![[Image]](images/PrairyErthADeepMap_186_1.jpg)
Beyond all the self-conscious lamentation over the passing of rural America, beyond the shallow romancing over a time that never was, lies a real awareness of some unique values of small-town life—certain relationships among people, between man and the land. These values are not better than those of city or suburb, they are simply different. They are values worthy of respect and preservation—values that some people would like to share today. The villages and small towns of America are not dwindling and disappearing because their values are no longer meaningful, but because they no longer work economically, no longer provide the level of services and amenities that most of us demand. No dramatic violence is being done to rural America. It is withering away because it has little function in modern life. The question of whether it can be brought back to health is at base a question of whether it can once again be brought into the mainstream of American life, of whether it can be given a meaningful function. And if it can, there still remains the question of whether the cost would be worthwhile.
—Robert B. Riley,
“New Mexico Villages in a Future Landscape” (1969)
Perhaps the blurring of provincial lines and the need for everyone to identify with the human condition in general will have positive results for the future, but preservation and promotion of local, state, and regional traditions will continue to make life more meaningful.
“Kansas: A Hard Land in the Heartland” (1988)
Love a place like Kansas and you can be content in a garden of raked sand.
—Earl Thompson,
Garden of Sand (1970)
The right scale in work gives power to affection. When one works beyond the reach of one’s love for the place one is working in, and for the things and creatures one is working with and among, then destruction inevitably results.
—Wendell Berry,
“Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse” (1991)
Q. There are about 1.3 billion cattle on the earth. The caloric equivalent of the food they consume would feed approximately how many human beings?
A. Nine billion people.
—Bill Adler, Jr.,
The Whole Earth Quiz Book (1991)
A fundamental characteristic of Kansas individualism is the tendency to conform; it is an individualism of conformity, not of revolt.
—Carl Becker,
“Kansas” (1910)
And of each one the core of life, namely happiness, is full of the rotten excrement of maggots.
—Walt Whitman,
“Thought” (1871)
When I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.
—Walt Whitman,
“This Compost” (1881)
In its original state, the tallgrass prairie—also known as the true prairie—was probably the most dramatic of all American grasslands, [yet] the designation “true prairie” is ironic, because the tallgrass prairie has a tenuous hold on being prairie at all.
—Lauren Brown,
Grasslands (1985)
I think the prairies will die without grass finding a voice. Its democracy may be against it.
Prairie grass never seems to know anybody.
—William A. Quayle,
The Prairie and the Sea (1905)
Compared to trees, shrubs, or forbs, grasses seem unfathomably plain. They fail to inspire interest or stir the imagination. We look at prairie and we see a great emptiness, a void that staggers the psyche and leaves much too much room for a mind to wander.
—Randy Winter,
“Nature Notes” (1987)
Every American has the right as part of his cultural heritage to stand in grass as high as his head in order to feel some small measure of history coursing his veins and personally establish an aesthetic bond with the past.
—William H. Elder,
“Needs and Problems of Grassland
Preservation” (1961)
Grass is the most widely distributed of all vegetable beings and is at once the type of our life and the emblem of our mortality . . . the carpet of the infant becomes the blanket of the dead.
—John James Ingalls,
“In Praise of Blue Grass” (1872)
Grasses are the greatest single source of wealth in the world.
—Agnes Chase,
First Book of Grasses (1959)
In the battle which we call agriculture, grass is the first line of defence.
Of all things the most common, grasses are the least known.
—J. C. Mohler,
Grasses in Kansas (1937)
Every recorded, primitive civilization in the world was built directly on wild grasses supplemented by their cultivated kin.
—Leo Edward Melchers,
Grasses in Kansas (1937)
Grass is the only soil builder of any consequence among the natural vegetation that originally covered this continent.
Grass is that indispensable form of plant life without which civilization, as we know it, would not exist.
—Sellers Archer and Clarence Bunch,
The American Grass Book (1953)
The basis of human proliferation is not our own seed but the seed of grasses.
—Evan Eisenberg,
“Back to Eden” (1989)
The voice said, Cry. And he said. What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: the grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.
—Isaiah,
40:6–7 (eighth century B.C.)
Climb this immense knotted cord, take one fact after another, and you will progress from the vibrio to the constellation. The immanent marvel has its own cohesion. Nothing is wasted; no effort is lost. The useless does not exist. The universe has what is necessary and only what is necessary.
—Victor Hugo,
The Toilers of the Sea (1866)
Most of the evidence, such as it is, reveals that the Plains repelled the women as they attracted the men. There was too much of the unknown, too few of the things they loved. If we could get at the truth we should doubtless find that many a family was stopped on the edge of the timber by women who refused to go farther.
If one may judge by fiction, one must conclude that the Plains exerted a peculiarly appalling effect on women.
The plain gives man new and novel sensations of elation, of vastness, of romance, of awe, and often nauseating loneliness.
—Walter Prescott Webb,
The Great Plains (1931)
For these [Kansas pioneer] women, life was far from easy. The endless hours of back-breaking toil left little time for rest and leisure. Day in and day out, they worked in the house and in the fields to produce the basic necessities of life and to build a future for their children. At first, the heavy work load seemed almost unbearable; it was physically exhausting and emotionally draining. Over the years, however, most women learned to abide the drudgery and monotony which filled their lives.
—Joanna L. Stratton,
Pioneer Women (1981)
In reading [pioneer women’s] diaries we come closer to understanding how historical drama translates into human experience. Through the eyes of women we begin to see history as the stuff of daily struggle.
—Lillian Schlissel,
Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (1982)
Loneliness, thy other name, thy one true synonym, is prairie.
—William A. Quayle,
The Prairie and the Sea (1905)
By listening to a particularly individual pattern of words, catching a tell-tale emphasis, or recognizing that something is being said which the speaker may not ever have been able to say before, there is a recognition of the infinite possibilities and experiences lying just under the surface of things.
Characters and Their Landscapes (1981)
Living in Kansas is a contradiction.
—Graffito noted by James Shortridge,
University of Kansas, Watson Library (1970)