What else is the truth about Kansas? It is, as the license plates once said, MIDWAY USA. If you cut out a cardboard map of the forty-eight contiguous states and stick a tack through the center of Kansas to pin to a wall, the map will hang nicely parallel with the floor. Knowing, then, that Kansas is the topographical heart of contiguous America, it seems reasonable to assume the state is a place of middle distance, a compromise: neither too far west, east, north, or south. It would appear as a balance point, the spot at the center holding comparatively steady in the revolutions of the “outer” nation. California is drifting north, New York may be on its way to sinking into the Atlantic, but dear old Kansas holds staunch. It has come to seem a place of equipoise, a still life, a region where movements end rather than begin, a land where the tumult settles down to the mere business of getting on with real things—basic things like bread and beef. (My Kansan grandfather used to say, “Kansas means eat as meat and wheat.”) But, apparently, all this suggests to an outstater is that Kansas is only, at best, something to be unconsciously thankful for, like air. Rarely has it been a place to seek out.
If Kansas appears a wholesome middle ground without the fascination of extremes, does it then have to follow that middleness and goodness equal dullness? Certainly in the early days of Anglo Kansas—the mid-nineteenth century—as the Territory was being cut away from the Rockies and shaped into a state, things were hardly in a condition of equipoise, and, most unquestionably, they were not dull unless mayhem is dull. No state came into the Union more violently (hence the epithet Bloody Kansas or, more touchingly, Bleeding Kansas). By then the European descendants, as elsewhere around the world, had successfully bilked the native peoples out of their land and had settled into cutting up and shooting down each other over real estate schemes and the slavery question. Kansas did not begin as—nor is it now except in outstate preconceptions—a land of placidity and insipidity.
Consider some names: William Quantrill, John Brown, Bat Masterson, the Dalton Gang, Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, the Bloody Benders, the Clutter family of In Cold Blood. Even the less sanguine history gives off an aura of discombobulations: Carry Nation; vigorous support of nation-changing reforms of the Progressive Era; Brown v. Topeka Board of Education; John Brinkley’s goat-gland, male-rejuvenation xeno-transplants. The truth is that Kansas history is a tumbling of lawsuits, fists, guns, torches, hatchets, and absurdities. It’s a tale often cutting to the bone, and its sharp edge is not reviled or denied by the citizens: The traveler today can find a monument or museum commemorating or at least mentioning all those names.
So, what is the reality of Kansas? Kansas is a complexity of moving points, a land of tilts and shifts, a region full of lives and ideas going this way and that and not infrequently colliding. It is the heartland reflecting an America whose own history begins with something close to genocide and carries on through deadly conflicts internecine and otherwise, with no generation not knowing war. Kansas beats at our center because it too moves in fitfulness, turbulence, and, somehow between times, in beauty. Its motto could be the nation’s: Ad Astra per Aspera, “to the stars through difficulties.” Kansas, as well as any other state, and far better than most, embodies the archetypal issues of this country, the movements—both splendid and evil—that formed Americans into something distinct from our Eastern Hemisphere ancestors: Indian dispossession, the westering movement, slavery, cowboys, exterminations of a natural world, women’s rights. It is a spacious land of wheat, beef, and petroleum—American translation: hamburgers and automobiles.
On another scale of things American, it is the birthplace of the dial telephone, Mentholatum (“the Little Nurse for Little Ills”), and the Oh Henry! candy bar. It’s the state that elected the first woman mayor (Susanna Salter), turned out the first woman dentist (Lucy Taylor), the first black woman to win an Academy Award (Hattie McDaniel). It was the first state to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment (black voting rights), and what is perhaps the most significant social movement of the sixties, constitutional change to end school segregation, formally started in Topeka. If Kansas is without the athletic idleness of ski slopes and surf—lacking mountains and oceans—it holds a more productive energy for national change. To be sure, some school board will embarrass Kansas by denying the teaching of evolution, and some politicians will confound science by refusing to address global climate change, yet Kansas remains a crucible of energy in its informed citizens.
I submit this notion: To see Kansas accurately is to find much that belongs at the heart of the United States. Like the nation, it is a land to be seen in the light of its days and in the shadows of its history. It is not a country to race across enfolded in the obscurities of speed and darkness only to arrive at the foot of the mountains at dawn as though one had slept through it all.
ALL KNOWLEDGE HUMAN AND COSMIC
To write about Pittsburgh or Kansas City or Albuquerque, or perhaps even Boston, is usually to discover resident readers both curious and often appreciative of such attention. But to take on New York City or its environs is to lay one’s text out for flagellation by the esteemed cognoscenti living in celebrated parochialism, the flagellum being the attitude “What the hell does he know?”
I can’t argue the point because whatever ground I write about, I never know enough, and that includes Nameless, Tennessee; and Cottonwood Falls, Kansas; and Cathlamet, Washington; and Starrucca, Pennsylvania; and a near infinitude of others. In my next life, I promise here—and you can then hold me to it—to silence my pen until I’m possessed of all knowledge human and cosmic.
Out East on the North Fork
If ever natural topography accurately and prophetically mirrored a place—at least in its earliest days—that spot might be the glacier-chiseled surface of Long Island, New York. By the time European explorers began actually setting foot on it in the early seventeenth century, their rudimentary sea charts were beginning to change from showing it as leviathan-like to a shape more like a fish. The image of the island I’m looking at now, a black-and-white satellite photograph, could almost be a depiction of a coelacanth, a creature of deep seas, a fish so primitive that paleontologists thought it extinct until a trawler in 1938 accidentally brought a specimen to the surface in the South Atlantic. If your imagination has a contemporary turn of mind, you might see Long Island instead as a huge bluefish, one of the most sapient creatures still swimming the nearly twelve hundred miles of the Long Island coast.
From the western end—where the piscine mouth at Gravesend Bay seems ready to eat Perth Amboy—to the point 124 miles eastward, where things conclude in a bifurcated tail (also called the flukes, although that term describes whales, not fish), this largest island of the U.S. Atlantic Seaboard owes its early economy to the fruits of the ocean, preeminently fish but also oysters, crabs, whales, and even seaweed.
In the autumn of 1679 the Dutchman Jasper Danckaerts wrote from the western end about a dinner served up by a centenarian grandmother who set before him a meal of striped bass: “It was salted a little and then smoked, and although it was now a year old, it was still perfectly good, and in flavor not inferior to smoked salmon.” But his next repast pleased him even more. He sampled hot from roasting over an oak-and-hickory fire “a pailfull of [Gowanus] oysters, which are the best in the country. They are fully as good as those of England. I had to try some of them raw. They are large and full, some of them not less than a foot long.” Upstate New Yorker eateries offer twelve-inch hot dogs, yes, but an oyster the length of a man’s shoe?
Upon hearing Danckaerts’s description, a friend of mine who grew up in Brooklyn only a couple of miles from Gowanus Bay said, in her inimitable Long-guy-land accent, “Foot-long oysters? And edible? If you fished up something from that bay now it would be a telephone booth or some goombah in cement footwear sent to swim with the fishes.”
Walt Whitman found the name Long Island too prosaic for his native ground and preferred calling it by one Indians used—Paumanok, “place of tribute”—a de
scription good enough were the American version not so accurate; Paumanok would indeed be better if only it meant what Walt wished: “fish-shaped.” The distinctive outline is mostly an expression of waters: rain, sea, and ice, but especially ice. Glaciers, coming from hundreds of miles north to peter out here, cut, shoved, scoured, depressed as well as uplifted the terrain, only to retreat and leave behind sand, gravel, and boulders; the last are wonderfully evident along the North Shore, the Sound side, where a mariner sails past miles of glacially transported stones the size of armchairs to a few others that, were they hollowed out, could serve as cabanas. By charting the nearly due north–south abrasions over the face of the rocks, geologists can delineate the route those granites took from their sources in the mountains of New England.
But the South Shore, the Atlantic side, is comparatively free of such bouldery depositions; even more, the southerly latitudinal tilt of Long Island gives that coast such a low profile—its eastern tip near Montauk excepted—a careless sailor may run aground before distinguishing waves from beaches that can have a breadth of almost an eighth of a mile. On the north, though, a sand beach may be only a hundred feet from surf to terra more firma. Geology here, as almost everywhere, determines the kind of life humans live atop it. The North Shore at the western end is the “Gold Coast,” with venerable forty-room mansions belonging to a realm Scott Fitzgerald called East and West Egg, a reach of small inlets creating peninsulas Islanders speak of as necks. (The description Little Neck clams refers to a location, not a presumed bivalve cervically revamped.) The Sound side is good for marine views, yachts, and privacy but poor for urban masses hunting tall breakers and long beaches. The Gold Coast has no barrier island to protect it, unless you share the view of a fellow who pointed north from Oyster Bay and told me, “That’s our barrier island.” I asked if that wasn’t Connecticut. “Bullshit,” he explained. “That’s the ever-lovin continent.”
My quest on Long Island, however, wasn’t for swimming beaches or golden coasts but rather for what remains of an older island, one that has, at least for another few years, escaped the sprawl not just of New York City but of the urbed and suburbed human juggernaut now running almost unbroken from Boston into New Jersey and headed hugger-mugger toward northern Virginia. I set out for the east end with a few old recollections and a map that colored the fish-of-an-island in jaundiced yellow from mouth to well past the belly. But beyond there, near the end of the expressway west of the Peconic River, the map turned white, the customary—and ever more rare—cartographic color for openness.
From the Throgs Neck Bridge linking the island to the Bronx, I moved along the North Shore. When I crossed the Peconic seventy miles from Times Square, I began to sense an island within an island. In truth, the North Fork is a rather level, often treeless peninsula extending from the river easterly some thirty miles to its end at Orient Point, a name my Middle Western background finds peculiarly jolly, since a Missourian believes one goes west to reach the Orient—any orient. Indeed, people of the North Fork view geography differently from us continentals: To them Brooklyn lies “back west” and they live “out east.” When one sees—and feels—how truly long this island is and how far it thrusts out into the Atlantic and then notices how protected the backwaters are near Brooklyn, the reversal of customary prepositions makes sense. I knew I’d come well away from the boroughs of New York when, east of the Nassau-Suffolk county line, my ears made it evident that out here a canine isn’t a duog but a dog, and the hard g in Long Island starts to slip. The native speech at this end is more Connecticut than Queens.
The North Fork tapers from a slender four miles across in the west to nothing at Orient Point which, by the way, actually happens to point at Northern Europe, and that might partly explain why Revolutionary War history out on this end is full of characters with Tory sympathies.
For some islanders, the North Fork is most important simply for not being like the fork south of Peconic Bay—at least not yet. Here a traveler sees little to suggest the Hamptons and all that attends such a privileged world of manifest plutocratic excess. The north is a quietly plainer place, still rather more rural if no longer rustic. Instead of designer-done estates, it greets the visitor with what may be the largest fowl on earth, a critter twenty-feet tall and thirty long, six tons of concrete painted white to look like a Pekin duck and once possessed of blinking Model-T taillights for eyes. The thing is so excellently outrageous that similar goofball roadside structures—elephants, coffeepots, derby hats, diplodocuses—have become known as duck architecture, or, to some people here, Art Ducko.
The Big Duck serves not as a gateway but as a sentinel watching over the North Fork, and it is to residents what the Empire State Building—both built in 1931—is to Manhattan. That the Long Island Duck still stands—more precisely, it sits—is a measure of durability and the esteem natives hold it in. Although the Duck has been moved a few miles and now technically nests upon the South Fork, it once sat just across the Peconic River in Riverhead, next to what is today the Snowflake Old Fashioned Ice Cream stand (where they serve up a Peconic Swamp Thing, raspberry with double chocolate sauce).
“Why a duck?” Chico asks Groucho. Inside the bird, I asked that of an amiable woman, Babs Bixby, a moniker that seems to belong in lights on a 1920s theater marquee. The morning I met her she was dispensing local lore—probably the only person in the world to do so from a duck’s belly—and she told me, “My grandfather once said there was a time out here when every nut and his brother owned a duck farm.” Because Long Island duckling was popular—not just on New York City menus but on those over much of the nation—one farm within living memory raised annually a half-million ducks. Today, only four of the so-called quacker ranches remain, and, during my jaunt, the only ducks I saw were a few wild idlers on village ponds.
In the past, Long Island was famous for another food: pickles. Babs Bixby said, “Two of the funniest words in the English language are duck and pickle, and both of those products were economically important here.” Many former cucumber fields are now in flowers, especially sunflowers that appear during late summer at the roadside produce stands along with white corn, squash, and fruit pies; in other seasons one finds mesclun, asparagus, rhubarb. Of that other famous Long Island crop, potatoes, I saw but a single stand advertising them, although I heard that island spuds are still a multimillion-dollar business.
I also heard the immediate future from a South Fork waitress whose second job was leasing summer rental properties. She said, “These days out here we’re all about the three Rs—restaurants, retail, and realty.” There’s no room in that abecedary for ducks, pickles, or potatoes, and that means a new Long Island has arrived and with it certain consumeristic attitudes reshaping the place. I think it wasn’t coincidence that several blocks down the street from her East Hampton restaurant I came upon a shop with a stack of pillows in the window. Stitched elegantly on them were apothegms; next to You Are Leaving Sunday Aren’t You? was Screw the Kids—a Dollar Saved Is a Dollar Wasted. Perhaps I read too much into small artifacts, but the difference between those pillows may indeed express something about the differences between the twin forks, about differences between pillows and potatoes, between seeing ducks along a creek and serving them on a porcelain plate.
In the seventies, when I first saw Greenport, the quintessential North Fork village, it was unmistakably a fisherman’s harbor showing as much tumbledown-ness as quaintness and redolent of the day’s catch rather than perfumed tourists. Its most famous store was S. T. Preston’s, a marine hardware store with oiled wooden floorboards and shelves of stacked nautical gear primarily for trawlers and lobstermen. Today, with its maritime-themed doormats and highball glasses, Preston’s is more gallery than chandlery. Where once I smelled diesel oil and sun-bleached fish scales, I now breathed vanilla and bayberry from candles delicately perfect for the table of that special vacation home. I heard a woman, looking at a lamp shaped into a plastic lighthouse, say to her little son tuggi
ng her arm, “Careful! Watch Mommy’s manicure!” Old seafaring Greenport, like the rest of us, has changed, and, as far as I could tell on my return, the changes have not been to the detriment of the economy. The place hums in the summer, when strollers have to dodge the fleets of SUVs navigating the narrow streets. Then, a curmudgeonly traveler whose recollections face off against joviality can wish for the company of an ancient mariner who, as they say here, is a “bit long in the mouth” and whose glittering eye might so constrain a fellow that he cannot choose but hear a genuine tale of a genuine ocean.
I had recently read a New York Times article quoting a local real estate broker: “We see the North Fork as the next area of development. People are going there because it’s quiet.” And another agent claimed, “Nothing has happened here that hasn’t been happening here for a long time. As long as we have agriculture, the sea, and second-home owners, we’ll be okay.” His logic escaped me; it was like a Mississippian saying, “As long as we have the farmland, cotton, and the boll weevil, we’ll be okay.”
Who can doubt the sea will remain? Who can doubt the influx of more urbanites hunting second-home plots? But just how many second homes can quiet agriculture accommodate? Can faux-colonial farmhouses alternating with faux-French country estates coexist with genuine farms? Confronting such pressure, various land-preservation plans, including one created by Suffolk County itself, have come about to help fields and farms remain in a use similar to the patches Corchaug Indians cultivated around Peconic Bay for at least six hundred years before Europeans arrived.