Down in the Hollow

Texaco Hill humps up at my back, looms up dry in the heat. I’m on my way down into a northerly inclined hollow, and I’ve just stooped to a snow-on-the-mountain, its white-margined blossoms not yet open, to test the milky sap once used (so I’ve heard) to brand cattle, and I’ve dribbled out a small circle on the back of my hand, and I’m waiting for the flesh to liquefy or whatever it will start to do before I wipe it off. I’ve been crouched so long, watching, that a harrier seems to have taken me for a rock, because it just slipped the ridge wind and beat to a hover close enough I can see its hot eye of golden ice. Collapsing its wings like a parasol, it drops hard into the bluestem, thrashes, then labors up out of the hollow to catch the wind, and hooked into its nerveless, ebony talons is a small, curled, limptailed something, and in the grass lies a fluff of bloodied fur. The Mysterium has opened for just a moment, and I’ve glimpsed inside, and it’s deflected me from my search for the headwaters of the Verdigris River.

I’m taking a water walk, hiking down among the intermittent streamlets (on this summer day they are just damp fingerings) that converge somewhere in here to set the river off on its ocean course: down to the Arkansas, the Mississippi, to the Gulf, which will return it on laden, leaden clouds. I’ve been reading about Chase waters, and I’m here to blend books and facts. Because the oldest visible things in the county lie along this river dell, I keep finding beginnings, and these rocks keep bringing me back to water, the fruit of the wind. (Had we named our planet more accurately, we might have called it Hydro.) I’m coming down an eroded escalator, dropping deeper into an extinct Permian sea, a narrow warp in time in this warped seabed, each step a thousand years further back, and I’m moving from the era of the great Permian extinctions toward the yeasty abundance of Carboniferous life lying below me, some of it liquefying into combustibles. From a clinkered slope I’ve just picked up a fossil, a shark’s tooth, a small crescent that looks like a tiny leaping dolphin; for two hundred million years it has lain locked in the shale, and now it moves again in my sweaty, salty shirt pocket as if it were once more a piece of a saw-toothed maw gliding along in the time when these rocks could be swum. Every so often it sticks me, seems to bite my chest as if to get to my blood. When it had its last meal, the Appalachians were rising, the Rockies were at sea level, and the continents lay sutured into Pangaea. Chase County is forty-six hundred miles from Paris, but then it was about three thousand miles closer.

I’m walking down into an old marine world: in their journals, early white travelers wrote of the prairie, using a single metaphor as if it were the only one possible—the ocean of grass—and no wonder, since this land is like the sea and it is of the sea. The characteristic shape of the hills, the stacked trapezoids, takes its substance from the old ocean and its form from rain and ice; the prehistory of Zebulon Pike’s and Stephen Long’s American desert is a study of waters. I’m a hiker through antique seas that have become stone cages of a marine zoo: crinoids, bryozoans, brachiopods, gastropods, pelecypods, ostracods, trilobites, and vertebrates that left behind only their razory teeth. But most abundant of all are fusulinids, single-cell invertebrates now turned to calcite tests that are almost the signature of Cottonwood Limestone. (In the walls of the Chase courthouse and the capitol in Topeka, those billions of things appearing to be grains of wheat were once creepers of the sea. Kansas paleontologist Christopher Maples told me, Fusulinids were incredibly abundant—the housefly of the Permian: they came along, went bonkers, then got snuffed in the Permian Extinction when seventy percent of the taxonomic variety was wiped out. Their evolution, beginning to end, was very rapid.)

I must for a moment speak in numbers: the average annual precipitation here is thirty-two inches, and that means the square mile surrounding me gets five hundred million gallons of water dumped on it yearly, enough to fill the new water tower at Cottonwood Falls twenty-five hundred times. The entire county receives about four hundred billion gallons a year, and that would fill this square mile to a depth of nearly two thousand feet. Things vary of course: in the flood year of 1951, 768 billion gallons came down, and two years later during the big drought only 261 billion gallons. In the early days especially, the number of farmers tended to rise and fall with the precipitation—the more of one, the more of the other—and neither the apocalyptic horsemen nor mechanization nor the lure of city jobs has so pushed people out as inches of rain.

The main watercourses of Chase look like the sprung tines of a fork thrust into a squarely cut piece of beefsteak that is the county, and ninety-five percent of the surface water leaving here goes out eastward on the central tine and handle, the Cottonwood, and on to the Neosho and the Arkansas. The Verdigris River, hardly more than a brook in Chase, drains only some thirty square miles of the county as it cuts, in leaving, an upside-down L. Of its 280 miles, just a dozen lie in Chase, one of them now under a small impoundment. The upper Verdigris is very much a Hills creek, with its peculiar color of transparent gray like faded flint, that hallmark hue of these upland streams. Sometimes the water runs a shade closer to oxidized copper, and I think the word verdigris, “green-gray,” describes it well, but I’ve read that the name comes from the Osage Indians, who today live south of here and who call it Wa-ce-ton-xoe, “gray-green-bark-waters,” perhaps an allusion to shale banks the color of sycamore trunks. As does the etymology, local pronunciation allows interpretation: VURR-duh-gree, VURR-duh-griss, and my own preference, like rainfall, varies from day to day.

Walking again: I’ve come to a mossy seep, not far above several runnels resolving themselves farther down the hollow into a confluence that I take, at least on this dry day, to be the headwaters. The seep is a lateral crack, a long crevice like a slender something left between the pages of a closed book. I can’t insert even a finger, but still the broken ledge drips, tick-tick-tick, like a water clock, and I set my tin cup under it, and now the seep goes ting-ting-ting, a small bell. I wait. The snow-on-the-mountain hasn’t marked my hand, and I’m not branded, and I’ll have no acid scar to tell stories about. Ting-ting-ting. This county is a leaky place, its stone sea shot through with fissures and fractures, concavities and crannies, holes and vugs, crazed layers of jointed limestone between strata of shale, all of it like a stack of sliced bread holding water until there’s too much, and then draining itself in hidden slopes. This one is a mere dripping—now it goes tuck-tuck-tuck—but, twelve miles west of here, Jack Spring, the biggest in the county, lets go about a hundred gallons a minute, so it takes old Jack, drawing from the largest cave system in Kansas, nearly a decade to return what falls on its square mile each year. There are many other springs, and most of their cold pools sprout a toothsome and peppery watercress; in season, I’ve munched my way from spring to spring as if pub-hopping. West of here also rise several artesian wells, one of them once strong enough to push its water up to the second floor of a nearby farmhouse. These hydraulic details matter, since a summer-flowing creek in an upland pasture can be miles away; the ranchers’ old solution was a stock tank and windmill, but the Aermotors and Dempster Annu-Oileds are gone like last year’s rain, and now bulldozer-cut ponds, cheap to build and maintain, pock the county. Thoreau thought a lake to be the earth’s eye; if he’s right, then Chase County, born blind, now sees better than Argus.

The cup, tock-tock-tock as if again counting time, overflows, and I drink my Adam’s ale and set the tin noggin back to catch a draft for my hot neck, and once more, ting-ting-ting. Years ago the citizens of Cottonwood Falls laboriously laid a four-mile-long cypress pipeline to tap water from a spring in the distant hills; I’ve drunk the cold sweetness from that western rock and eaten the watercress there, and I understand why they went to the trouble in that day when people attended to the tastes of water as the Irish do their stout. You can still see the cypress pipes here and there, but they are full of mud. The town drinks now from the not-so-sweet Cottonwood alluvium, a water so hard, a woman told me, that she might as well wash with gravel.

My cup fills, and the droplets, like a campfire, mesmerize me: the patter, the patter, the pattern, the pattern, slightly changing, the patter, the pattern. Tick-tick-tick-tick. I’m down in a hollow where a river begins, I’m between ledges where a source drips steady as if being long and slowly wrung, I’m between layers of rock and shale, they between gone seas; the wind carries in the rain, the water flushes along organic acids that eat the permeable stone back into liquid and send it again toward the far father sea; the solids come in and head out, just pausing; all around me are absorptions and percolations, everything soluble, the grasses sucking the mutable rock and transpiring, everything between forms of liquidity, and all things forms of liquidity: the harrier a feathered bag of nutrient waters falling onto the furred sack of sapid juices, thirsty for hot rodent blood it can turn into flight; and what was I but a guzzling, sweating bag of certain saps waiting to give up its moisture: press me dry, powdery dry, and you’d have a lump of mineralized soil, about enough to pot a geranium.

Tell me, O Swami of the Waters, in a word, what is the essence of life? Saith he, Borrowed.