PrairyErth (A Deep Map)

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.”