3 for the Road: Ian Frazier's "Great Plains"

This is the third in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Great Plains. 

Frazier’s book chronicles his Great Plains rambles of the 1980s. And man, does he ramble! He clocks twenty-five thousand miles on his van, driving up, down, and across “that immense Western short-grass prairie now mostly plowed under.” He noses around countless dusty, little towns, seeing what there is to see, noting down detail after extraordinary detail. In Strasburg, North Dakota, he looks inside the Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church:

There was a smell of polished wood, hymnals, and rubber floor-mats. The empty air was still vibrating slightly with the suppressed fidgets of children. Except for the pews and the floors, almost every interior surface was covered with statues or paintings. Two girl-sized statues of angels holding fonts of holy water stood by the main door. The tall, narrow windows each had a saint in stained glass. Angels and biblical scenes covered the ceiling. The altar had a crucified Christ in the center, statues of the Virgin Mary, St. Anne, St. Peter, St. Paul, the Last Supper, candles, scrolls, filigrees, more angels – a scene as colourful and crowded as the finale of the Radio City Easter Show. All the vents at the bottoms of the windows were open. At the front of the church, Emerson Seabreeze electric fans on wheeled stands faced the congregation.

Near Medicine Bow, Wyoming, he visits a rock shop “made entirely of fossilized dinosaur bones.” On the banks of the Sun River, in western Montana, he sits inside a “medicine wheel” (“The hooves of cattle going down to the water have trampled out most of the wheel’s center”). In the valley of the Madison River, also in western Montana, he stops at the Madison Buffalo Jump State Monument (“On the spot where so many buffalo would have landed and died, almost no grass grows, maybe out of tact”). Just outside the town of Holcomb, in western Kansas, he pulls into the driveway of the house where the Herb Clutter family was murdered one night in 1959, and where, later, Truman Capote came to research In Cold Blood (“The history of this house makes everything here look different; it makes warm afternoon sunshine into the flash of a police photographer’s camera”). On the open prairie in west-central Montana, near no town, he encounters what he calls “perhaps my favourite ruin on the Great Plains” – a massive steel-and-concrete structure that was once a command center for the Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile system. He writes, “As my van rocks gently on its springs in the wind, and as the wind whistles through the grama grass, I feel as if the car and the grass and I are all flesh to this ruin’s bone.”

Frazier’s most profound Great Plains epiphany occurs in Nicodemus, Kansas, population about fifty, founded by black homesteaders. Arriving there, he finds the town in the middle of its annual Founders’ Day Weekend celebration. At the township hall, Frazier attends a program, including a fashion show of ladies hats: 

The hats were big, in dramatic shapes, burgundy and gray and black and white. Mrs. Avalon Roberson modelled them. She put on each hat and strolled around the room so everybody could see it. She got applause all the way around. Then Mrs. Jaunita Robinson, of Nicodemus, introduced her daughters Kathleen, Karen, Kaye, Kolleen, Krystal, and Karmen. Her other daughter, Kimberleen, who was pregnant, watched from the audience. First, Karmen, wearing (Juanita Robinson told us) a white suit with a slit skirt, a navy handkerchief, a black-and-white blouse, white ankle boot with a chain on the side, and a black-and-white hat with a veil, walked to the middle of the floor and stood with her left hand on her hip and her face turned to the side. Then Krystal, wearing a white lace dress, a white lace coat with balloon sleeves, and a white hat with navy lining and a veil, came and stood next to her sister the same way. Then came Kolleen, in a casual dress with black-and-off-white-striped pockets on the side, white nylons, black shoes, and a black hat. Then Karen, in a two-piece red suit, a white lace blouse, a red hat with a veil, and white shoes. Then Kathleen, in a purple silk dress with black stripes, a black hat, and black shoes. Then Kaye, in a black-and-blue triangle dress, a black belt, black shoes, blue nylons, and a black hat. When they were all lined up, they held that pose for a moment. Then the song “When Doves Cry,” by Prince, began to play on the loudspeaker, and they began to dance. I looked past the people sitting on chairs against the wall, the women with their pocketbooks on their knees, past the portrait of Blanche White, who was like a mother to the kids in the town, through the tall open window, past the roadside grove of elms which Blanche White’s 4-H Club planted in the 1950s, past the wheat-field horizon, and into the blank, bright sky. Suddenly I felt a joy so strong it almost knocked me down. It came up my spine and settled on my head like a warm cap and filled my eyes with tears, while I stood there packed in with everybody, watching Mrs. Robinson’s lovely daughters dance.

Wow! That, for me, is one of the most thrilling, uplifting, bravura passages in all of literature. It’s like an aria, moving from very detailed, exact description to a moment of pure joy that soars above the scene, “through the tall open window, past the roadside grove of elms which Blanche White’s 4-H Club planted in the 1950s, past the wheat-field horizon, and into the blank, bright sky.” 

Great Plains is a brilliant epiphanic journey across a land that is “like a sheet Americans screened their dream on for awhile and then largely forgot about.” It takes you to Sitting Bull’s cabin on the Grand River; to a black-powder rendezvous at Bent’s Fort; to a Wyoming Ranch for a cattle roundup. It puts you squarely there with Crazy Horse, in the jail at Fort Robinson, when he’s fatally stabbed. 

Sometimes Frazier sleeps in his van; sometimes he stays in motels. He writes, “A the edge of a little town, I pulled off the road, took off my shoes, moved some stuff from the mattress, and fell asleep, the gasoline still sloshing back and forth gently in the tank.” I love that sentence – matter-of-fact reporting with just the right touch of lyrical detail. Great Plains brims with such lines. Here’s another: “The first snow storm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks.” And another: “A moth glanced off the edge of the windshield, and in the sunset the dust its wings left sparkled like mascara.” If you relish sentences like that, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Great Plains.

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss various aspects of these books – their action, structure, imagery, point of view, sense of place, use of figuration – in more detail. My next post in this series will be on structure.