In the Quadrangle:
Matfield Green

Only two dreams—sleeping dreams—from my childhood remain, and, forty years later, they still hold the sharp focus of a viewcamera photograph exposed at f/64: one was a piece of aerial fantasy, the other industrial archaeology, and each occurred only once. In the first, I went aloft in a wingless, propellerless orange crate mysteriously powered by a small, spring-wound clock without hands that could keep me airborne, just above the rooftops, as long as I kept winding it. In the other, I dreamed I uncovered beside our neighbor’s picket fence a section of forgotten rail line—ties, tracks, spikes. This dream of finding history buried in my own yard, I believe now, set me out on my first walk in Chase County. But, tramping along some months ago, I was remembering only a strange and exotic thing I’d heard citizens mention, the Orient grade, an alleged rail route partly built but soon abandoned that ran through the county; evidence of it was purportedly visible around Matfield Green, even in the backyards. I say purportedly because I’d driven in the area several times to look for the grade and had found nothing, and so I put the line in with fanciful folklore about Zebulon Pike’s stone fort and a house porch stained by a murdered man’s blood that would never wash clean.

I pieced together these improbabilities about the Orient line: Missouri businessmen in 1900 decided to open a route to China by building a railroad from Kansas City to some forsaken Mexican town on the Gulf of California from where ships would open trade with the Far East. It seemed to me that anyone who could believe such a scheme existed could believe in a route from, say, Boise, Idaho, to Uxmal, Yucatán, to tap the African ivory trade. Yet hints about the track grade kept cropping up, and, after failing to find it on my walk, I decided to treat it as a puzzle on the grid, a crossword of blanks and clues where the game is to avoid turning to the back for the solution: I refused to ask people to show it to me, if they could. The search for phantasmagoria—grails, fountains, unicorns—runs deep in men, often producing things even more unexpected than the phantasm, so I made the Orient grade mine. Looking for the ludicrous allows our dreams—and sometimes dreams of others—to lead us.

I was walking about three miles north of the southern county line along route 177, which I first knew as Kansas 13, and which, to the amusement of the older residents, I still call 13 because 177 is a numeral and nothing more, but 13 is an ancient character, a glyph, an image charged with history, superstition, legerdemain, necromancy: if I say “thirteen,” things rise inside you, but 177 is only three digits leading to the next county. I was walking and thinking about this, composing some of this sentence, or at least the bones of it, and then I began remembering it was this section of old 13 that had convinced me that Chase County held something I wanted to know. Something else happened on this little asphalt meander among rock walls and coffee trees, a stretch, as in most of the county, of billboard-free highway, the kind of road homeward Americans dream of: driving it in the mid-seventies, I wondered whether a traveler could cross the United States on nothing but back roads like this one. Three years later, trying to step out of the knee-deep shambles of what was passing for my life, I took off on such a trip with the hope that following new, physical maps could change the dream cartography a mind wanders in; that tour went on for thirteen thousand miles through thirty-eight states.

When I returned here in October of 1984 and was walking the Matfield road in search of Og (so I’d taken to calling the Orient grade), I realized that, while circumnational journeys are fine, I might have reached a similar destination by staying within a single American county, even one of seeming spareness like this one. The new challenge, as my quest for Og would soon reveal, was, to reword Thoreau a bit, to travel a good deal in Chase County, and the requisite to that was to go slowly, almost inch by inch, on foot. And so, I was on Kansas 13 again, looking for Og but hoping to find, as always, connections: I had gone out and come around, but I was still hunting for links—this time along a route where the way was too broken for anything but feet, a stout walking stick, and some dreaming.

The Matfield quadrangle is much like the topography just to the north, both taking their character—their genius—from the South Fork, which splits the quad north to south as nicely as a halved melon, although the traveler along route 13 misses the similarities because just south of Bazaar the road drops off the uplands into the little river valley and follows it along on the west bank to Matfield, where it branches southwest down the vale of Mercer Creek, then rises again onto the prairie and heads out for the oil fields around El Dorado. On each side of the South Fork the prairie spreads out almost entirely unmolested by roads but dissected by a dozen major creeks that flow in just a bit aslant of true east or west. The turnpike cuts the southeast corner, and the surprise in this open land is that you rarely see the toll road until you cross it (throughout Chase, the pike hardly shows up once you leave it). The pattern of streams and roads in the quadrangle reflects that of the county as a whole, but here the configuration is reversed and inverted, as New Zealand is to Italy. South of the turnpike and near old Thurman sits the Booster Station, where Cities Service in 1930 built a little settlement to tend the machinery of the natural-gas pipeline, a feudal village to serve the manor. The place is now a ghost town and the big compressor building, its pipes bending up from underground into the light like serpents cast out, lies with the uneasy quiet of the haunted, the machines more or less now minding themselves; but countians still speak of the Booster baseball team and the whang-leather arm of Chick Shaft, a pitcher Cities Service hired as an oiler so it could win itself a championship.

Route 13 also follows the Santa Fe line through most of the quadrangle, the two lying side by side like old lovers, one humping up over the other here and the other humping over there, and the citizens often fix nearby places in relation to these crossings as if they were lone navigational marks on the trail like Courthouse Rock. North of Matfield and a couple of miles south of the first overpass—near the confluence of the South Fork and Crocker Creek from the west and, from the east, Steak Bake Creek (despite the culinary appearance, the name comes from settler Ely Stakebake)—there is a house made from an old railroad passenger car. Not far away and beside the tracks is a long, cast-block building once home to Hispanic rail workers; empty now except for stack-ings of things, it’s the only Santa Fe bunkhouse left in a county where there used to be one every half dozen miles. The citizens still refer to these houses without plumbing, electricity, and insulation as Mexican shanties. The bunkhouse near Matfield is the last vestige of railroad moguldom hereabouts, and only a few people who remember that life remain in the county.

Near these sorry dwellings are two large frame homes: first, the old Crocker place with its long and angled porches, hipped and gabled roof, and a three-story round tower that was later covered by a portico and fluted columns; this pretense, incongruous on the prairie, so overwhelms things nearby that it’s easy to miss the earlier and smaller Crocker home immediately north or to take it (as I did) for a half-sized child’s playhouse. Second, on down the road is the Rogler place, Pioneer Bluffs, with its 1870 rock wall and a parallel row of cottonwoods named after the presidents (only Lincoln is still alive). A couple of miles south of Matfield stood a third place, the Brandley home, one of the largest frame houses in the county until it burned to the ground in the twenties. These estates were the south-county expression of the wish for prairie plantations manifested at Spring Hill.

Henry Brandley (born Brandli), a young Swiss who had been a ditch digger in Indiana, walked into Chase from Iowa in 1859 with his friend, an Austrian, Charles Rogler, and they were joined later by Erastus Crocker, who lost a great toe at Appomattox (Rogler served only a hundred days, but Brandley saw action in the West and caught a Ute arrow in his arm that left him with a permanently crippled hand). Following the war, these men began making money and going (or sending sons) to the statehouse, and they formed a club of three: one countian said, They intermarried until who-laid-the-chunk. But, as the twentieth century pressed in, things began changing and the inevitable classlessness of prairie life exerted itself; today the Brandley place is a mere depression on a slope, the Crocker home sold out of the family, and the Rogler house closed and apparently on its way to becoming a museum. To look at the stories of the upper South Fork, it seems that no family got very far from the dirt floor of the log shanty it started in, and that has happened so often across the county it’s as if the prairie lets nothing rise far from itself.

On that October day in 1984 when I was walking north on Kansas 13 toward Matfield and finding Og nowhere, I was distracted by an old roofline showing above a somber grove, and I headed off west toward it; along an abandoned and overgrown piece of highway I found some small outbuildings piled with wood-rat nests and chewed pods from coffee trees. From under a rotting board that I disturbed crawled a fat black-widow spider missing a leg, and nearby lay a dead heron, decay turning its freakish beak and legs into something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting; a few yards beyond stood a derelict farmhouse of gnawed rat holes, and across the old roadway rose the steep and wooded slope of the western uplands. Cut into the hill was a small stone springhouse with an arched doorway, and from it and a culvert alongside came an outrush of water. The thing opened like a dark, evil maw issuing the sound of far waters moving in turbulence as if riled. Although the day was warm and my thirst up, the water seemed such a voice of lurking malignance that even the hominess of the springhouse ledge, which once held a chum of butter or can of milk, did not lessen the aura of a thing not right. I stepped out of the cool damp hole and, still bent from the low ceiling, slowly straightened, then recoiled violently before I realized that what stood above the springhouse was not a horribly burned man but a tall and charred tree stump, its pair of stubbed limbs like arms upraised in warning. I headed back to the road to get away from the gloom of overgrowth and the infested buildings. In the county are many campsites Indians used for centuries, yet this homestead around Perkins Spring hadn’t lasted sixty years, and I figured my unease came from some notion about white men’s inability to endure, about their incapacity to live with the land, people who were users of and not dwellers in. That no one today could find this little acre of the wooded and watered valley a pleasant place to live in—maybe that’s what cast the darkness. Or was it the other way around—a darkness driving people away? I hiked on up the sunny road and wondered what my price would be to sleep a single night in that bane of a house with its sinister gurgle of water.

I came to the big curve 13 makes below Matfield, and I was thinking how this road seems to promise much but releases it slowly, letting its past seep out so that you must collect it drip by drip, a cup of old water shot through with the exudate of lives: the collecting and drinking of such seepings is one of the most human things we do, and it is the source of our hope for continuance. Even though I had not drunk from Perkins Spring, merely confronting its dark presence had started changes.

About halfway around the road curve reflecting the bend in Mercer Creek is a stand of big sycamores; stacked among their sparse limbs, seventy feet up and clinging precariously to the higher forks and outer lateral branches, were a dozen blue-heron nests, some of them big enough to hatch a brood of human infants. This colony began in 1953, but it descends from a heronry a few miles east on the Verdigris that has been used for a century, its remote location once kept secret by cowhands. To the people of the upper South Fork, nothing shows the end of winter more than the coming of the massive wings of great blues and the courting clapper of their clumsy beaks, the heavy bills grasping and shaking sycamore branches as if to drive winter on north.

I was walking, and now and then a pickup rolled past, driver staring, rarely waving. When I stopped once to see if a certain rise might be Og, a fellow pulled up and said, Trouble? by which he meant, Are you trouble? and I said I was heading to Matfield, and to indict me he said, Ain’t many to walk this road, and that was something I knew: walking here is eccentric; even when the citizens take an outing in the hills they go by truck, and to walk along a road is to suggest poverty or peculiarity.

Matfield sits on the western side of the South Fork, against the brow where the uplands drop to the river terraces and then rise again a half mile eastward to run brokenly to the Flint Hills escarpment. The hamlet is snugged in enough to make me believe that, with a terrific heave, I could throw a rock up and out of the valley onto the uplands; it is this compression of river and trees and simple dwellings, hidden from the prairie sweep, that gives the village its unornamented, if decrepit, charm and keeps its name from being a hoax.

Matfield Green, the words spelled out in rock letters high on the eastern slope, got its name from settler and first postmaster David Mercer of Kent, England, who remembered a place called Matfield, a collection of fine houses around a big green where he played cricket, just east of Tunbridge Wells. If by “green” you understand a mowed sward at village center, then the Kansas Matfield is green-less, but with the grasses around it for miles, a common here would be like a pond in Venice. The hamlet has burned several times, the last big fire in 1933 when, people believe, a windowpane concentrated a beam of sunlight in the second floor of a shop. Much of what has been here is gone, yet Matfield retains just enough structures to be picturesque in the prairie manner: a couple of old false- front stores, two closed brick schools, some empty and some occupied houses (the best a 1905 catalog kit house with restored fretwork), a steepled church, and a pair of old-style canopied Riling stations on 13, once known as Reed Street. The west-side station is shut up, but the other is now the Hitchin’ Post bar, appropriately run by an English woman who follows the country-pub and old West custom of putting the convenience out back; I don’t know where the last American tavern privy will be, but the Hitchin’ Post has a chance at national history.

Things coalesce accidentally sometimes, and words end up saying more than they were meant to. The story of Matfield and the tenor of its life have been shaped by two things: murder and the long promise of a railroad. Wayne Rogler, a former state senator and the last of the three great families here, says he once counted up seventeen died-with-boots-on killings around early-day Matfield. From that, you can see how, without intending to, promoters celebrating the grandest moment of the town, on the last day of July, 1923, linked those forces in a newspaper headline advertising their awaited emergence and rise to urban prosperity:

 

SEE MATFIELD GREEN AND DIE

 

Matfield Green, the last great cattle town without a railroad, after waiting half a century, has realized her dreams and has a railroad and will celebrate the event by a rousing

OLD TIME PICNIC

 

After failed attempts by several rail companies to build through Matfield, the promoters were still cautious and hoped for the Lord’s mercy should the train come in sideways instead of endways. The promoters did not mention it, but the old town plats show that citizens had been ready for years to pick up their present streets running the due compass directions and set them down realigned with whatever angle the tracks might take.

On that Tuesday in July, from morning until dark, the people turned out to watch the Santa Fe crew lay track; they brought basket dinners and shared free watermelon, put their children in footraces, set sons to busting broncs, played against Elk for the county baseball championship; all day there were concerts and that evening a platform dance. Although citizens did not know it, Mat field was at its zenith of exuberant optimism: their hopes—the dream—was that material progress hauled in on trains a mile and a half long would be followed not only by money but also by civility. For a while, the railroad did indeed seem the harbinger of economic and moral progress: incomes rose, murders dropped. Then came paved highways and truck transport, and by midcentury the only thing Matfield could get from the Santa Fe was a whistle blast, and the Saffordville Syndrome began, and today Matfield Green, population thirty, has less than it had sixty years ago of everything except abandoned buildings. But it hasn’t seen a man shot down in years: maybe at least part of the dream has been realized; maybe some of the freight, if not the train, did come in sideways after all.