William Least Heat-Moon

“Boston Corbett, after he shot down John Wilkes Booth in Virginia, came out to Kansas where he would lie on his back, rifle locked toward the sky, and shoot hawks; I’m lying here in hopes the stars will shoot.”

“The bag he was about to carry across thirty-some miles of the Flint Hills I considered more of a chifforobe than a pack, a thing that can change one’s destination from a place to a hernia.”

“I came to understand that the prairies are nothing but grass as the sea is nothing but water, that most prairie life is within the place: under the stems, below the turf, beneath the stones. The prairie is not a topography that shows its all but rather a vastly exposed place of concealment, like the geodes so abundant in the county, where the splendid lies within the plain cover.”

“Almost everything I see in this place sooner or later brings me back to the grasses; after all, this is the prairie, a topography that so surprised Anglo culture when it began arriving that it found for this grand-beyond no suitable word in its immense vocabulary, and it resorted to the French of illiterate trappers: prairie. Except in accounts of novice travelers, these grasslands have never been meadows, heaths, moors, downs, wolds. A woman in Boston once said to me, Prairie is such a lovely word—and for so grim a place.”

“The thousands of acres that lay encircled around the knob I really didn’t see, not at first. I saw air, and I said, good god, look at all this air, and I recalled a woman saying, Seems the air here hasn’t ever been used before.”

“I was coming to see that facts carry a traveler only so far: at last he must penetrate the land by a different means, for to know a place in any real and lasting way is sooner or later to dream it. That’s how we come to belong to it in the deepest sense.”