[BUT YOU'RE BREAKING THIS DOWN FROM WHOLE HOG. AND HARD TO SIT HERE AND BE CLOSE TO YOU, AND NOT KISS YOU, THE BETTER YOUR FINISHED PRODUCT. OH, YOU'RE PREACHING TO THE CHOIR.]
Preliminary Glance at an American Landscape by John A. Kouwenhoven
From the Blister-Dome of the Wabash Railway’s Blue Bird, en route from St. Louis to Chicago, the spring landscape of central Illinois is one of wide, level horizons with now and then a clump of leafed-out willows or a brief row of maples or elms which have budded enough to look hazy. It is a land of pale coffee-colored fields, darkened in irregular blotches where shadows lie and in strips where a tractor-drawn disc harrow has recently passed. A lone man driving a tractor is the only human being you are likely to see for miles, but there are many other living things: cattle—black, or black and white, and still winter-fuzzy—standing or lying in the unplowed fields; pigs and sheep whose young scamper away from the fenced railroad track when the train passes, though their elders are accustomed and remain still; and quite often a pheasant, green neck feathers shining in the sun, standing close to the track, always with is back turned to the passing train, looking over his shoulder at it but not otherwise disturbed.
The only city you go through is Decatur, a momentary collection of factories, warehouses, and handsome grain elevators, and a business district with some stone buildings of modest dimensions. Most of the towns you go through are small and irregularly square, with streets at right angles to the railroad, many of which do not cross the track but stop short at earth mounds partly covered with grass. Each town has a corrugated sheet-metal grain elevator and a Quonset warehouse or two near the wooden station. The houses are wood, with fruit trees blooming in their board-fenced yards. But there are almost no people in sight, just a few cars moving in the streets or parked at the curbs. And in less than a minute your are out on the prairie again.
Occasionally the level fields are studded with shining ponds, and now and then you see small streams whose flashing surfaces are almost flush with the fields they flow through, or shallow gullies banked with tin cans and bottles which glitter in the sun. Running alongside the track all the way, three tiers of shining wires dip from and rise to the crossbars on the telegraph poles—each of the three crossbars with room for ten bright insulators, some missing, leaving gaps like broken rake teeth. Sometimes the ground bordering the track also dips and rises where the right of way has been sliced down to grade through long, flowing swells of land. But the only real break in the general flatness is a huge eroded mesa, man-made from the waste of what may be strip-mining operations, which stretches along west of the track for miles, somewhere near Reddick or Essex judging by the timetable.
Most of the time there is just the wide, flat landscape of harrow-smoothed earth, ruled into squares by lines of wire fence strung on thin metal posts (not split wooden posts, as in New England), and along the fences there is a fringe of the dry, blond husks of last year’s uncut grass, with now and then a large, unaccountable sheet of wilted brown paper caught on the wire barbs. Once in a huge, immaculate field near Symerton, roughly forty-seven miles out of Chicago, I saw a rock. It was about the size and shape of a dented watermelon, but no one had bothered to move it; the parallel harrow tracks in the smooth dirt diverged to avoid it, then came together again.
Once in a while you see white roads taped across the landscape, and if they cross the track the diesel honks at them. Once in a while you see a lonely schoolhouse, usually of wood, with a flag flying briskly from a pole in front and a yellow bus standing in the grassless yard. Once in a while a field is dotted with round metal grain bins with cone-shaped roofs, looking like a battery of stumpy, unlaunchable rockets. And once in a while, too, near one of the clumps of trees, you see a white farmhouse, with red or white barns—big barns, with ventilators on their roofs looking like little barns straddling the ridgepoles of the big ones. Near the houses tall windmills stand on spindly iron legs, mostly with broken blades in their fans, and almost every farm has a gawky television antenna in the yard as tall as, or taller than, the windmill.
This is a landscape which a century ago looked to a Chicago newspaperman like “the untilled and almost untrodden pastures of God.” Standing with a group of excursionists in the middle of the rolling prairies, the reporter, Benjamin F. Taylor, felt as if he were in the center of a tremendous dish.
Not a tree nor a living thing in sight; not a sign that man had ever been an occupant of the planet . . . The great blue sky was set down exactly upon the edge of the dish, like the cover of a tureen, and there we were, pitifully belittled.
A century later the pastures of God are well-tilled and much trodden. The prairie has become, in fact, a technological landscape: subdivided by wire fences, smoothed by tractors, tied to the urban-industrial world by wires, roads, rails, and by the invisible pulses felt in the lofty antennas. The height of those antennas measures the strength of the city’s pull. As you leave St. Louis they grow taller and taller until, in central Illinois they outtop and almost outnumber the trees. As you approach Chicago they grow shorter until, when you reach the suburban landscape of supermarkets, drive-ins, and rows of little square houses with little square lawns, they need be only small, solicitous bundles of branching wire rods attached to the house chimneys.
The prairie landscape no longer belittles man. It is still vast, and you see very few people as you watch from a train window. But man’s technology has modified everything from the texture of the earth itself to the stance of the pheasants.
This landscape, through which I last traveled three years ago, came freshly to my mind as I began to assemble and revise the essays in this book. It did so, I think, because it embodies a number of the forms and patterns which seem to me to be characteristic of a civilization based as ours is upon a distinctive blend of technology and a somewhat untidy but dynamic form of democracy. And it is with some of these characteristic forms and patterns, and the indigenous energies they express, that these essays are primarily concerned.
There are other American landscapes, some of which embody forms and patterns that seem to have little in common with those of the prairies: the landscape of Maryland’s trim and cultivated Eastern Shore: the barbaric splendor of the Southwest’s mesas and canyons; the grim and powerful landscape of River Rouge; and—more like the prairies than it first appears—the New York Skyline.
The most endearing and comfortable landscape, to me, is in Vermont, where I spend the summers on a farm which lies like a large green saddle blanket on the small of the back of a mountainous ridge along the western border of the state. Eastward from the farm you can look down in the domesticated Vermont valleys of Pawlet and Dorset, with pasture clearings running well up the enclosing slopes. Westward you look out over a widening, open-ended valley where the tree-hidden village of Rupert lies, where dogs bark distantly in the evening, and where an occasional light blinks through the trees after dark. At the far, open end of the valley the D & H Railroad comes down from the north and curves westward into New York State toward the Hudson and the Susquehanna. You cannot see the trains but when the wind is right—when rain is coming—you can hear the imitation steam-whistle which the railroad, in tune with the new industrial sentimentality, has substituted for barking horns on its diesels. And beyond the valley’s open end the continent rolls gently westward through the Mohawk Valley and then invisibly onward past the Great Lakes, lifting easily across the prairies and plains. You can believe that if the atmosphere were glass-clear and the earth did not curve you could see two thirds of the way to the Pacific, for there is nothing high enough to block the view till you come to the Laramie Range and the Big Horns. Closed and friendly to the east, open and inviting to the west, it is a likable landscape.
It is, I suppose, the landscape of this eastward-and-westward-looking Vermont farm, superimposed upon the landscape of New York’s skyline, which controls the point of view from which I have looked at America. But the characteristic landscape of the America I have looked at in these essays seems to me to be the “interminable and stately prairies,” as Walt Whitman called them, ruled off by roads and fences into mathematical grid. They have become, as Whitman thought they would become, the home of “America’s distinctive ideas and distinctive realities.” They produced Abraham Lincoln and the city of Chicago—both of which are ideas as well as realities and both of which seem to me, at least, to be distinctively American.
