To discover bestselling non-fiction in the rural grasslands of the American Midwest, a writer need only look closely. As evidence, consider author William Least Heat-Moon, who took the time-three years-to study a place called Chase County, Kan., and rendered a 600-page tome called ”PrairyErth (a deep map)” as a result.
This book, which follows by nine years Heat-Moon`s Americana classic
”Blue Highways,” has made it to No. 7 on The New York Times best-seller list.
All this attention is for a book about a county of 3,000 people that otherwise is mostly grass. It is an irony that Heat-Moon relishes.
”I do like to write against presumed knowledge,” he said. ”People presume or assume they know all they want to know about Kansas. And I liked the idea of trying to write a book about a place that looked empty and barren.”
Why? Partly for the challenge, he says. There is a trace of literary daredevil in Heat-Moon, a man trusting in his storytelling skills while trying to prove this maxim: In every life, no matter how obscure, there is drama, poignancy-a story. His problem in ”PrairyErth,” a geologic term for the soils of the central grasslands, wasn`t a dearth of material, but too much.
”I finally had to cut it off because there was no way I could get every tale I heard in,” he said.
What`s more, Heat-Moon says, his experience in Chase County proves there is a ”PrairyErth” waiting in every chunk of America, if only people would look.
”What I hope we care about is our own particular terrain. If I can draw somebody into one small piece of the United States, which incidentally happens to be nearly at the heart of America, then I also think they`re going to be drawn into their own lands, their own topography.”
Such is a world view that, like his pen name, derives from the fraction of his ancestry that is Osage Indian. From a young age, Heat-Moon, the son of a Kansas City lawyer, felt a strong attachment to the land, spending more time in wooded areas and along streams in the outskirts of the city than in a classroom.
”When I was a boy of 8, I wanted to walk on every square foot of America. I didn`t realize how absurd that was,” says Heat-Moon, now 52, who also is known as William Trogdon. ”Since I was little, I had the urge to know this land as no one else has known it.”
Only after painful years as an adult would he set off to pursue that dream in earnest. Having lost his job as a professor at a small women`s college in Missouri because of declining enrollment there, and with his marriage failed, Heat-Moon in 1978 loaded up a van and embarked on a 13,000-mile, three-month journey across the backroads of America.
The result was a national best seller, ”Blue Highways,” a quirky celebration of the places left behind as a nation moved to the city. It was on the ”Blue Highways” journey that the idea for his latest work took hold.
”As I would come into these little towns and stay for a day or so, I wondered what would happen if I stayed for a season rather than just a day, but still try to remain an outside traveler,” Heat-Moon said.
After ”Blue Highways,” that notion fused with a yen to explore Chase County, a place in Kansas where Heat-Moon once noticed that the backroads seemed to end.
”I liked the clarity of line in a place that seemed to require me to bring something to it and to open to it actively: See far, see little,” Heat- Moon writes in ”PrairyErth.” ”I learned a prairie secret: Take the numbing distance in small doses and gorge on the little details that beckon.
”The book is very much about the American past,” Heat-Moon continues.
”We`re famous as a nation for being people who don`t give a damn about our past. As somebody said, `The American disease is forgetfulness.` When you have a forgetful people, you also have a nation capable of losing its way.”
Yet Heat-Moon`s thesis declares also that a nation need not retreat to the grasslands to find itself.
”A whole lot of people are ready to find out that we don`t have to live the way we live,” he says, ”That this land is an incredible place, and if you`re open to it, your own life begins to take on aspects of the marvelous.”
