Talking about Kansas is difficult, because very few persons understand and appreciate a steppe ecology, at least that is what I have come to call the Kansas prairie. The Native Americans understood it deeply and reputedly called it the ocean of grass that stretched from North Texas to Manitoba. The Native Americans of the ocean of grass appear to have viewed their world much as island peoples in ocean environments have viewed theirs. And when native Americans acquired horses, they began to view it much like island peoples acquiring better ship building and navigation skills; that is, they viewed their lives much as sea farers have through out history. They followed the buffalo herds first on foot probably for relatively short distances for thousands of years, then on horseback, when the Spanish brought horses (note: I have always secretly wondered if far back in pre history that Native Americans perhaps rode primitive variants of horses that became extinct for some reasons).
To grasp life on the ocean of grass--to break through our blinders of over-familiarity of its ploughed up, fenced, fracked, pipeline webbed, cattle ranched, irrigated, wheat and corn farmed look of today--it helps to think a bit more purposefully about seafarers. Sea farers have long set sail in search of fish to catch and eat and trade and sell. They often sailed great distances to follow the cod to catch and salt, or whales to slaughter and cook for oils, or what have you. Sailors have always been amphibians; that is, they have always lived on both the sea and the land. And they have always rightly said that land lubbers, those that did not go to sea, could not understand the majesty and scale of the sea; how one was changed by navigating the sea for a length of time out of site and out of reach of land. How its mysteries of the deep welling up, like ones own dreams welling up at night amidst ones waking days, connected oneself to something deeper, something more alive and transcendently savage and beautiful, than had one stayed at home on the land solely. But always the sailors have to come back to port and in time they always grow too old to go to sea, if the sea does not take them young in its fits of fury between its hypnotic periods of serenity.
The ocean of grass, the prairie and its legacy that lies behind the ploughed, farmed, ranched expanses we see now on occasional long drives through it, what geographers I believe also classify as steppe, also found in central Asia on even vaster scale, i.e., the ocean of grass that spans the heart of North America, is quite similar in its extremes and effects on persons to the sea itself on seafarers, if they ever actually live in the prairie and move around on it, rather than just keep their shoulders to the suburban wheel and work and shop in it. It is something that is mesmerizing in its magnitude and forces one to scope it down to something manageable and come into port frequently in what are called villages, towns and cities, but which are really just islands in the ocean of grass, or ports at its shore.
To be born on the prairie, either in a port city at its edge, like I was in Kansas City, or to grow up in one of its tiny island villages like McPherson, or Onaga, or Goodland--little refueling stations on the way to the western shore that is the port town of Denver, say, as well as places where the awesome harvests of the ocean of grass are collected and moved by diesel semi-trailer trucks, bearing company names and city names always half a continent or more away, and by graffiti covered railroad trains pulled by diesel electrics--the original hybrids--to the great, lonely elevators for shipment down diked, brown rivers that were once wildly circuitous coiling serpents reduce with poetic license to blue meridians and Moon Rivers flowing to the Gulf of Mexico for trans-shipment on oceans of salt water to mouths hungry for wheat bread and corn masa around the world, is to be irreversibly different from peoples from the mountains and deserts and wooded and jungled regions and especially those from big cities by oceans of water. It is to know on a deep level the vastness of nature is not limited to the rigid inanimateness of rock, or the shifting inanimateness of sand, or the eternally fluctuating inanimateness of water. The prairie, you see, is alive. It is animate. It is not the medium that life is in, as is the case of the ocean. Rather, it is the medium of life itself. It grows and dies before your eyes, if you stay awhile. It repeats. Vegetation myths still mean something if you know the prairie. When the amber waves of grain wave, it is life itself that is waving at you. When the corn leaves flutter dark green and avocado glints in hot, humid June wind it is life that undulates with infinite complexity on the rods and cones of the retinas of ones squinting eyes.
The same view of the awesomeness of life may be seen in the depths of deciduous forests clinging to the steep, dark river valleys of the Alleghenies, or under the green house of a stifling subtropical jungle in Louisiana, or Florida, but these are cramped, claustrophobic experiences of life's fecund spectacle of rank indifference to one human being's existence. One cannot see the forest for the trees in, say, eastern Pennsylvannia. One can barely see the stars inside or outside the tiny towns crowded onto green rivers winding like water moccasins through the mountains worn down by life strangling them for eons. And once in a swamp jungle one's experience is even more constrained and localized.
But the prairie is the opposite experience. On the prairie, one can never not see the horizon; never not see that life stretches all the way to and fro, all the way to and far, far beyond what one can see. To stand on the prairie is to know, really know, the vastness of life on this strange, tiny green planet adrift in a universe of voids and rocks, and life killing radiation unfiltered by our tent of atmosphere; a universe where even the probability of other life remains an unverified mystery given hope only by stochastic abstractions.
To really "see" life, to really experience its verdant scale, to really know its beauty, complexity and consuming indifference, one has to live on the prairie for a time, one has to walk it, one has to walk into its thinly distribute groves of trees along small rivers and come out onto its vast horizons, one has look up close at its dense weave of grasses and weeds and hear its cicada and catch its grass hoppers and feel its flies and bees whir by one's ear, while at the same time never losing site of its horizons. It is this bothness of the prairie that defines it--its ever present, ever visible, simultaneous combination of the micro and the macro of life, if one will every once in awhile take off the blinders of work and recreation and media, or school if you are young as I once was living there, and stand alone in a pasture, or a rest area by an interstate, or a truck stop, or simply venture down a gravel section road off the beaten path and stop at a "high" spot and turn off the car and stand in the tall grass of the ditch by the road and just look and listen. You will see far and near. But unlike the mountains, or the oceans, where you can also see far and near, you will be looking far and near at life undulating sensuously in the wind and stretching to the horizon, not standing stoically like pines on mountains of stiff rock, not salt water smashing and cresting against rock encrusted with barnacles and anenomes and star fish and rock fish that you cannot see unless you run up so close you lose sight of the horizon, as you bend over and marvel at the reef life in the breakers at your feet.
On the prairie, you get both all the time, whether you want it or not. And even if you go "down in the bottoms," where the rich soil is, you know that you are always within running distance, or a short drive if you are old like me, to the prairie above and the bothness you were born with and are accustomed to. You know you are never far from wonder of life both near and far--from the simultaneity of it all.
Ironically, I did not fully appreciate the American prairie until I left it and even then it took reading a strange, tragic book, of all things, to bring into articulate focus, what I had been born knowing on some sublingual level. I stumbled into a book, a World War II memoir, the title of which I now forget, written by a German soldier, and published posthumously by his family, in some small press. It recounted his harrowingly bad experiences on the eastern front in the mercifully failed Nazi invasion of Russia. If you have been to Germany it is country of diverse topography, but what sticks with one, at least what stuck with me, was that it was often a hilly country of forests. It is something like Pennsylvania, I suppose, or vice versa. The Romans did not invade much of it, because of its claustrophobic forests that vast, disciplined Roman legions quickly would lose tactical advantage inside. In any case, the man who wrote the memoir grew up in a small city of Germany. He was educated. He was destined to become a doctor. But he was conscripted into the Army and before he knew it he was a highly educated young private taking orders from ideological fanatics and often morons. (Note: I am told by many that have served that it is a rare army, like it is a rare corporation, and a rare government that is not this way much of the time, but I digress.) At the key moment that Hitler's invasion might have succeeded the Germans stopped, likely necessarily, to solidify their supply lines and prepare for the dreaded Russian winter. It was then that things began to go dreadfully wrong for the author of this war memoir. It was then that the orders began to come down through channels that were being given based on assumptions about logistical and weather conditions and Russian troop concentrations that were not based on reality, but on speculation, because lines of communications had badly deteriorated. It was then, after a horrific winter of suffering that his division of soldiers were ordered to march south to the Caspian, rather than continue east, as if marching to the Caspian were like marching from Bavaria to Alsace. What they were marching into was a vast steppe, a vast prairie, of a scale as big, or bigger, than from Manitoba to North Texas. The word was they were to march south and meet up with German armies moving from the Balkans to Ukraine. And the march went on all spring and all summer and all fall and, though I can't recall, maybe they camped and marched another spring and fall. They marched until all of their machinery had to be left behind in spring mud for there were no roads, just wagon ruts, and thousands of miles of grass, oceans of grass, and not cities, just villages and farm steads hundreds of miles apart. And they grew lost as they marched and died of exposure and starvation. And it was not until the last ideologically fanatical officer and last stupid sergeant had died of starvation, disease, thirst, or exposure, that this articulate would be doctor was finally free to lead a small rag tag band of German privates on a quest to survive rather than on a mad, quixotic quest to conquer the Caspian Basin for the fatherland's oil and gas needs, and for access eventually to the Persian Gulf and the other mad, fanatical bastards from neo Shogunate Japan with their great Navy trying to stretch through the southwest Pacific to the Persian Gulf in hopes of joining forces with the Germans and the Italians, to take over the worlds oil and gas supplies and the eastern hemisphere's global shipping lanes. In the vastness of the central Eurasian steppe, caught up in the intoxicating vision of Nazis back in Berlin and Bavaria backed by private oligarchs like Krupps in control of regional, would be global producer oligopolies and illegitimately in control of their own states, seeking control of global trade routes and global energy supplies, was this poor, pitiful, well educated, well mannered private and a dozen or so hapless German soldiers by then emaciated and in rags lost in the middle of an ocean of grass a half a world a way from the steppe I grew up on the edge of. And what did this doctor's memoir of his war experiences recall as changing him profoundly? Was it hunger? Combat? The madness of war? Fanaticism run amok? Corporate military fascism exposed for the human dead end that it always is, regardless of where it rears its ugly head. It was his daily experience of the fantastic dimensions of the central Asian steppe that he marched through, and then hiked through, then staggered through, and then finally for a time crawled through, before finally finding their way into being taken prisoners and saved. He said it was the most remarkable, most awesome, most transforming expanse of geography he had ever witnessed, despite all of the horrors that befell him there.
When persons learn where I am from and ask me what the prairie is like I do not tell them about this book, because I cannot recall its title, or author's name, and I do not want to introduce perfect strangers to the horrors of war, or make them suspect that I harbor any sympathies for the Germans regarding World War II.
What I do tell them to do is read a book I love deeply and frankly cherish my copy of. It is called "Prairie Erth" by William Least Heat Moon, who most unfortunately lives in Missouri and teaches at that dreadful state's leading university. When I am far from the prairie, as I mostly am, and when I am struggling with meaning and purpose, and when basketball will not pull me through such funks, I often reach for that book and simply crack it open and re-read any random section of it and I am reconnected with that steadying experience of bothness that I was born with that has stood me so well in so many circumstances. And on the very rare occasions when even that does not suave my soul, then I get out the suit case, and catch a flight back to Kansas and hope there is still someone alive their I can go visit and, when their busy schedules require them to get back to their routines, then I go for a drive down to the old home place, where my great grand father raised a family in eastern Kansas at subsistence level after having tried and failed in the prairie of central Kansas. And if that does not work, then I drive as far out into Kansas as I can get and I drive to a gravel section road off the beaten path and I come to a stop at what an easterner, or a westerner, would barely notice as a high spot in the road, and I park the car and step out in the tall grass and look in every direction as I did as a child.
It works for me.
