Along the Ghost Highway

Unless you count possums, skunks, raccoons, and deer, there’s no coming and going on this road, a quarter-mile-long strip of concrete, twenty feet wide, running nearly atop an east-west section line, and so concealed two miles east of Saffordville that many countians don’t know it still exists. I am walking it, and I believe it to be the last exposed piece of the original concrete, however broken, of what was once U.S. 50 South in or touching Chase. These fractures, a crazed pattern of cracks and crevices crammed with plants, give it the look of the slabbed Appian Way. On each of its long sides, the Santa Fe trackbeds seal it in, and two raised section-line roads close its ends to give it the appearance of an empty moat; these closures have largely kept this strip from being torn out. The railroad grades slide right down to what was once the highway shoulder, and, a hundred feet south, the Cottonwood River, just below where Buckeye Creek joins, begins turning a nicely cut W in the valley as it meanders toward junction with the Neosho River. Three hundred feet north and several feet higher and sitting atop the second road lies the newest highway 50, twenty-four feet wide; this one has yet to be flooded. Three highways, three trackbeds, and one river have made for much passage, much fluxion of one kind and another: flatboats, the El Capitan and Super Chief, flivvers and roadsters and runabouts, Chevy coupes, Marmon sedans, Hudson Terraplanes, pickups, long-haul transports heading to California and Chicago. The concrete, in the right angle of light, shows four parallel depres sions, wheel tracks, worn by all that traffic, and I’m dreaming it, dreaming lives going east and west, conversations at a mile a minute, people riding and listening in the dark to “The Great Gilder-sleeve” and “Inner Sanctum,” to home runs and field goals, vehicles full of expectation, boredom, anger, laughter, dread, drowsiness, passenger-side sleep, back-seat sex, drunkenness, and whatever they said about coming into the prairie for the first time.

Today the new highway takes the passage, and, in so doing, takes its toll: six thousand cars and trucks rip over it each day, and their occasional meetings have given this stretch in the vale of the river the name Death Valley. Because the highway is straight as an axle, because its hills are long and gentle with good sight-lines, because this appears a most undangerous place, and because people still stack up here and die, one politician called it a Bermuda Triangle. Two years ago the county led the state in traffic deaths, and most of them happened on this open stretch of new U.S. 50 that runs the east valley. A man said to me: Pile up the bodies killed in the last thirteen months on that nine miles between the Chase line and Strong City, and it would look like we’d just had a bounty hunt. Hell, we don’t even have that many coyotes here anymore.

But I am speaking of the old highway, this ghost of a road, the one under my boots, this one quiet for thirty years and starting to disappear under sediment and scrub: it reveals better than any other place nearby the power of prairie, its continuous insistence, its opportunism, its capacity to lie unheeded and let human intrusion pass and only then to begin to creep back from what seemed nonexistence, to germinate and grow and build a bed of litter that needs only a loose spark to clear away the new and competing trees and really open things again for the grasses, for the native essence of the region.

Along this fossil highway, even though it lies in the bottomlands that have always belonged mostly to the trees, I am walking in the time of the birth of the tallgrass prairie, that epoch when turfy perennials—bluestems and gramas, panicums and ryes—began covering the American interior as the old sea, now turned to a limestone anchor, once did. Down in here, the rock is the worn concrete, yet, as hard as it is, the cement road is nevertheless a fissured seedbed, a string of a glade full of brand-new prairie, an extinct highway giving birth to grassland.

Now: I’ve walked half this remnant, and I’ve found big bluestem and little bluestem, silvery bluestem, cord grass, wild rye, sun flower, bundle flower, catclaw sensitive briar, and also plants of the woodlands, including a clump of garden iris from I don’t know where. But this strip is not a relict Pleistocene prairie because there probably never was much grass in this low spot in the bottoms: a vestigial highway, yes, but a new prairie. The native forbs and grasses have come in on the wind and maybe on the floods, and now they have roots under the pavement, and soon the prairie plants will need fire to clear away the shading and moisture-sucking trees, and until then the infant prairie can do little more than begin.

Prairie birth: in an earlier time, men believed the grasslands came as a consequence of infertile ground, or an absence of coarse soil material, or from glaciation, from bison trampling, lightning fires, Indian fires, from persistent wind, drought, temperature extremes. But Chase County has good soil of various composition, the ice sheets did not reach here, and the temperature range and rainfall differ only a little from the woodlands of Missouri. The other “reasons”—fire, wind, grazing—contribute less to the birth of prairie than to its maintenance. No: the source of the prairie is its midcontinental position, far from tempering seas, where it lies under an eolian cleavage zone that mixes westerlies, wrung dry by the Rocky Mountains, with humid air from the Gulf: here, inches of evaporation and precipitation are nearly equal, and here, above my head, the rain-shadow of the Rockies meets in commensurate strength the humid Gulf fronts so that this land can grow ten-foot grasses and ninety-foot sycamores, and which one prevails depends mostly on one thing: fire. In the last half-century, the balance has careened toward trees because white men have suppressed the keeper of the grasses. To the prairie, the voice of the Great Mysterious speaks in three tongues: water, wind, flame. This glade beginning in the abandoned highway has heard the first two, and now this slender quarter mile of incipient prairie could use a tossed cigarette from a Santa Fe trackman so that the highway can flourish as never before.