end up with a piece of social archaeology perhaps, but I wouldn’t have the kind of literate evocation that was the inceptive urge. So, the struggle was to let the grid create a structure allowing the narrator’s voice to inform and color. My hope is the pattern will prevent me from falling into the solipsistic black hole that is too often the death of potentially good tales of travel.
In this struggle against a writer’s self overwhelming, polluting, and degrading the realm he wants to present, one monument of American reportage brilliantly overcomes it: James Agee’s 1941 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It’s splendid precisely because it resolves so originally and richly the centrifugal-centripetal problem of one writer’s explorations. Agee employs the framework of a scientist in his purely factual descriptions of three sharecropp
er families in Alabama. (For an illustration of his method, see his descriptions of the Gudgers’ beds or the Rickettses’ fireplace.) With an objectivity quite the match of the documentary photographs of the people and the place made by his partner Walker Evans, Agee presents the details as precisely and fully as is readably possible, only then blending in his own vision and unique voice, thereby turning a sociological report into literature of the highest order. The book moves between the hard and flat side of sharecropper life in Hale County, Alabama, and the sharp edge of his passionate intelligence and imaginatively lambent prose. “Sprawling and overwritten,” some naysayers have cried. Well, so is Moby-Dick and Tristram Shandy and Gargantua and Pantagruel. And what about Tom Jones; Remembrance of Things Past?
Although Agee’s book has become a classic (even if the most unread of American classics), writers of nonfiction, it seems to me, have not much built upon his method or been enough inspired by his solution to the perpetual problem of the writer’s self in its surroundings. Yet Agee’s achievement stands squarely at the critical juncture between factual writing and fiction. He equilibrated self with its surround like a high-wire artist continually balancing to keep from falling to his death. To my mind, this equipoise between writing (and traveling) centrifugally or centripetally is the cardinal problem the so-called New Journalism tried to address. Its solutions, full of fictive devices (and ostentations of self), were dangerous to the survival of nonfiction, where its power—its very existence—depends always on the primacy of fact.
My book about the prairie will neither look nor sound like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but it was James Agee’s perhaps intuitive recognition and conscious solution to the centrifugal-centripetal journey that started me on that course where I stumbled across a defining and delimiting pattern in a series of topographic maps. He was an architect of a threshold leading to a room more wonderfully spacious than I’d once imagined.
THE 3,170 TH COUNTY
Although “The Smoked Ciscoes of Gitche-Gumee” makes no mention of it, my long pursuit of visiting every American county lay behind the quest for food of another era, and, to be honest, the hunt for the little fish seemed more a potential bonus than a goal. Cook County, Minnesota, manages to hide under the rather straight and regular Canadian border running from the western end of Lake Superior all the way to the Pacific. If you look at a map, you’ll see how, out of 3,170 counties, Cook could end up being a finale.
The Smoked Ciscoes of Gitche-Gumee
In the summer of 1949, just before my tenth birthday, I was serving in my usual role as navigator aboard my father’s tub of an automobile, a vehicle large and black and not unlike a hearse—a fit comparison given that a year later he would nearly die in it when a drunken corn-farmer drove into him headfirst on a Missouri highway. But in the July before the crash, we were passing through the eastern edge of the North Woods of upper Minnesota. With a topographical abruptness hardly typical of the state, the road seemed to fall away as it rolled down a bluff; ahead was a distant skyline no longer of dark trees but one of a pencil line linking two radiant shades of blue. Which reflected the other, who could say? It was my first glimpse of a body of water showing no opposite shore.
With a road map in hand, I knew it had to be Lake Superior, yet how could a lake so far inland have a coast beyond the horizon? I was about to learn the Ojibway name for it: Kitchigammee, “big sea water,” or, in Longfellow’s less correct if better known version, Gitche-Gumee. That so-called lake was the largest body of entirely fresh water on the planet, big enough for seventeenth-century voyageurs to consider it a sea.
At its deepest place, the tallest skyscraper on earth would vanish in it. More awesome than the somber conifer forest lying behind, here was a watery realm a boy from Kansas City could fill with creatures escaped from his imagination. The deep blue of its depths and the wind having at it bespoke remoteness and coldness even in midsummer, and, although I couldn’t then have articulated it, I recognized the edge of something dangerously wild and intimidatingly mysterious.
Almost as soon as we turned southward from Minnesota Route 1 onto U.S. 61, the lake revealed its first enigma. Every few miles hand-painted signs cropped up, each advertising in one wording or the other:
SMOKED CISCOES AHEAD!
What a cisco was—smoked or unsmoked—I had no idea. My father, who had just taught me how to catch a walleye and who seemed to know boreal waters, had no answer either. A cisco might be a creature from the deep, some rarity, maybe an aberration of nature like those stuffed concoctions a traveler then could find exhibited for a dime along rural highways: jackalopes, a half fish–half frog, a three-legged calf, a two-headed alligator, even a merman (in Arkansas).
One of the few things that could move my father to stop and get out from behind a steering wheel was the scent of barbecue smoke across a road. In Kansas City, such a whiff usually led us to brisket of beef or so-called burnt ends laid over a slice of white bread. But along the bouldered rim of Lake Superior a little north of Two Harbors, Minnesota, the occasional wooden cafés hanging along its high edge and showing smoked cisco signs didn’t look like the smokeries we knew. These had promise of unknown fare, the kind to make the labor of travel worth its undertaking.
We pulled into a rickety eatery held up by wooden posts seemingly insufficient in number and diameter to keep the place above the lake just then banging ominously far beneath the eastern café wall. The buckled floor was manifest warning that one diner too many might send the entire enterprise into the water. My father, a cautious man who sometimes wore a belt with his suspenders, stepped gingerly, as if testing ice on a pond, toward a table by a bank of windows giving onto the lake. Pasted to the walls were menus. Under the heading FROM THE LAKE, between listings of herring and trout, was a scribbled When Available, and there it was: Smoked Cisco. So, to my disappointment, a cisco was not a miscreation, not freak of the deep, but a small, edible fish.
I knew from my father’s example that a jolly equatorial amplitude, a fulsome girth, does not guarantee an adventuresome eater, yet he could be bold—provided he had at hand one of his jingles like “S-M-O-K-E-D means O-K-2-E-A-T. Unless it’s turned green.” He ordered up two plates of smoked ciscoes as part of an expression of a belief he usually gave more utterance to than practice: From a mere vacation, one goes home older, but from true travel one returns changed by challenge. To him, an exotic dish provided the happiest of challenges, and when the food was, to use his word, scrumtudious, like the ciscoes, the richest of rewards. Of the highest order among travelers are those moments when a place and a comestible indelibly link to write themselves deeply into one’s memory. That day, Lake Superior wrote itself into me.
That remembrance took me again to the North Shore of Superior in Minnesota a half-century later. I’d heard the little cisco was not faring well in the Great Lakes and to find a plate of them was increasingly difficult. One June morning I lit out for the North Country along U.S. 61, the North Shore Highway, a fine 150-mile stretch opened in 1924. I wasn’t expecting SMOKED CISCOES AHEAD! signs, and I didn’t see any, and hope dwindled as the miles came and went, and the roadside showed less and less developed as it neared the Canadian border. By the time I was running out of American territory I’d still not turned up a single smoked fish of any sort, not even a sardine. The coastal road opened frequently to splendid lacustrine scenery, and the hues of Superior, modulated by sky and proximity to shore, might have been decocted from gemstones: here flowing sapphire, there aquamarine, and once when I stopped to walk the stony margin and looked into a small pool I saw liquid chalcedony vibrating from the thump of the waves.
Superior, like its region, is an expression of water and weather working over rocks—hard rocks like granite, basalt, and gabbro. The coast is a gamut of steep and high headlands dropping to beaches strewn with stones from boulders to pebbles, the smaller pieces often wave-polished into spheres and ovoids, globets and orbs, colorful rotundities turned to cabochons a walker could
almost right there string into a necklace. One may also find irregularities in startling shapes. In fact, at the decrepit café where I’d first tasted smoked cisco, behind a glass counter under the cash register was a small Superior beach-stone water-worried into the configuration of the head of an old man; had it been excavated from a cave or midden, a seasoned archaeologist would swear a human hand had crafted it.
The Superior visible today was probably created by incomprehensibly massive glacial lobes moving southward and gouging out stone softer than the adamantine igneous rock around portions of its margin so that the lake is the outcome of fire and ice, a place relinquishing its fierce origins but only slowly. Once, its waterline was almost double its present height above sea level, a fact one can readily discern in downtown Duluth in the steep, stairstep-like former shores of the ancient Superior.
The earliest voyageurs called it Lac Superieur, a name having nothing to do with altitude, size, depth, excellence, or (even today) with its comparative cleanliness. Rather, superieur refers to its position “above,” that is, north of its four sisters. The uppermost margin of Superior is five-hundred miles north of the southern rim of Lake Erie, nearly the longitudinal distance of France from the Mediterranean to the Channel. For many residents of the Superior shore, its finest aspect beyond Duluth is a coast free from cities, and that means fishermen working out of sight of the breakwaters still drink straight from the lake, a detail I hoped would mean somewhere yet swam a cisco.
As the miles rolled under me with no sign of the fish—smoked, barbecued, grilled, steamed, baked, boiled, broiled, fried, poached, roasted, toasted, pickled, stewed, chowdered, coddled, curried, or, ye gods, even microwaved—my hopes forlorn, I at last fetched up in Grand Marais, a pleasant lakeside village. On its perimeter was a collection of brightly painted buildings rambling down to a dinky harbor where hung a faded sign: