The Ruts

Most have been plowed up or paved over but you can still find them, tracks cut deep into the earth by prairie schooners crossing that great green ocean, pitching waves of pasture out where there's nothing else to do but live. Concealing their detritus— a piece of sun-bleached buffalo skull, a button from a cavalry soldier's coat—the ruts wind their way beneath leafy suburban streets, lie buried under a Phillips 66 and the corner of a Pizza Hut where a couple sits slumped in their booth. Yet here and there, like a fish head breaking the surface of the water, they emerge in a school teacher's back yard or a farmer's field, evidence of wagons packed with hardtack and hard money, thousands of draft animals tended by traders with blistered feet, their journey both bleak and romantic. That's the kind of proof I like, a scar I can put my hand to, history that will dust my fingers with a little bit of suffering, a little bit of bone.