‘PrairyErth: A Deep Map’

 I have been taking apart William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth, trying to figure out how it works. That’s the same thing as wondering whether there’s a better way to write a book like that, and so anything I’d say about the structure of the book would sound more critical than I’d intend it to be. But no one spends so much time with a book that doesn’t intrigue him.

Least Heat-Moon called the book a deep map, and I think he delivers on the claim. It’s a map of Chase County, Kansas, which had a population of about 3,000 when Least Heat-Moon was exploring it in the 1980s.

The book has 76 chapters; 72 are in 12 sections of six chapters each. Each section is about a township in the county. Least Heat-Moon decided on that structure, following Thomas Jefferson’s plan of putting the country on a grid system.

That’s a call the next writer should second-guess. Some of the townships are more interesting than others. At least one of the townships is so empty that Least Heat-Moon fills the section with the tragic history of the Kansas, or Kaw, people, who were driven from the county to what’s now Oklahoma in 1873. That tragic story is one of the best in the book. But a reader might be aware that the story doesn’t exactly fit the structure the author chose.

Each section has six chapters, the first of which is titled “From the Commonplace Book.” Each is a collection of quotations from other writers. The introductory and concluding sections also have a “From the Commonplace Book,” along with one other chapter. So 14 of the 76 chapters, 18 percent, are collections of quotations and readings. That’s not a complaint. I thought it was closer to genius. With this kind of book, much of the story involves history. I liked the quotations from original sources.

The last chapter is a record of two friends, Least Heat-Moon and Clive “Scott” Chisholm, going on a three-day walk through the county, trying to find traces of the Kaw Trail. The trail was used by ancient hunting parties. Parts of it were incorporated into the Santa Fe Trail by people of European ancestry. And the trail was used when the Kaw people were forced to leave their homeland. It’s an interesting dialog that might remind you of the film My Dinner with Andre.

PrairyErth is a big book, 200,000 words, Least Heat-Moon says. Three times the planned length. Least Heat-Moon discusses choices he made in the writing, and he also has a section on the topics he left out. I wondered whether getting off the grid system would have allowed him to address some of them. I would have read about chiggers, dugouts and the farmer who refused electricity. I’d also like to know about hopper-dozers, Model A cars that were modified to scrape grasshoppers off crops.

If I ever get around to making a deep map, I might do a few things differently. But this is a book I admire.

• Source: William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991.

Whom would you invite?

 If you could invite a writer from the past to write a piece about our times, whom would you invite? I was thinking about Ralph Ellison, who lived through a lot of outrage. He said: 

You see a situation which outrages you, but as you write about the characters who embody that which outrages, your sense of craft and the moral role of your craft demands that you depict those characters in the breadth of their humanity. You try to give them the density of the human rather than the narrow intensity of the demonic. That means you try to delineate them as men and women who possess feelings and ideals, no matter how much you reject their feelings and ideals.

 

• Source: Ralph Ellison gave an interview to John Hersey, who titled it “A Completion of Personality.” It’s in The Writer’s Craft, edited by John Hersey; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981, pp. 267-82. The quotation is on p. 281.

How naturalists are made

 A hawk, intent on a target in the borrow ditch, crossed the road in a dive, missing the windshield of my truck by a couple of feet.

He wasn’t big, so I’d guess young male. The Wise Woman and I saw plenty of red, so I’d guess a red-tailed hawk.

Red-tailed hawks can dive at more than 100 mph, so we barely got a glimpse. We looked at the other, doubting whether we’d seen anything at all. But when an animal that size sails that fast between the windshield and the hood ornament, all your mental notes from the walk through the woods disappear. All that’s left is awe.

Later, I thought about a remark E.O. Wilson made about how naturalists come into being. If you want to create young naturalists, put kids in front of an animal in the wild, he said. It doesn’t work if you put them in front of a textbook.

Dunn: 'The Same Cold'

 I’ve read the warnings about confusing poetry with news. But sometimes the news makes you read a poem in a different way. Here’s the beginning of Stephen Dunn’s “The Same Cold”:

In Minnesota the serious cold arrived

like no cold I’d previously experienced,

an in-your-face honesty to it, a clarity

that always took me by surprise.

On blizzardly nights with wires down

or in the dead-battery dawn

the cold made good neighbors of us all,

made us moral because we might need

something moral in return, no hitchhiker

left on the road, not even some frozen

strange-looking turned away

from the door.

 

Dunn told how his car broke down when it was 30-below. He was saved by “a man with a candy bar and blanket,/ a man for all weather.”

 

It was no big thing to him, the savior.

Just two men, he said, in the same cold.

 

• Source: Stephen Dunn, Different Hours; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010, p. 61-2.

Note to reader who somehow finds this 50 years later: In January 2026, people in Minneapolis were protesting the inhumane treatment of immigrants and people suspected of being immigrants. The response of the then-president of the United States was to flood the city with poorly trained, undisciplined agents who killed people.

Paying attention

 In grade school, I had a teacher who thumped the ears of boys who looked out the window, daydreaming when they should have been paying attention.

I was thinking about attention — how we learn to pay attention and how we get distracted — when I ran across a story about how Native Americans who lived on the Great Plains taught their children.

Women did the harvesting, and they taught their children how to find prairie turnips. Pediomelum esculentum typically has several stems. Women taught their children that if they looked carefully at one of the stems and followed the direction it was pointing, they’d find another plant.

Of course the stems don’t grow in a direction that points to another plant. But if a child follows any direction, looking carefully, she or he likely will find another prize.

Different people teach children to pay attention in different ways. Fictions seem to work as well as facts.

• Source: The story was told by Melvin Gilmore in Prairie Smoke, published in 1929. I found it quoted in William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, pp. 218-19. The plant is also known as tipsin and breadroot. I’ve seen it in Texas but not in Georgia.

Evans Mill

 We stopped at the site of Evans Mill and hiked along Pole Bridge Creek, happy to get out of the house after the ice storm.

The enormous dog insisted on playing in the white water that once turned the grist mill. Ice still covered the creek in the eddies. It was a hard freeze, but the dog, a German, is oblivious to cold.

The trail climbs a ridge, a steep drop on both sides. The forest is typical of the Piedmont — oak, hickory, sweetgum and pine. We walked a mile without seeing a beech.

The mill was just south of Lithonia, which was once the center of the quarry business around here. It’s now a town of 2,500.

From roughly 1880 to 1920, the granite business was bigger than cotton. The granite in Lithonia is like the stone found around Stone Mountain and the other monadnocks but was easier to work. Some quarry owners brought in immigrants — quarrymen from Scotland and Wales. A lot of African Americans families were also in the business.

Village historians say that if you want to know what the stone is like, look at the campus of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. A lot of it is there.

What a god was like

 Heracles, half-god, half-man, eventually became immortal. He’s a hard guy to admire, much less love.

Yesterday’s note on the rape of Auge is the kind of story that the ancient Greeks told about the heroes and gods. Heracles did a lot of good, but he murdered, plundered and raped as he went along.

As a schoolboy, I learned Heracles was assigned a series of impossible tasks to atone for killing his wife and children in a fit of madness. But the lesson stopped there. Had the story continued, I’d have learned that Heracles was slow to learn.

Having completed his labors, Heracles killed yet another man and, as penance, consented to be sold into slavery for a year. He was bought by Omphale, queen of Lydia.

She was looking for sex, not the usual labor that heroes provided. Heracles, being Heracles, rid the country of bandits and killed a giant, marauding serpent.

But if you were writing a biography of the god, this chapter would be “Heracles: the sex-slave period.” This chapter is not taught in schools.

I’ve been thinking about the gods, trying to find something in the world that I know that I could compare them to.

Greek thinkers had different views of the gods. One was that a god was a kind of force you neither loved nor hated but simply accepted because you couldn’t do anything about it. I heard Old Timers in Texas speak of the Neches Rivers that way. People lived by the river because they needed the water. But it flooded often, carrying away kin and cattle, and occasionally the house.

• Source: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 162-8.