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Trying to look as if he were not eavesdropping, he wrote down practiced insults by old combatants at Darla's bar, in a town called Bazaar. She: "You're so dumb, if you fell in a barrel of tits you'd come up sucking your thumb." He: "You're so ugly we're all hoping that wind don't blow off your clothes." In the same town, he finds the spare, waste-no-words diary of 18-year-old Elizabeth Ann Mardin, a bride newly arrived in Kansas. For June 21, 1862: "I went a goosebarrying in the fore noon and I went to see the soldiers drill in the after noon it was a plesant day." For Dec. 12, of the same year: "We cleaned some of the ((hog)) guts for soap grease it sprinkled rain."
He sifts the rowdy history of "bleeding Kansas" just before the Civil War. He notes 140 ways to spell the state's name, among them Ka, Kaal, Ka-Anjou and Kaw; the last being the present spelling of the name of the Native American tribe, now nearly extinct, that lived here before the coming of whites. Somewhat uneasily, he watches an all-woman ranch team castrating bull calves. He talks to old inhabitants who tell of monstrous floods and of hiding in "fraidy holes" -- storm cellars -- to wait out tornadoes.
In an old house he finds a mirror "with the silver mostly gone, as if all its reflections had worn it through." He hikes to the spot near Bazaar where, in 1931, the Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne and seven other men died in a plane crash, after which local people carried pieces off for keepsakes. A woman tells him about running a health-food restaurant in a little burg called Cottonwood Falls: "We never did get the farmers to eat alfalfa sprouts. They know silage when they see it."
Was he ever bored? Hmmm. He tells of staking out the main and only street of Cedar Point, a hamlet's least piglet of a town. The idea is to watch all visible action, dawn to dusk, from the back of his van. But nothing happens. He puts aside as too metaphysical the lame notion that he himself constitutes Cedar Point's action for the day. It rains. That's it.
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 in him.