Here’s a description of Darla’s, a place in Chase County, Kansas. Chase County is itself an interesting, place. It had about 3,000 residents when William Least Heat-Moon visited in the 1980s. Here’s what he found at Darla’s, a 10-stool bar:
Near my stool is an empty number-ten green bean can used as a spittoon, and at my elbow the cue-chalk jug holds a twenty dollar bill a customer has left for a pool stick when the salesman next comes around. In various places are gallon jars of brined things — turkey gizzards, sausages, eggs, dill pickles, jalapeño peppers — and there’s a large bottle of Tabasco; after five o’clock, other than the corner grocery and the quick-stop that hasn’t yet opened, these jars hold the only food for sale in town. I’ve been in the cold wind most of the day, and I’m happy enough to order a paper towel of pickled gizzards, which I slice with my pocketknife.
I would have made a meal of the peppers, but that’s a matter of taste.
I like the description because I recognize it. I’ve seen places where people in rural communities go when they have nowhere else to go. I’ve seen how the atmosphere in such places rises and falls in predictable ways, almost as if it were following some law of nature: how early in the evening everyone is joking, shyly or with false bravado, and how later darker currents sometimes come up — toxic mixtures of bigotry, racism and rage.
• Source: William Least Heat-Moon, PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, p. 208.
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