MONOTONY
We left Lawrence late at night and went immediately to bed upon the
train. When I awoke in the morning the car was standing still. In the
ventilators overhead, I heard the steady monotonous whistling of the
wind. As I became more awake I began to wonder where we were and why we
were not moving. Presently I raised the window shade and looked out.
How many things there are in life which we think we know from hearsay,
yet which, when we actually encounter them, burst upon us with a new and
strange significance! I had believed, for example, that I realized the
vastness of the United States without having actually traveled across
the country, yet I had not realized it at all, and I do not believe that
any one can possibly realize it without having felt it, in the course of
a long journey. So too, with the interminable rolling desolation of the
prairies, and the likeness of the prairies to the sea: I had imagined
that I understood the prairies without having laid eyes upon them, but
when I raised my window shade that morning, and found the prairies
stretching out before me, I was as surprised, as stunned, as though I
had never heard of them before, and the idea came to me like an original
thought: How perfectly _enormous_ they are! And how like the sea!
I had discovered for myself the truth of another platitude.
For a long time I lay comfortably in my berth, gazing out at the
appalling spread of land and sky. Even at sea the great bowl of the sky
had never looked so vast to me. The land was nothing to it. In the
foreground there was nothing; in the middle distance, nothing; in the
distance, nothing--nothing, nothing, nothing, met the eye in all that
treeless waste of brown and gray which lay between the railroad line and
the horizon, on which was discernible the faint outlines of several
ships--ships which were in reality a house, a windmill and a barn.
Presently our craft--for I had the feeling that I was on a ship at
anchor--got under way. On we sailed over the ocean of land for mile upon
mile, each mile like the one before it and the one that followed, save
only when we passed a little fleet of houses, like fishing boats at sea,
or crossed an inconsequential wagon road, resembling the faintly
discernible wake of some ship, long since out of sight.
Presently I arose and joining my companion, went to the dining car for
breakfast. He too had fallen under the spell of the prairies. We sat
over our meal and stared out of the window like a pair of images. After
breakfast it was the same: we returned to our car and continued to gaze
out at the eternal spaces. Later in the morning, we became restless and
moved back to the observation car as men are driven by boredom from one
room to another on an ocean liner.
Now and then in the distance we would see cattle like dots upon the
plain, and once in a long time a horseman ambling along beneath the sky.
The little towns were far apart and had, like the surrounding scenery,
an air of sadness and of desolation. The few buildings were of primitive
form, most of them one-story structures of wood, painted in raw color.
But each little settlement had its wooden church, and each church its
steeple--a steeple crude and pathetic in its expression of effort on the
part of a poor little hamlet to embellish, more than any other house,
the house of God.
Even our train seemed to have been affected by this country. The
observation car was deserted when we reached it. Presently, however, a
stranger joined us there, and after a time we fell into conversation
with him as we sat and looked at the receding track.
He proved to be a Kansan and he told us interesting things about the
State.
Aside from wheat, which is the great Kansas crop, corn is grown in
eastern Kansas, and alfalfa in various parts of the State. Alfalfa stays
green throughout the greater part of the year as it goes through several
sowings. Fields of alfalfa resemble clover fields, save that the former
grows more densely and is of a richer, darker shade of green. After
alfalfa has grown a few years the roots run far down into the ground,
often reaching the "underflow" of western Kansas. This underflow is very
characteristic of that part of the State, where it is said, there are
many lost rivers flowing beneath the surface, adding one more to the
list of Kansas phenomena. Some of these rivers flow only three or four
feet below the ground, I am told, while others have reached a depth of
from twenty to a hundred feet. Alfalfa roots will go down twenty feet to
find the water. The former bed of the Republican River in northwestern
Kansas is, with the exception of a narrow strip in the middle where the
river runs on the surface in flood times, covered with rich alfalfa
fields. Excepting at the time of spring and summer rains, this river is
almost dry. The old bridges over it are no longer necessary except when
the rains occur, and the river has piled sand under them until in some
places there is not room for a man to stand beneath bridges which, when
built, were ten and twelve feet above the river bed. Now, I am told,
they don't build bridges any more, but lay cement roads through the
sand, clearing their surfaces after the freshets.
The Arkansas River once a mighty stream, has held out with more success
than the Republican against the winds and drifting sands, but it is
slowly and certainly disappearing, burying itself in the sand and earth
it carries down at flood times--a work in which it is assisted by the
strong, persistent prairie winds.
[Illustration: Even at sea the great bowl of the sky had never looked
to me so vast]
The great wheat belt begins somewhere about the middle of the State and
continues to the west. In the spring the wheat is light green in color
and is flexible in the wind so that at that time of year, the
resemblance of the prairies to the sea is much more marked, and
travelers are often heard to declare that the sight of the green billows
makes them seasick. The season in Kansas is about a month earlier than
in the eastern states; in May and June the wheat turns yellow, and in
the latter part of June it is harvested, leaving the prairies brown and
bare again.
The prairie land which is not sown in wheat or alfalfa, is covered with
prairie grass--a long, wiry grass, lighter in shade than blue grass,
which waves in the everlasting wind and glistens like silver in the sun.
Rain, sun, wind! The elements rule over Kansas. People's hearts are
light or heavy according to the weather and the prospects as to crops.
My Kansan friend in the observation car pointed out to me the fact that
at every railroad siding the railroad company had paid its respects to
the Kansas wind by the installation of a device known as a "derailer,"
the purpose of which is to prevent cars from rolling or blowing from a
siding out onto the main line. If a car starts to blow along the siding,
the derailer catches it before it reaches the switch, and throws one
truck off the track.
"I suppose you've seen cyclones out here, too?" I asked the Kansan.
"Oh, yes," he said.
"Do the people out in this section of the State all have cyclone
cellars?"
"Oh, some," he said. "Some has 'em. But a great many folks don't pay no
attention to cyclones."
Last year, during a bad drought in western Kansas, the wind performed a
new feat, adding another item to Kansas tradition. A high wind came in
February and continued until June, actually blowing away a large portion
of the top-soil of Thomas County, denuding a tract of land fifteen by
twenty miles in extent. It was not a mere surface blow, either. In many
places two feet of soil would be carried away; roads were obliterated,
houses stood like dreary, deserted little forts, the earth piled up
breast high around their wire-enclosed dooryards, and fences fell
because the supporting soil was blown away from the posts. During this
time the air was full of dust, and after it was over the country had
reverted to desert--a desert not of sand, but of dust.
This story sounded so improbable that I looked up a man who had been in
Thomas County at the time. He told me about it in detail.
"I have spent most of my life in the Middle West," he said, "but that
exhibition was a revelation to me of the power of the wind. A quarter of
the county was stripped bare. The farmers had, for the most part, moved
out of the district because they couldn't keep the wheat in the ground
long enough to raise a crop. But they were camped around the edges,
making common cause against the wind. You couldn't find a man among
them, either, who would admit that he was beaten. The kind of men who
are beaten by things like that couldn't stand the racket in western
Kansas. The fellows out there are the most outrageously optimistic folks
I ever saw. They will stand in the wind, eating the dirt that blows into
their mouths, and telling you what good soil it is--they don't mean good
to eat, either--and if you give them a kind word they are up in arms in
a minute trying to sell you some of the cursed country.
"The men I talked to attributed the trouble to too much harrowing; they
said the surface soil was scratched so fine that it simply wouldn't
hold. There were wild theories, too, of meteorological disturbances, but
I think those were mostly evolved in the brains of Sunday editors.
"The farmers fought the thing systematically by a process they called
'listing': a turning over of the top-soil with plows. And after a while
the listing, for some reason known only to the Almighty and the
Department of Agriculture, actually did stop the trouble and the land
stayed put again. Then the farmers planted Kaffir corn because it grows
easily, and because they needed a network of roots to hold down the
soil. Most of that land was reclaimed by the end of last summer."
The little towns along the line are almost all alike. Each has a
watering tank for locomotives, a grain elevator, and a cattle pen,
beside the track. Each has a station made of wide vertical boards, their
seams covered by wooden strips, and the whole painted ochre. Then there
is usually a wide, sandy main street with a few brick buildings and
more wooden ones, while on the outskirts of the town are shanties,
covered with tar paper, and beyond them the eternal prairie. You can see
no more reason why a town should be at that point on the prairie than at
any other point. And it is a fact, I believe, that, in many instances,
the railroad companies have simply created towns, arbitrarily, at even
distances. The only town I recall that looked in any way different from
every other town out there, was Wallace, where a storekeeper has made a
lot of curious figures, in twisted wire, and placed them on the roof of
his store, whence they project into the air for a distance of twenty or
thirty feet.
I think, though I am not sure, that it was before we crossed the
Colorado line when we saw our first 'dobe house, our first sage brush,
and our first tumbleweed. Mark Twain has described sagebrush as looking
like "a gnarled and venerable live oak tree reduced to a little shrub
two feet high, with its rough bark, its foliage, its twisted boughs, all
complete." In "Roughing It" he writes two whole pages about sagebrush,
telling how it gives a gray-green tint to the desert country, how hardy
it is, and how it is used for making camp fires on the plains and he
winds up with this characteristic paragraph:
"Sagebrush is very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished
failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his
illegitimate child, the mule. But their testimony to its nutritiousness
is worth nothing, for they will eat pine knots, or anthracite coal, or
brass filings, or lead pipe, or old bottles, or anything that comes
handy, and then go off looking as grateful as if they had had oysters
for dinner."
[Illustration: The little towns of Western Kansas are far apart and
have, like the surrounding scenery, an air of sadness and desolation]
Though Mark Twain tells about coyotes and prairie dogs--animals which I
looked for, but regret to say I did not see--he ignores the tumbleweed,
the most curious thing, animal, vegetable, or mineral, that crossed my
vision as I crossed the plains. I cannot understand why Mark Twain did
not mention this weed, because he must have seen it, and it must have
delighted him, with its comical gyrations.
Tumbleweed is a bushy plant which grows to a height of perhaps three
feet, and has a mass of little twigs and branches which make its shape
almost perfectly round. Fortunately for the amusement of mankind, it has
a weak stalk, so that, when the plant dries, the wind breaks it off at
the bottom, and then proceeds to roll it, over and over, across the
land. I well remember the first tumbleweed we saw.
"What on earth is that thing?" cried my companion, suddenly, pointing
out through the car window. I looked. Some distance away a strange,
buff-colored shape was making a swift, uncanny progress toward the east.
It wasn't crawling; it wasn't running; but it was traveling fast, with a
rolling, tossing, careening motion, like a barrel half full of whisky,
rushing down hill. Now it tilted one way, now another; now it shot
swiftly into some slight depression in the plain, but only to come
bounding lightly out again, with an air indescribably gay, abandoned and
inane.
Soon we saw another and another; they became more and more common as we
went along until presently they were rushing everywhere, careering in
their maudlin course across the prairie, and piled high against the
fences along the railroad's right of way, like great concealing
snowdrifts.
We fell in love with tumbleweed and never while it was in sight lost
interest in its idiotic evolutions. Excepting only tobacco, it is the
greatest weed that grows, and it has the advantage over tobacco that it
does no man any harm, but serves only to excite his risibilities. It is
the clown of vegetation, and it has the air, as it rolls along, of being
conscious of its comicality, like the smart _caniche_, in the dog show,
who goes and overturns the basket behind the trainer's back; or the
circus clown who runs about with a rolling gait, tripping, turning
double and triple somersaults, rising, running on, tripping, falling,
and turning over and over again. Who shall say that tumbleweed is
useless, since it contributes a rare note of drollery to the tragic
desolation of the western plains?
As I have said, I am not certain that we saw the tumbleweed before we
crossed the line from Kansas into Colorado, but there is one episode
that I remember, and which I am certain occurred before we reached the
boundary, for I recall the name of the town at which it happened.
It was a sad-looking little town, like all the rest--just a main street
and a few stores and houses set down in the midst of the illimitable
waste. Our train stopped there.
I saw a man across the aisle look out of the window, scowl, rise from
his seat, throw up his arms, and exclaim, addressing no one in
particular: "God! How can they stand living out here? I'd rather be
dead!"
My companion and I had been speaking of the same thing, wondering how
people could endure their lives in such a place.
"Come on," he said, rising. "This is the last stop before we get to
Colorado. Let's get out and walk."
I followed him from the car and to the station platform.
Looking away from the station, we gazed upon a foreground the principal
scenic grandeur of which was supplied by a hitching post. Beyond lay the
inevitable main street and dismal buildings. One of them, as I recall
it, was painted sky-blue, and bore the simple, unostentatious word,
"Hotel."
My companion gazed upon the scene for a time. He looked melancholy.
Finally, without turning his head, he spoke.
"How would you like to get off and spend a week here, some day?" he
asked me.
"You mean get off some day and spend a week," I corrected.
"No, I mean get off and spend a week some day."
I was still cogitating over that when the train started. We scrambled
aboard and, resuming our seats in the observation car, looked back at
the receding station. There, in strong black letters on a white sign, we
saw, for the first time, the name of the town:
Monotony!
THE MOUNTAINS AND THE COAST