Twain's Feast (6 page)

However strongly he associated prairie chickens with their native grasslands, Twain wasn’t immune to the charm of eating them hundreds of miles away. In 1879 he wrote a letter noting that a friend of his was “in the habit of sending . . . a Christmas present of prairie chickens” to his home in Hartford. That year, he concluded happily, “those chickens were fine & came just in time for Christmas dinner.”

Springfield, Illinois, is the home of Abraham Lincoln and the “horseshoe.” A horseshoe is two thick, side-by-side pieces of sourdough toast, heaped with ground beef, mounded with fries, and finally drowned under cheese sauce. When I sample one at D’Arcy’s Pint, I’m ravenous—I haven’t eaten since the night before, and I’ve spent the morning walking all over Goose Lake Prairie, the state’s largest surviving grassland—and I scarf that sucker down.

It doesn’t taste much like any of its constituent foods: beef, potatoes, cheese. But it hits all the basic pleasure centers, the desires for salt and meat and fat and gooeyness and crunch. Humans evolved on grasslands; our gigantic brains, as well as our bipedalism, may have developed to aid us in foraging and hunting for food over large distances in a region given to paralyzing seasonal droughts. Somewhere deep in my own brain, there still resides the notion that I might soon need to head out there across the fields with a sharpened stick and hunt me down some elk, or wrestle a baboon for groundnuts. These activities, it stands to reason, will demand a store of protein and fat: they will require a horseshoe.

But even as my ape mind drives me to gulp down the horseshoe, a different part of my brain recognizes that it’s garbage. This is the part that, when it hears that horseshoes have never spread far beyond Springfield, asks,
And what does that tell you?
For in truth the bread and fries and ground beef and cheese necessary to a horseshoe are not difficult to procure elsewhere in this land of ours. Maybe the fact that the horseshoe technically qualifies as “local” to Springfield testifies only to the great good sense of people not living in Springfield.

That’s the part of my brain that understands that the grasslands, cradle and driver of human evolution, are gone from this part of the world mostly because of the kind of foul concoction that I am, at this moment, eating as though it’s my job. When an animal was once hunted by the millions, it’s natural to assume that that is why it isn’t exactly blotting out the sun anymore. But in the case of the prairie chickens, the real culprit was habitat loss. Once that wonderful checkerboard of corn and grass gave way to corn and soybeans, and nothing but corn and soybeans, there was no place for the birds to seek shelter for their nests.

And in 1947, just over a century after the invention of the plow that broke the prairies, another innovation appeared that would further transform the land, making it even more uniform—at once more productive and more sterile. That was the year that farmers began applying ammonium nitrate from World War II-era munitions plants to their cornfields. Now corn could be grown even on the poorer “gray” prairies of southern Illinois, where cultivated redtop grass (grown for use making dye) had sheltered a good-size remnant of prairie chickens. Once the redtop was gone, only birds on refuges like Prairie Ridge could survive.

Even more important, the new fertilizer destroyed the ancient rhythms of corn agriculture; the idea of land going “corn sick” and being left fallow for a few seasons to recover became a historical curiosity, as did the use of most winter cover crops. Growing corn on ammonium nitrate meant that the land could be left bare for half the year. And across much of the tallgrass country, where roots once literally locked soil into place, bare land was suddenly defenseless before rain, and wind, and melting snow.

Now, erosion is nothing new on the Mississippi; erosion, in fact, is one of the things that Twain loved about it. In
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
Huck eavesdrops on a party of river men arguing “about differences betwixt clear-water rivers and muddy-water ones. The man they called Ed said the muddy Mississippi water was wholesomer to drink than the clear water of the Ohio; he said if you let a pint of this yaller Mississippi water settle, you would have about a half to three-quarters of an inch of mud in the bottom. . . . The Child of Calamity said that was so; he said there was nutritiousness in the mud, and a man that drunk Mississippi water could grow corn in his stomach if he wanted to.” And in
Life on the Mississippi,
Twain claimed to have seen a steamboat so thickly coated with windblown dirt that “her hurricane deck would be worth a hundred and fifty dollars an acre” in New England. “The soil on her forecastle,” he wrote, “was quite good—the new crop of wheat was already springing from the cracks in protected places. The companionway was of a dry sandy character, and would have been well suited for grapes. . . . The soil on the boiler-deck was thin and rocky, but good enough for grazing purposes.”

But the affection of Twain and his characters notwithstanding, the best soil is soil that stays where it is. And destroying the old root systems meant that more soil went sliding down the muddier Mississippi than ever before. Today Iowa can lose as much as six bushels of earth for every bushel of corn produced; an equivalent amount of prairie would lose only one-eighth as much, while simultaneously adding a great deal more to the loam from its own constantly dying and regrowing root system. Since the beginning of corn’s reign, Iowa’s fabulously rich black topsoil has shrunk to about two feet deep—still thick by worldwide standards but about half of what it probably was when prairie grass held the loam in place. In the Great Plains, tiny “postage stamp” prairies sometimes tower as much as three feet above contiguous plowed land, pedestal monuments to the scars left by the plow.

Twain wanted corn bread, and “green corn, on the ear,” and corn “cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper.” He also wanted the prairie chickens that those foods displaced. When I think about this, I start to feel that Twain’s feast is at war with itself. But that’s actually wrong; the sad truth is that modern, industrial corn has almost nothing in common with the sweet corn Twain loved. In fact, the vast majority of corn grown in this country is completely inedible to humans. When it does appear in our food chain, it’s indirectly, after being fed to cows or pigs or processed into soda or Twinkies or a thousand other things that look and taste nothing like corn.

So corn and prairie chickens don’t have to be completely mutually exclusive, as the long decades of prairie chickens thriving alongside cornfields showed. But having a truly diversified landscape requires a deep shifting of priorities—beginning with the decision to grow . . . you know,
food,
instead of something that can be ground and bleached and manipulated into something that looks like it might be food, if you hold it just so in exactly the right light.

When it comes to the prairies, the effect of America’s subsidizing of industrial corn has been nuclear, reducing thousands of species to one, or at best a handful. Strikingly, even our modern monocultures still shadow the old ecosystems, the ancient patterns of grass. A single tall grass, corn, has replaced the thick tallgrass prairies of Illinois and Iowa; the mixed prairies of Nebraska and Kansas now hold winter wheat; the western, shortgrass Great Plains, where millions of bison once grazed, have been made over as cattle ground. But these shadows are only that. To an extent that was once literally unimaginable, we’ve extricated ourselves from nature’s seasonal constraints (at least temporarily, at least as long as the oil flows). It’s an impressive achievement in its own terms, but it also means the sharp amputation of nature’s rhythms, subtleties, and joys.

When, after many years away, Twain returned to Illinois on an 1874 promotional tour, he promptly ordered a roasted prairie chicken from room service in a small-town hotel. The African-American boy who served him was amazed that he meant to eat the whole bird himself, which led to an evening-long chat. Twain later immortalized their talk in the essay “Sociable Jimmy,” an essay that, Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin argues, contains the first seeds of Huckleberry Finn’s voice. Surely it’s only a coincidence that it was prairie chicken that set off the conversation. But, at the same time, it’s appropriate that a meal bound so inextricably to the land and to Twain’s memories helped to spark his greatest work of American life and speech.

After leaving Springfield, I drive through mile after mile of cornfields, across the Mississippi and into Missouri, across a contrastingly grassy country all the way out to the site of John Quarles’s old spread near the town of Florida—the place that fixed itself so deeply into Twain’s heart. Today it’s easy to miss. In fact, I miss it twice, zooming past its nondescript, lopsided trailer and a matching pair of tool sheds. Then, beside a barbed-wire-rimmed culvert—maybe even Twain’s “divine place for wading” with swimming pools “which were forbidden to us and therefore much frequented by us”—I see a tilting mailbox of rusty steel, marked with the kind of block-lettered sticky squares that kids use to put their names on bedroom doors:

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the day after Easter, I’m on Frank Oberle’s land in Missouri’s Adair County, a hundred miles north of Florida, waiting for Frank to burn a prairie.

Frank can concentrate
hard.
His thick, strong frame hunches over a small bunch of grass; he seems to use it to gauge all the hundreds of acres in the wide prairie bowl before us. Over a salt-and-pepper mustache, Frank’s eyes are intent as a scope. The intensity may come from his decades as a photojournalist, during which he took some of the best shots of bald eagles you’ll ever see. Or it may simply be that the day’s work requires this level of concentration—without it, a shift in the high wind could send his planned fire ripping the wrong way, throwing flames across the two-lane road, with nothing to stop it until the river some eight miles away. The only hope then would be setting a hurried, even frantic, burn along the road, hoping to make a blackened firebreak before the main blaze came on with all the force of the wind behind it.

Whatever its source, Frank’s focus makes me feel scattered and flighty, though Frank himself couldn’t be friendlier or more welcoming—at least in between tasks that require his full, almost unnerving, attention. “I’ve promised myself that when I burn, I’ll never, ever hurry,” he says without looking up.

Until Frank and his wife, Judy, bought these eight hundred acres of northern Missouri pasture, the land had been owned by the same family since the prairie on it was first broken in 1854. Now it’s home to their Pure Air Native Seed Company, which sells native grass and brome seeds to jump-start prairie restorations of all sizes. If prairie chickens are ever going to return in numbers to Illinois, it will be because of the work of Frank and others like him; it will be because people care enough to raise the seed that once grew wild from skyline to skyline.

Frank fell in love with this land while driving through on his way to photo shoots in Minnesota and the Dakotas. After decades spending as many as eight months of every year on assignment, he realized that his work was becoming more of a job than a passion, and he and Judy began looking for a farm with potential. “It’s kind of a gem in the rough,” he told me. “This morning there was a dozen turkeys along the road, deer over in the meadow there, geese down there setting on eggs. We had pelicans here, I think twenty-four last week.” He still takes huge numbers of photos, but now only on their own land. “I could do a book just on this farm, the flowers and butterflies and bees and groundhogs, badgers and deer and bobcats and coyotes. If you had a four-hundred-page book, you could fill each page with something totally different.”

Where once there was nothing but relatively uniform dairy pasture, now the bottoms wait for row crops of blue wild indigo, coreopsis, Indian paintbrush, foxglove beardtongue, and dozens of other prairie flowers. The surrounding hills are covered with grasses, all high and wild and dry at this time of year. “Up there we take whatever she gives us,” Frank says of the grasslands. But his seeming nonchalance disguises the brutally hard work needed to replicate the dramatic processes of the natural prairies: “Growing for seeds is a young man’s sport. Hard work, weeding and harvesting and clearing.” Someday he’d love to have it as an outreach and education spot, maybe set up some cabins—have people come out “for a week, or until they
get
weak.”

Until then he’s lucky in his workers. One of the first things that Frank told me was not to photograph the faces of the three lanky teenagers in plain blue work clothes, who moved quietly and without eye contact as they readied the farm vehicles for the coming burn. Naturally, I agreed to keep my camera pointed away, learning only later that the three come from an Old Order Amish community and would consider photos to be forbidden graven images.

They’re hard, hard workers; by the time Frank picks them up at 8:00 A.M. for a full day’s work, they’ll already have put in two hours in their own dairy barns. But it’s difficult for me to figure out what, exactly, they’re allowed to do. They can’t drive cars (Frank has to drive them forty miles twice a day), which seems straightforward enough—no machinery allowed, except for the horse-powered implements they use on their own land. Then I find that they can operate his tractor, so apparently
owning
the machine is what matters. But no, they can’t drive the quick, tough little camo Kawasaki Prairie four-wheeler. Evidently, the fact that it has handlebars instead of a steering wheel puts it off-limits. This one I never figure out.