Twain's Feast (7 page)

Two of the Amish silently push the Kawasaki from the barn, while the third fires up the tractor so Frank can check the rear sprayers. The worst thing that could happen today would be not to have enough water in the right place at the right time. At last it’s done, and Frank invites me into the house for coffee while the others fuel up the machinery.

Frank’s connections to this mixed and rolling country run deep. His mother’s side of the family arrived from France in the 1700s and prospered for well over a century as fur traders. “In fact, I grew up in a French-speaking household. I’m the last generation to have heard that, listening to my grandmother and my grandpa’s sister speaking French the whole time they were baking bread on Tuesdays, there along the river.” As the fur bearers grew scarcer, the family turned to truck farming. “But I had that sense of wonderment from my grandmother. She’d say, ‘We only use this land. When the river needs it, we move.’ In my family it’s almost a disgrace to talk about getting government money when the floods come. You know when you’re planting in that ground that the river owns it. So our mentality is that we only use it.” Frank talks about a century ago and this morning in the same present tense, using “we” to speak of things he likely only ever heard about. “We use the land when she lets us. When she needs it, we go up to the hills. We come back when it’s dry.” The river would flood from March until May; if his family planted in June, sometimes there was still time to get a crop out.

It’s a powerful combination, this willingness to work so hard to bring something from the land while still accepting the earth’s primacy. It’s of a piece with his and Judy’s work here, which requires both constant labor and an acceptance that the prairie will offer what it wants to.

“Prairie is the rarest ecosystem in North America,” Frank says, increasingly animated. “’Cause where it’s good, it’s being eyed for four-dollar corn. Seven-dollar beans. That’ll jeopardize a lot. But for now Missouri has more flat, native prairie than anywhere else in North America. It’s mostly still here for cultural and traditional reasons, kind of an ingrained thing with some English mentality, or Scottish, or Irish. You plow some up, but you
never
plow it all. That’ll save you in dry years, because you’ll get a hay crop off those fifteen-foot roots. It’s not like Illinois, with the flat land and good drainage. Here you need some insurance to feed your livestock, feed your milk cows. If you keep the prairie, then in drought years you’ll always have something. And I’m afraid we’re going to lose all that.”

He pauses and cups his hands around his mouth; prairie-chicken booms and cackles fill the living room, as though a flock has taken to the rafters. “There are black prairies not far from here that should be a national landmark,” Frank says. “I go out there, hear the booming. But the guy who owns them says it’s too much work to keep it in pasture, and the government will only subsidize row crops—never pasture ground.”

I ask about the Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP, intended to allow the conversion of some cropland back into prairie. Frank shakes his head. “I feel that conservation is the worm put on a hook to get dollars, and only crumbs get to the conservation it’s trying to attract. Look, all Americans have a soft spot in their hearts for conservation. We owe the wildlife, and we owe the landscape for the benefits we’ve had from it. But I believe the bureaucracy feels inconvenienced by the necessity for conservation, so they administer conservation programs without the passion that makes taxpayers willing to be charged in the first place.

“If it was me, I’d have people signing up for programs only on the basis of performance. There shouldn’t be money just for a practice; it should be for the
quality
of that practice. Some of the landowners we sell seed to because they want money from CRP . . . well, I know for a fact that they just go through the motions. We got guys throwing seeds on the bare ground and coming in with receipts that say they planted it. Some of what the government pays for is just wrongheaded. We got a million and a half acres in fescue and brome. But fescue’s a noxious weed! It
inhibits
growth. We were better off when we had small farms row cropping.”

Frank sighs, somewhat spent, and drags two fingers along his mustache. “It’s like love and
love,
” he says after a long moment. “True love is the personality being driven forward by the will. Then there’s the love that’s just a kind of flat emotional response—you know, I
looove
my four-wheeler. Agencies can’t have the right kind of love. They don’t have the will necessary for it. If we had the will and determination and passion, we could turn the whole thing with prairie chickens around right away. But you know what it is—it’s when you go into a government office, they look at you like there’s a tattoo on your head that says ‘Work.’
Results
don’t come into it.”

On such a windy day, the only safe course is to begin the burn very, very slowly, and Frank keeps his promise not to hurry. He carries a drip can, which is like a combination oilcan and blowtorch, and with the pull of a trigger drips a burning diesel blend onto the dry grass. I join Chris, one of the Amish teens, in an ATV equipped with spray bottles (and, I notice—feeling like an insider—a steering wheel). The others follow Frank as he begins setting a long, narrow fire beside the road, downwind from the three hundred acres he intends to set on fire today. The wind is so strong that the smoke stays plastered to the ground for perhaps ten feet before finally rising and unraveling like a flag left too long in a gale.

What would happen if the wind changed? “It’s happened before,” Chris says. “Frank’d have to just get on the four-wheeler and try to circle around as fast as it would go, setting the fire behind him the whole way.” As it is, the fire creeps slowly downslope and into the wind, kept from spreading by the sprayers on the tractor and in the hands of the Amish. It will take hours to burn a firebreak thirty feet across and maybe a mile long, big enough that the fire can then have its way with the land.

I realize there’s no chance I’m making my flight home. In the scant twenty minutes it takes to change my ticket, the wind begins to shift, sending a black band of burning far to the south. If it gets too far and the wind shifts again, the fire could shoot down and across the bottom of the grassy bowl with enough force to jump the road. Frank is worried, returning to that first state of almost eerie concentration. “It’s tenuous right now.” He pulls up some of the dry grass that’s been pressed flat beside the road, waits for it to burn in a quick flash, then pulls up another beside it. He hands me one of the rakes and takes off on his four-wheeler, wanting to be sure he has enough fuel in the drip can to set the long fire he’ll need if this one gets out of control.

My first couple of efforts smoke and die. “He makes it look easy,” I say to Chris. Then I see that Chris makes it look easy, too; in fact, I’m probably the only person within a hundred miles who really stinks at this. But I eventually improve, and soon we’re moving at a pretty good pace, extending the fire line about ten feet per minute.

As I work, I think back to my talk with Frank, finding it difficult to pinpoint how he felt about the utter transformation of the land. He was visibly angered by bureaucratic cynicism, which he thought led to the failure of programs meant to bring back some of what we lost by transforming the land. But when he talked about development, about the incredible capacity of riverboats and barges compared with trains, there was a genuine excitement in his voice, an enthusiasm about the ability to
do.

Twain once wrote scornfully that seeing humanity as the pinnacle of Creation was like imagining that the Eiffel Tower had been built to hold up the skin of paint covering its tip. I doubt Frank would make that mistake. “We owe the wildlife,” he’d said. “And we owe the landscape for the benefits we’ve had from it.” Maybe that was the key; he didn’t think it was wrong to take from the land, only to see nothing in what it gives but the product of our own hands. Soon I have a chance to watch him put that balance into practice—the winds fade and turn back to a safe course. Frank heads for the opposite ridge, drip can in hand, and begins burning in earnest.

There is one fire; there are many fires. They break and split and merge, running red up slopes, filling the sky with smoke. As long as I stay on burned ground, it’s safe. Now the fire is approaching from two directions, each blaze about knee-high. As they draw closer, they rise slowly to my waist, then my chest, before at last reaching an invisible, crucial point, some precisely correct combination of wind and heat and fuel; the fires inhale, smoke and air sweeping up between them as into a chimney. In seconds the flames triple in height, roaring overhead. I feel instantly sunburned. There’s a sound like a thousand thin glass rods shattering, as the stiff cells in the grassy stalks explode. The wind had been blowing smoke into my face, but now air passes me, in a rush, from behind. It’s like a wave drawing water into itself before crashing forward, a sensation so familiar from bodysurfing that I recoil, instinctively expecting a massive blowing back of flame. But the fires hold behind the wind they’ve shifted. Hawks wheel beside the scorching thermal; behind me fire tornadoes dance, sassy whirlwinds of smoke and dust that spit along the burned ground at skipping-stone cadence, pulling black ash swirling up their chutes.

The fires meet with a roar; their lines shift, again moving with the prevailing wind, a bright, hundred-yard-long line stalking through dead grasses. I imagine prairie chickens fleeing from the burn like ghosts, their flight among the fastest of all birds. I run far up a slope and then down, behind the fire now, following it on the black, smoking ground. The smoke from the main blaze is black and gray, orange and yellow. It is towers and curtains, and it pours before the sun, so thickly that when I snap a photo the flash goes off.

I had thought that with the fire so high the ground behind it would be like a forest floor after a fire—glowing, blanketed with embers, surely unbearably hot. But, in fact, the only thing that keeps me from approaching closer to the burn is the heat off the ten-foot flames. The grasses burn too quickly to warm the ground even slightly; the potash cools almost as soon as the fire is gone. I creep closer, until I have to hold a hand to shield my eyebrows. Even so close to the blaze, the ground is cool enough for me to place a palm flat against the earth; the grass stubs are scratchy as a two-day beard.

Around me ribbons of smoke trail up from still-burning clumps of grass, and from tufts twisted into wicks like volcanoes. Sometimes I see what look like glowing orange snakes that, when kicked, burst apart into dry, dead grass and sudden fire. But other than that, there is the lethal fire and then the ground it already touched and so made safe, and little or no border between them.

After an hour the flames have cleared great reaches of grass. Then I find myself in what feels like the most wildly open place I’ve ever been. I’ve been on salt flats and on the open ocean, but this is different; the speed of the transformation from impassably thick grass into clean and ashy slope leaves me exhilarated, with an uncontrollable urge to run. So I do, striding out down one hill and up the next. The ground is spongy, packed with living roots. Smoke blows into my face, and then clear air. I send a surprised hawk flying; I kick the glowing snakes. I’m alone out here, and free to do what I want, and that simple fact is oddly new to me. I’ve gotten used to the notion that you can hurt a natural landscape by so much as looking at it the wrong way. But there is nothing I can do to this land that the fire hasn’t done already. There are no trails here, or guardrails, or signposts—just the rolling, blackened land and the hawks flying, and me, on the run.