Beneath a Thirty-Six-Square Grid

Items found, things dug up, oddments of the grasses like shards under a digger’s grid:

CRIBBING ARISTOTLE. Earth, air, fire, water: the fruit of these ancient elements here is tallgrass, and from it proceeds the way of life.

THE VIEW FROM THIRTY THOUSAND FEET. If, in June, you look down from a jetliner on Chase County, ninety-five percent of what you see will be grasses—native, alien, cultivated, wild.

ONLY ALFALFA IS NOT. Of the four major crops here, three are grasses—wheat, sorghum, com. The major pursuit, beef, absolutely depends on grass. You can see how, given the present American diet, grasses stand between us and hunger.

IN ABSENCE OF POISONS. In North America, tallgrasses probably began evolving about twenty million years ago, most likely in tandem with herbivores, against whose teeth grass has not the usual vegetative defenses of toxin or spine but instead only cellular structures containing silica—microparticles of “sand”—that strengthen the plant and also wear down the teeth of grazers, a defense that would seem as effective as a holdup victim’s breathing hard on the gunman’s cold pistol to corrode it. Yet, if you take a field knife of finest steel and cut a couple of armfuls of prairie grass, you’ll find the blade dulled as if you’d dressed out a buffalo.

ERTHS. The soils of the American grasslands, according to one old taxonomy, belong either to the Prairyerths—lying generally east of the ninety-sixth meridian in the North and the ninety-seventh farther south—or to the more western Blackerths. Chase County lies among the Prairyerths close to where they meet the Blackerths of the mixed-grass region. Tallgrass is to Prairyerth as cypress to swamp, caribou to tundra.

SNAPSHOT. I am on an upland in a fine stand of little bluestem and some buffalo grass, a place of full light where the only shadows are poor, tiny, fleeting: a few leaves of wild indigo, a spider web, the flight of a bird.

WHY THE BREADBASKET. The Prairyerths and Blackerths are deep soils, lightly granular, relatively nonacid, unleached, with full stores of humus and minerals. Weathering (wetting, drying, freezing, thawing) and deeply penetrating roots (especially those of the grasses) that “stir” the soil provide nearly every element favorable to plant growth. This mixing of climate and earthen crust has made the middle of America the most plenteous agricultural region on the planet.

THE WESTERINGS. The signature of the long prairie, big bluestem, probably originated in the valleys of the Appalachian Mountains, although its character is better suited to the climate and landforms farther west; its migration recapitulates the grand plate movement of the crustal rock it comes from, and it’s also an analog of human passages: red and white.

ETYMOLOGIES. Unlike unrelated and non-native “Kentucky” bluegrass, the name bluestem is self-evident if you look closely at the lower end of a leaf where it branches away in purplish blueness from the stalk; you will also understand an earlier and more accurate, if less elegant, name: bluejoint. Look at the seed head of spread prongs on big blue and you’ll understand its other names—turkeyfoot, turkeyclaw—and watch the heads of little blue turn to white silkiness in the autumn and you’ll understand its other name—prairie beard grass—and its Latin generic name: Andropogon, man’s beard.

FORGET THE BLUE GRAMA. Of the nearly seventy species of native grass growing in Chase County, the cattleman cares about five: big and little bluestem, Indian grass, switch grass, and side-oats grama. Many ranchers consider that a sufficient diversity.

LIKE THE CHINESE ARMY. On upland ranges away from wooded vales some ninety percent of the vegetation is grass, yet three quarters of the species are nongrasses: the dominance of grass lies in its bulk, not its variety. The native forb with the largest number of species, about as numerous as the grasses combined, is the aster, yet its members are nearly invisible.

SNAPSHOT. I am up on a ridge. In spite of the rise and fall of the hills, the grass gives such openness that it distorts elevation and turns this land into mere length and breadth, into an apparently horizontal place, a myth you can truly dispel only by walking crosscountry.

WERE IT NOT FOR ROOTS AND CUDS. The work of Chase is the turning of soil and cellulose into humanly digestible carbohydrate and protein. If this immense conversion of sugars were to fail, only a half-dozen quarrymen could earn a living.

VESSEL OF WRATH. Although humankind’s most commonly concocted beverage, beer, comes from a grass, the native grasses of the tall prairie are too deficient in sugars to serve as a source of brewing malt. Were Kansas known for barley instead of beef and wheat, local notions would be different, and Carry Nation would not likely have chopped up her first saloon thirty-five miles from here.

HEKA HO! GENERAL CUSTER. With its growth tissues protected, tallgrass attracts grazers and fire to itself, thereby turning apparent enemies into allies that help destroy seedling trees and non-native broadleaf plants, the real rivals of long grass: the Kansa inviting in the cavalry to subdue the Pawnee.

THE ANTHILL PRINCIPLE. Some tallgrasses keep sixty percent of their weight underground and seem to treat the world of sunlight as alien and dangerous, a realm to enter as a spinster does the stock market, venturing only a portion at a time on a few blue chippers, yet ready, if they fail, to cut her losses and get out. Big bluestem invests germ so conservatively that some prairie botanists have never found in the wild a big blue seedling.

THE LESSON OF BEASTS. The survival of mammals on a grassland where cover is scarce depends upon at least one, commonly two, and sometimes three facilities: herding, burrowing, running. Native peoples dominated the plains when they developed all of them: clans, earth lodges, horses.

SNAPSHOT. It has just rained, and I’m walking a drenched crest where the little bluestem has turned nearly to amethyst, as it does on a wet October day (people accustomed to city lawns are surprised to see tall prairie respond to autumn with subtle hues of cinnamon and wine, like an oak-hickory forest, and showing more rich colors in some years than others, like maples). This hill has no intermedi ary horizon of trees so I am the highest thing, a solitary projection, and the roundness of the sky seems nearly accessible: the grasses allow me the illusion I can raise my arms to stir the bowl of heavens, and that notion makes my blood regret the long, ancestral years of skulking in the forest.

NO SOFT FOCUS. In the early days of settlement, when countians used the words flint hills, they meant upland pastures as distinct from cultivated bottoms, but the term broadened and came to include the whole of the two-hundred-mile-long, east-central rumpling across the state. Academics’ later attempts to name the region the Bluestem Hills failed, and that’s odd, since flint breaks farm implements, slices tires, cuts up stock, injures people, and contributes virtually nothing to the natural exchange that makes the land abundant here. It’s as if we were to chuck out the several epithets of Lincoln—Honest Abe, the Great Emancipator, the Man Who Saved the Union—and happily call him Old Wart Face.

THE ORTHOPTERAN CHORUS. In October the dominant sounds in the tall prairie are the raspings and clicketings of grasshoppers, katydids, and crickets; everywhere among the long stems cling translucent-winged, jointed-bodied creatures with serrated jaws that can eat the hickory handle of an ax. Like a cook who wants her pie eaten but not gobbled and so leaves a few pits in the cherries, grass laces its moist cellulose veins with silicon it takes from Permian stone: seawater become rock borrowed by bluestem to blunt the jaws of bugs.

WHAT ZEB SAID. After Zebulon Pike explored the center of the Heartland, he wrote in his 1808 account: From these immense prairies may arise one great advantage to the United States, viz: The restriction of our population to some certain limits, and thereby a continuation of the Union. Our citizens being so prone to rambling and extending themselves on the frontiers will, through necessity, be constrained to limit their extent on the west to the borders of the Missouri and Mississippi, while they leave the prairies incapable of cultivation to the wandering and uncivilized aborigines of the country. In 1871, General George Custer said in My Life on the Plains: [The] tide of emigration . . . advanced toward the setting sun, slowly but surely narrowing the preconceived limits of the Great American Desert and correspondingly enlarging the limits of civilization. At last the geographical myth was dispelled.

LIKE AN APOTHECARY. From the first, countians have believed that limestone imparts to the grasses their remarkable capacity to fatten elk and antelope, bison and cattle, and the earliest geological report on Chase, by Major Hawn in 1865, attributed the thick stands of bluejoint to gypseous clays and spoke of several theories scientists were offering for the link between “gypsum” and the robust vegetable economy: the mineral serves bluestem as gastric juices do a stomach, stimulates its circulation like a tonic, supplies an invigorating spritzer of water and carbonic acid, promotes soil fermentation like yeast, fixes ammonia as calcium does bone, or acts as an exciting power to the saps like powdered unicorn horn to the old lover.

ANDROPOGON AND MEN’S BEARDS. From wind comes the sea, from it shelled creatures, from them stone, from it grasses, from them the bison, from it the hunter: a Plains Indian sometimes speaks of the grandfather winds.

SNAPSHOT. West of Bazaar and north of Den Creek, the grasses lie over the hills like a blanket over a sleeper, retaining the dominion they once had everywhere about. They slow my walking although this surface growth is only three months old; yet, below ground, the root systems are older than the big cottonwoods in the hollow. The prairie hides its age by peeling off its face every year and showing each spring a new one, but the cottonwoods can only swell, gnarl, extend, and break. Humankind has long seen trees as reflections of itself, and we have imagined gods in them and cut deities and holy objects from them; we will eat and build with grasses but not worship them, will see them as metaphor but not divinity; it is this separation, I think, that can create such unease when we confront the prairie. Gods may rise from oceans and clouds, but I’ve heard of none rising from grasses, and this is peculiar because, unlike oceans or heavens, grasslands so evidently die and are reborn, and because, although less evidently, they are the place where our kind was made.

O BRAVE NEW WORLD. Big bluestem spreads over the prairie mostly by cloning itself through lateral underground stems, its rhizomes having the capacity to replicate themselves for a century or more; it also, but less frequently, reseeds itself through sexual means, so that a slope of big blue contains both clones and seedling offspring. Could a man do this, say a Shakespeare, his precise genetic duplicate could sit down today and share an ale with his great-great-etcetera-grandchild.

HUMDRUMITY. If we judge from their many journals, nine teenth-century travelers in their first miles of crossing the prairie were astonished, appalled, and confounded by the grassed endlessness west of the ninety-fifth meridian even though they were expecting it; but their awe almost never opened to perception, turning instead to recitations of numbed miles over grass, grass, grass, from here to Tedium.

CAVEAT EMPTOR. During one year of especially good rains, Cottonwood Falls realty agent Whitt Laughridge tried to show a prospective buyer some pasture, but the bluestem was so high they couldn’t see the tract. He told me: We drove into it and had to turn around and drive out. He didn’t buy it, so I guess he didn’t recognize it as pasture.

THE BOOK OF NATURE. Grasses and broadleaf plants coexist closely by sharing light and soil nutrients at different levels and different times of the year; in spite of relentlessly fierce competition, species so balance themselves that a big increase of one at the expense of others hardly happens unless there is outside disturbance. In mature grassland the communities are diversely full yet in equilibrium, but I haven’t heard of any prairie politican seeing or caring to apply the parable.

THE LAST DEFENSE. The third-greatest enemy of the tallgrass is not fire, disease, herbivores, high wind, heat, cold, ice, freezing, or flood—it is drought, the force that shapes the prairie, the power that grasses roll their leaves against and counter by treating the world above ground as a treacherous place to be only tolerated, as if they understood the prepotency of drought over their second great enemy, trees. Against the biggest enemy, Western man, they have a lone defense of waiting him out, surviving in neglected pockets like those World War Two Japanese soldiers who were still creeping out of jungles a quarter of a century after the surrender.

SNAPSHOT. I am atop a hill that opens onto a circle of horizon without a single tree interrupting it. Over the last fifty years it’s become a view harder and harder to find here, and I have yet to meet a longtime resident who does not say that there are more trees than ever before: seventy-six-year-old Frank Gaddie of Bazaar said, It’s got so I hate a tree. When I first began looking around the county, I found the wooded vales, several of them reminding me of Vermont, the loveliest places in Chase, but since then, while I’ve not lost my pleasure in wooded hollows, I’ve come to cherish absolute treelessness.

THE RED AND THE WHITE. Range biologists classify species of praine vegetation as “decreasers” or “increasers” according to the response of a plant to agricultural practices. All of the native tallgrasses are decreasers when faced with heavy grazing, trampling, frequent mowing, plowing, even fertilizing. With their decline come the increasers, the imported grasses—fescue, brome, bluegrass. Decreasers, increasers: bluebirds, English sparrows; prairie wolves, hounds; ghost dancers, Moral Majorities.

BLUE BABIES. Unlike native grass, an alien increaser frequently needs fertilizer and irrigation to survive the vagaries of the prairie. The last time I stopped for gas on the turnpike, I saw a small sign on the door: Matfield Green Service Area has exceeded the 10.0 mg per liter limit allowed for nitrate in drinking water, and it warned of cyanosis, a disease caused by, among other things, fertilizer runoff.

BRAZIL. A burr oak here may live 150 years and take fifty more to decompose; for those two centuries it keeps most of its nutrients locked within itself, giving up only a smidgen each autumn in its acorns and leaves; but that superficial mat of fallen vegetation—if it isn’t carried away by wind or rain—inhibits circulation of water and air and allows only a shallow recycling of nutrients. Although an oak sends down a deep taproot, the tree scarcely alters the subsoil, and that’s why earth in a cleared forest can quickly lose its shallow fertility: had the Heartland been largely woods instead of prairie, America might now be what the Amazon is becoming.

LEVIATHAN. A clump of big bluestem penetrates deeply into the subsoil and carries some nutrients up and deposits them and hauls others down and stores them; the old passages of decayed roots open the soil to percolation and aeration; the brief cycle of an individual plant accelerates the process, while the thick surface network of rootlets (something that can hardly be washed or blown away) sponges up moisture and foods: in these ways the tallgrass builds soil from rock debris. As a whale surfaces for air, so big blue comes up for sunlight, but it too belongs mostly to a netherworld.

GO-BACK LAND. After pioneers had all the rich bottom acres in tillage, the second generation of countians began breaking sod on less steep hillsides and planting corn, oats, wheat, barley; for a time the plants grew on the marginal cropland, and, just before the great drought of the thirties hit, about eighty thousand acres here were under cultivation. Because most of the plowed land lay in the protected bottoms and nearly all of the remainder of the county was grass-covered, Chase fared better than many other areas; nevertheless, when the dust years finally ended here, one quarter of the cultivated acreage, mostly slopes, was on its way back to grass. It was as if, said an Oklahoma biologist, Nature had withheld rain to rid herself of the unworthy.

SNAPSHOT. On a rare day of near windlessness, I am sitting on a ridge that opens toward two smaller hills so similar they seem reflections. Unlike a forest, a grassland lets sound carry, and I can count distant prairie voices: a harrier, a meadowlark, an upland plover. Each calls in plaintive phrases as if it admitted the prairie solitude into its notes. When the air does move, it pulls from the bending grass around me a soft outrush like a deep breath slowly vented, the wind giving voice to the grass, and it lending a face to the wind.