Word: chases
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ASSISTANT EDITORS: Ursula Nadasdy de Gallo, Andrea Dorfman, Katherine Mihok, Brigid O'Hara-Forster, William Tynan, Jane Van Tassel (Department Heads); Bernard Baumohl, Nancy McD. Chase, Georgia Harbison, Anne Hopkins, Susan M. Reed, Elizabeth Rudulph, Sidney Urquhart...
...Chase County, Kans., writes William Trogdon, "is the most easterly piece of the American Far West." Meaning what? And who, for that matter, is Trogdon, whose name does not appear on the title page of his extraordinary and wholly original new book, PrairyErth (a deep map)? What's prairyerth...
...question at a time. Prairyerth is an old geological term for prairie soil. The westerly thinning-out of forest and the first broad stretches of prairie grass are what make Chase County a magical place for the author. Eastern travelers feel edgy here, Trogdon notices, and so do some natives: "The protection and sureties of the vertical woodland, walled like a home and enclosed like a refuge, are gone, and now the land . . . is a world of air, space, apparent emptiness, near nothingness," where wind blows steadily "as if out of the lungs of the universe...
...great Americana as its betters, Mark Twain's Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi. The author's visceral decision to explore one American locality was an intuitive leap from the restlessness of Blue Highways. And it was a leap toward the nation's center. He had seen Chase County's Flint Hills and the bits of remaining tallgrass prairie as a boy. He was attracted in part because the historical past was very recent (white settlement began in 1856) and because the present is isolated from shopping- mall modernity, so that both are faded like old jeans...
ASSISTANT EDITORS: Ursula Nadasdy de Gallo, Andrea Dorfman, Katherine Mihok, Brigid O'Hara-Forster, William Tynan, Jane Van Tassel (Department Heads); Bernard Baumohl, Nancy McD. Chase, Georgia Harbison, Anne Hopkins, Susan M. Reed, Elizabeth Rudulph, Sidney Urquhart...