PrairyErth

PrairyErth- William Least Heat-Moon

To capture the essence of a place; more than its history, its demography, or even its ‘feel’, you must immerse yourself in it.  You must become the place itself so that you are IT, feeling what IT feels, being what IT is. You must become one of ITs people. And all of these goals, every one, is doomed to fail.  For no matter how long you live in that place, walk its roads, be among its people you are never able to be IT, or THEM. 

‘Walk a mile in his moccasins’ we think Indians once said, and you can only then know his pain or joy.  William Least Heat Moon has done more than walk where other moccasins have trod than any other I know.  And I believe he would be the first to say, ‘Its impossible.”  But he, and I, must try.

I began to mentally prepare, indeed, be called to and for this journey Mona and I are on, by Moons first book, Blue Highways.  I read his Quoz not long before we purchased FROG.  Our first name for our coach was Quo, of the latin ‘Where?’ which I took from the title Quoz, which means a strange, indefinable something. And in my mind Frog is still Quo. Where next?

I just finished reading the subject of this review and I am no closer to knowing how to become the place and people we meet than he was at the end of all of his books.  What I do have, and he obviously has, is the desire to try to learn, to attempt to know, what it meant to be fully and truly in a place once, or be in that ‘other’ place now, which others inhabit.

PrairyErth - by William Least Heat-Moon

PrairyErth, an old concept word that means more than the words in correct modern English than those two words could ever mean, is over 700 pages of being, living, experiencing one county in the center of rolling hill plains Kansas.  Chase County.  One of the most ignored of the most mundane counties of all the so-called mundane state, yet absolutely chock full of history, drama, violence, love, passion and every human emotion… just like every other county in every other one of the American fifty states.  Chase County, Kansas, is each of us, but very much itself.

I started reading it too late; just before we left the Colorado plains.  And today we are on the eastern edge of Arkansas preparing to move on east into Tennessee. But there is nothing I have read that does not prepare me to see the next county, meet the next person, attempt to become IT, or THEM, all over again.

Moon has walked thousands of miles in others shoes so he could write of their journeys. For some known but to God reason, I am called to do the same. 

If you are similarly called, you will learn at least better how to, and you will simply love the way he instructs you, in any of William’s books.  But this one takes you deeper, more fully into IT than anything he or another I have read. Read it to laugh, tear up, and wonder ‘why?’. Read it to learn.  But mostly read it for the sheer pleasure of the walk.

Privileged to share moccasins with the best of them…

*****-Ken