per and more profitable) by nester grandsire; surviving drought and
duststorm, locust, weevil, and straying herds; feeding rachitic kids,
dull women and helpless men for halfacentury.

"The Farm Resettlement Administration would have moved them to fatter
ground a hundred times, but blindly obstinate they held to what was
theirs and yet not theirs. In the frontseat the man and wife and what
remained of quick moments of dropjawed ecstasy, in back unwieldly
chickencoop, slats patched with bits of applebox and wire, weathered
gray; astonished cocks crowing out of time and hens heads down. Hitched
behind, the family cow, stiffribbed and emptyuddered. The grass, deaf
lover, had seized the shack, its fingers curled the solid door, body
pressed forward for joyful rape. The nesters don't look back but pant
ahead; the bumping of the car accommodates the cow.

"Ive had to leave the lodge of course and spend my nights in a thin
house with a roof shaped like two playingcards, with the misleading
sign, in punishment crippled, half fallen from its support, 'Tourists
Accommodated' (if accommodation be empty spaces with mottoes and
porcelain pisspots then punishment was unrighteous). I shall move on
soon, perhaps for the worse since there is green now, beneath the blue.

"If I can ever come away I shall, but I'd not miss this gladiator show,
this retiarii swing.

"Give my best to the Old Boy--tell him I'd write direct, but family
feeling makes it hard. Joe."

I showed the letter to the general, expecting him perhaps to be annoyed
by Joe's instability, but he merely said, "Boy shouldnt be wasting his
talents ... put it in sound ... orchestrate it."

Just as Joe's enthusiasm covered only one aspect of the grass so his
retreat from lodge to wayside hostel, to city hotel, embraced only a
minute sector of the great advance. Neither moral nor brute force slowed
the weed. It clutched the upper reaches of the Rio Grande and ran down
its course to the Gulf of Mexico like quicksilver in a broken
thermometer. It went through Colorado, Oklahoma and Kansas; it nibbled
at the forks of the Platte; it left behind the Great Salt Lake like a
chip diamond lost in an enormous setting.

There is no benefit to be derived from looking at the darker side of
things and indeed it is a universal observation that there is no
misfortune without its compensation. The loss of the great cattlegrazing
areas of the West increased the demand for our concentrated f