Walking Old Tom's Grand Grid

By John Skow

Chase County, Kans., writes William Trogdon, "is the most easterly piece of the American Far West." Meaning what? And who, for that matter, is Trogdon, whose name does not appear on the title page of his extraordinary and wholly original new book, PrairyErth (a deep map)? What's prairyerth?

One question at a time. Prairyerth is an old geological term for prairie soil. The westerly thinning-out of forest and the first broad stretches of prairie grass are what make Chase County a magical place for the author. Eastern travelers feel edgy here, Trogdon notices, and so do some natives: "The protection and sureties of the vertical woodland, walled like a home and enclosed like a refuge, are gone, and now the land . . . is a world of air, space, apparent emptiness, near nothingness," where wind blows steadily "as if out of the lungs of the universe."

Lungs indeed, the winded reader reflects. But this very good writer can blow softly too, and listen well, and march simple sentences usefully across a flat place. This is not new information to those who read his 1983 best seller, Blue Highways, a marvelously quirky account of a 13,000-mile side-roads motor ramble around the U.S. He is better known by his pen name, William Least Heat- Moon, which comes from the Osage Indian part of his heritage. His father was Heat-Moon, meaning July, the hot month; his older brother Little Heat- % Moon; and he himself last and Least. To avoid explaining all of this repeatedly on his reporting meanders, he goes for everyday purposes by Trogdon, his birth name from Irish and English ancestors.

Blue Highways was a delight, and so, in a darker and deeper way, is PrairyErth (Houghton Mifflin; 624 pages; $24.95). In kind and quality, it somewhat resembles Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, and it will not look out of place on the same shelf of great Americana as its betters, Mark Twain's Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi. The author's visceral decision to explore one American locality was an intuitive leap from the restlessness of Blue Highways. And it was a leap toward the nation's center. He had seen Chase County's Flint Hills and the bits of remaining tallgrass prairie as a boy. He was attracted in part because the historical past was very recent (white settlement began in 1856) and because the present is isolated from shopping- mall modernity, so that both are faded like old jeans.

His plan was beaverish: to walk, sniff, conn and brood every one of the county's 12 central grids, 744 sq. mi. on the U.S. Geological Survey maps. With much satisfaction, he reports it was Thomas Jefferson who directed that all of the nation except the already mapped East be ruled into grids, never mind natural or political borders. "Chase County sleeps north-south or east- west," he digresses (if that is possible in a project that depends on serendipity), "the square rooms squared with the world, the decumbent folk like an accountant's figures neatly between ruled lines, their slumber neatly compartmentalized in Tom's grand grid."

In four years of moseying, he got the feel of the county. "Emptiness" turned out to be only apparent, and "near nothingness" jostling and crowded. Though more with ghosts, often enough, than live inhabitants; the present population of Chase, 3,013, is about what it was in 1873.

Trying to look as if he were not eavesdropping, he wrote down practiced insults by old combatants at Darla's bar, in a town called Bazaar. She: "You're so dumb, if you fell in a barrel of tits you'd come up sucking your thumb." He: "You're so ugly we're all hoping that wind don't blow off your clothes." In the same town, he finds the spare, waste-no-words diary of 18-year-old Elizabeth Ann Mardin, a bride newly arrived in Kansas. For June 21, 1862: "I went a goosebarrying in the fore noon and I went to see the soldiers drill in the after noon it was a plesant day." For Dec. 12, of the same year: "We cleaned some of the ((hog)) guts for soap grease it sprinkled rain."

He sifts the rowdy history of "bleeding Kansas" just before the Civil War. He notes 140 ways to spell the state's name, among them Ka, Kaal, Ka-Anjou and Kaw; the last being the present spelling of the name of the Native American tribe, now nearly extinct, that lived here before the coming of whites. Somewhat uneasily, he watches an all-woman ranch team castrating bull calves. He talks to old inhabitants who tell of monstrous floods and of hiding in "fraidy holes" -- storm cellars -- to wait out tornadoes.

In an old house he finds a mirror "with the silver mostly gone, as if all its reflections had worn it through." He hikes to the spot near Bazaar where, in 1931, the Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne and seven other men died in a plane crash, after which local people carried pieces off for keepsakes. A woman tells him about running a health-food restaurant in a little burg called Cottonwood Falls: "We never did get the farmers to eat alfalfa sprouts. They know silage when they see it."

Was he ever bored? Hmmm. He tells of staking out the main and only street of Cedar Point, a hamlet's least piglet of a town. The idea is to watch all visible action, dawn to dusk, from the back of his van. But nothing happens. He puts aside as too metaphysical the lame notion that he himself constitutes Cedar Point's action for the day. It rains. That's it.

Except that a journalist who reads PrairyErth asks whether the van in Cedar Point could be the same noble '75 Ford Econoline, named Ghost Dancing, that rattled for 13,000 miles in Blue Highways. "Of course," said the author last week, sounding pleased. "Got a dead battery now, but otherwise just fine." Plenty of nostalgic action here. And a hope that with a fresh battery, Ghost Dancing will have still another fine, quirky book in him.