Word: prairyerth
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...observer. He sees the origins of today's political attitudes--the Westerners' reflexive contempt for environmentalism and genial hatred of the Federal Government--in the homesteaders' ordeal by hailstorm and bankruptcy. But what makes Bad Land exceptional, on a level with William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways and PrairyErth, is a pervasive sense of yearning. The author is powerfully drawn to this hard country, this broad and nearly featureless landscape, and the reader does not doubt that had Raban been born in 1880, he would have found himself in Montana by 1908, driving fence posts with aching city shoulders...
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...
Blue Highways was a delight, and so, in a darker and deeper way, is PrairyErth (Houghton Mifflin; 624 pages; $24.95). In kind and quality, it somewhat resembles Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, and it will not look out of place on the same shelf of 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...
Except that a journalist who reads PrairyErth asks whether the van in Cedar Point could be the same noble '75 Ford Econoline, named Ghost Dancing, that rattled for 13,000 miles in Blue Highways. "Of course," said the author last week, sounding pleased. "Got a dead battery now, but otherwise just fine." Plenty of nostalgic action here. And a hope that with a fresh battery, Ghost Dancing will have still another fine, quirky book...
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