A deep map
Cheryl Unruh
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Nearly 20 years after he wrote about Chase County, William Least Heat-Moon returned. And he liked what he saw.
When the author of “PrairyErth (a deep map)” revisited the county this past spring, his thoughts were recorded by Wichita filmmaker John O’Hara. In the documentary “Return to PrairyErth,” Heat-Moon reminisced about his experiences in the 1980s in Chase County, and he talked about how much things have changed, for the better, since then.
On July 24, Heat-Moon appeared for the documentary’s premiere held in the barn at Pioneer Bluffs, just north of Matfield Green. Pioneer Bluffs is the 1859 Rogler homestead maintained by the Pioneer Bluffs Foundation, which uses the property to teach history, sustainability, and community-building.
“I’m really proud of Chase County for the changes they’ve made,” Heat-Moon said at the end of the film. “This place, with what they’ve done in just two decades, it gives me hope for America.”
It was 1983 when Heat-Moon first came to Chase County to study its 774 square miles and to begin writing “PrairyErth,” a 624-page tome. Heat-Moon spent a good part of eight years there, hearing stories and learning the ways of the people. He asked questions and he listened. He listened a lot.
In the film, Heat-Moon said that for his earlier book, “Blue Highways,” he would stop in a place, get to know a few people and learn a bit of the history there. “I would want to stay and fill out these stories,” he said. “I wanted to get an encyclopedic knowledge of particular places, but the point of ‘Blue Highways’ is a lot of places in a limited time, 13,000 miles in three months, but I kept wanting to stop and go deep....”
Heat-Moon selected Chase County as the place to go deep, to temporarily reside in one county and take in everything: history, folklore, railroads, agriculture, the works.
In the Flint Hills, Heat-Moon studied nature: cottonwood trees, limestone, the Nemaha Ridge (an underground mountain range), and he even took apart the sticks in a wood rat’s nest to count them.
In the book, Heat-Moon says that he gave names to specific Osage orange fence posts that had “served me as guides.” He watched calves being castrated, and the hand wielding the scalpel was that of a 16-year-old girl with chipped pink fingernail polish. He visited the plane crash site near Bazaar where Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne and others died in 1931. Heat-Moon walked through cemeteries and he read the tombstones.
For his book, he spoke with teenagers, business folks, older citizens. The teens mentioned the limitations of living in a small place; many wanted to escape the community where everyone knew their business or made unfair judgments about them.
Like Heat-Moon and his deep map, I think we all have a desire to learn more – about nature, our history, about the lives that came before us, and the people around us now.
We may not have eight years to dedicate to a project as intense as his, but yet we are always observing, always taking in information. And perhaps each observation we make or each fact we absorb makes us more complete, helps define us, reveals how we fit in, shows us our place in the world.
We may travel to other states or countries and get excited about seeing new things and learning about history in Colorado or New Mexico. We are naturally curious about how others live. But we don’t have to leave town to explore; our own surroundings have countless things to teach us. All we have to do is pay attention, notice, ask questions.
“PrairyErth” is an impressive example of just how much a person can discover in small towns where seemingly nothing of note ever happens.
In the documentary, Heat-Moon said one of his reasons for writing the book was “If I can show to American readers that this little ol’ place in east central Kansas is interesting and it’s deep — deep in its history, deep in its past, its history, both human and natural history — if I can show that, then they’re going to realize … that wherever they live, that place, too, is deep in history and interesting.”
“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net. Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.