Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey

by William Least Heat-Moon

  A few years earlier, in one of my rambles through hinterland America, I began noting an increasing number of gravel roads and dead-end lanes, even rural driveways, marked with “street” signs; the day before, I’d seen a two-lane track into a pasture with a sign: WHODATHOTIT ROAD. I interpreted it as commentary on the arrival of 911 emergency service and its requirement to provide identification useful to a fire truck, ambulance, or sheriff. Undoubtedly, some of these names will survive in the sprawling of the nation, as pasture paths get turned into avenues of subdivisions named Highland Heights or Forest Woods and as dead ends get opened and paved into some new Asian auto-plant. Your descendants may one day drive a vehicle assembled on Whodathotit Expressway.

  Since public forums can be difficult for an individual citizen to enter, these road names are an opportunity for expression along state rights-of-way, one second only to vanity license-plates. Two days earlier, we came up behind an overpriced, overpraised, overpowered, oversized, Teutonic vehicle with an overweening license-plate: 4U2NV. I wished ours was 4GETIT. Or better, that one I saw a few years ago: IDGAF (my interpretation begins with “I Don’t Give”). And what about that front plate of 3M-TA3, a message taking on new meaning in a rearview mirror?

  At Pencil Bluff, a T intersection with a cluster of homes and a scatter of businesses — propane distributor, church, gas station, highway-department depot — we pulled up at Hop’s Store, a new building where any character of place had to come from a character walking through the door. I did my part. Inside was a man exceptional in his blandness, a fellow more of shrugs than sentences, who answered a couple of my questions by only raising his shoulders. I asked — my fourth question — why the hamlet was called Pencil Bluff. At that, he actually spoke: “I don’t have any idea.” His interest in the question likely matched his curiosity about counted cross-stitch or bookbinding or linear algebra. Then he shrugged and spoke: “Before my time,” he mumbled, as if a man can be expected to know only what occurs during his life.

  My practice on the road when I ask such questions is to present them resoundingly so that others may hear; in piscatorial terms, it’s the difference between casting a dry fly and throwing a net — the chances of hauling in something increase. On occasion it works, and it did then in Pencil Bluff (once Sock City; why, I didn’t learn). A smiling customer standing to the side whom I’d not noticed before, an oldster so long exposed to the sky he wasn’t tanned so much as simply discolored, offered an answer, his solution corrected and expanded on by the cook making sandwiches at the grill. “Out on the river,” she said, “that’s the bluff, and it’s all slate rock where people here used to get their writing stuff for school. Back in the Deepression.” Communal memory now primed, a woman whose face lighted at the chance to inform said, “It’s out there at the preacher’s hole. The old baptism pool.” And that aroused the shrugging man to speak yet again, his memory opening at last: “There’s big catfish and brim out there in that hole. Durin Lula Jo Parson’s baptism, a catfish swum plumb between her legs, and she took a-hollerin, ‘Hallelujah! Hallelujah! The hand of the Lord’s full on me!’”

  I asked where the bluff was, but the directions needed enough clarification that the sunned man said, “It’s easier if I just show you.” He took his sack of sandwiches, and we followed him to his pickup; on the tailgate was one of those little chromed-plastic icthyoidal emblems evangelicals stick to the back end of their vehicles, those fundamentalist fishes so often swimming — however inappropriately — forever leftward across the trunk lids of America.

  As we fell in behind him, I said something about catfish holes and baptismal pools, and to the tune of the old hymn, Q sang, “He will make us fishers of quoz if we’ll follow him.” He led us into trees and brush along the north bank of the Ouachita where we came upon a beautifully fractured ledge of dark shale crumbling down to the river. The rock laminations were of some regularity in thickness and broke free into both smooth tablets and slender pencil-like strips. While the slate was of ready cleavage, it wasn’t possessed of enough integrity to serve as a schoolroom blackboard any more than it could as the bed of a billiard table or even as roof tiles, yet it was too hard to function as a good pencil except when scratched against itself, and to that end it served well. Its economic inutility had kept it from being quarried, thereby preserving a splendid riverside outcrop along a section beloved by canoeists. Q turned to me. “Do we have a quoz here?”

  Thinking of baptisms and Route 88 place-names, I picked up a small tabletlike piece and, with a sliver for a pencil, scratched, “In the beginning was the Word,” and tucked the slate back into the bluff to await the next freshet that would wash it down to the river. I was thinking not just of John’s gospel but also of Mark Twain’s: “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book.”

  Who now can say whether any past citizens here toyed with the notion of the river absorbing their words or considered their pencilings from the bluff being made from seawater and sediment transubstantiated by the ancient compressions of the rising Ouachita Mountains? If some few did think along those lines, they might dispute John’s “No man hath seen God at any time” — provided they could see deity at work through the grand mechanisms of plate tectonics. I suppose it all comes down to where one seeks his thaumaturgy.

  This theological wandering had been brought on by the beauty of the old baptismal pool and furthered by an explanation we’d heard that morning for an opolis on down the road: Washita, sitting at the west end of Lake Ouachita, behind the dammed river. Back on the mountain, a man said (in different terms) Washita was an anagram from “washed in the blood of the Lamb.”

  Q thought Wablodlam would more accurately carry the message. “But then,” she added, “maybe it’s too close to Bedlam.” I thought it bold for business-people in Washita to offer an opposing etymology in their contention the name has no religious significance, deriving as it does from an Indian word meaning “good hunting and fishing.” Considering the village economy depended in no small way on hunters and fishermen, I found the claim as suspect as the first, but the intrinsic nature of their views was fully Bible Belt where down-home, supersaturated religion faces off with local cash registers. Profitable is the place when they meld: “Let’s build,” says the mayor, “the World’s Largest Observation-Deck Cross. Light it up at night. Install an elevator and charge three bucks a hoist. By God, we’ll be knee-deep in tourists!”

  What we do know about the word Ouachita is that French trappers met a tribe or perhaps just a moiety who apparently referred to themselves or their territory along the lower river with sounds the Frenchmen imitated as wah-shee-tah, the stressed syllables unknown today. I’ve come upon a pocketful of spellings for Ouachita but no unquestionable interpretation of its meaning, and that, to me, allows a traveler to infuse it with his own associations; after all, such personal interpretation is a central purpose for traveling: to visit Bogalusa or Chugwater or Pinetucky and to return home with your own definitions.

  During their exploration of the river in 1804, William Dunbar consistently spelled it Washita while partner George Hunter, almost as insistently, wrote Ouachita, neither man yielding to the other’s orthography despite a certain sharing of journal entries. As for the Ouachita people themselves, they apparently moved away from the European newcomers — and any troubles with orthography — to join Caddoan relatives, the Natchitoches, farther west.

  Among forsythia shrubs just opening into puffs of bright yellow, the road turned northward to skirt the coves and inundated tributaries of the drowned river, its original bed now lying six miles distant, and we entered low hills that wrenched the asphalt around for some way east of Story, another T intersection opolis, a place incapable of catching our fancy any more than the explanation of its name, one (if you will) without much of a story: the first postmaster was Mrs. James Story. And so ended the string of writerly opoli — except for the one farther downriver, the one belonging to you, Reader.

  Along our rout
e was an occasional front yard with a tree swing cut from a tire (two of them shaped most artfully into sea horses) or a lawn full of trestle tables offering for sale 165-million-year-old quartz crystals broken out of nearby quarries. The stunning clarity of the polyhedrons turned sunlight into all its visible colors and cast little spectral lights over the grass so that ruptured rainbows danced across lawns.

  In the early spring sky, vultures wheeled in their distinctive tilting flight, their earthbound clumsiness transformed into a grace surpassing that of an eagle. Those black eaters-of-the-dead made me think of mortality. “Again?” said Q. To her, they were transformers of decay into life, and she was right, for what was the engendering Ouachita soil itself but moldered mountains and decomposed vegetation feeding the leaf feeding the rabbit feeding the vulture?

  The way mortality kept popping up that afternoon, I’m not at all surprised I began to see it in the nomenclature of the upper valley. To name a place is not simply to confirm its existence, even if it subsists only in an imagined land — Erewhon, Quivira, Yoknapatawpha County — with no more actuality than a high-tailed wampus cat. Bestowing a name also extends longevity when a corporeal presence vanishes, when a town (or a human) gets deincorporated. To read an old American road atlas is to travel a land no longer existent except on its pages; names, like bestowers of names and their buildings, come and go. When the last brick dissolves in a ghost town, the place can survive for a while longer, if it is to survive at all, only in the word. The surest refuge, the most certain habitat for a ghost, lies in stories, and perhaps that’s the reason ancient Egyptians, enwrapped as they were with immortality — a meaningless notion unless coupled with mortality — considered the tongue the seat of their eternal souls.

  The pyramids of Egypt crumble a little more each year as they work their way back into the desert, but to erase what has been written about them — their histories — would require the obliteration of human civilization virtually everywhere on the planet.

  I have no clear idea where or how far a name can carry us, but I suspect, like infinity, it exceeds even our capacity to wonder, and I believe a name bestowed well is another hedge against total annihilation and its realm of the utterly forgotten.

  7

  The Forgotten Expedition

  THE LIGHT BEGAN DROPPING, but it didn’t vanish fast enough to hide the Tophet lying ahead along Arkansas 7, a stretch of road battered with illuminated billboards turning roadside litter into ghostly glowings: wraiths of shopping bags hung in bushes, and cups and bottles shone like burning brimstone. The Ouachitas come to their eastern decline not far beyond the highway, and there, a little north of Hot Springs, the agents of Mammon had marked the topographical terminus with a kind of aesthetic if not spiritual boundary and put the lie to the motto on Arkansas license plates: THE NATURAL STATE. Along Route 7, whatever the natural was, it served mostly to turn a buck.

  A section of mountaintop had been cut open for “America’s Largest Gated Community,” an advertising slogan Q found poorly reasoned: wouldn’t more people only increase chances of residents meeting up with those they’re trying to escape? Expressing the reverse of what we saw, another slogan for the place — “Welcome to Heaven on Earth” — suggested a paradise residing in covenants about the color of a garage door and whether it could be left open on Sunday, as well as land prices assuring that thy neighbor shall not have a portfolio significantly smaller than thine because, as we all know, inadequate negotiables are a major cause of unmowed lawns and political preferences leaning toward populist positions. Q thought a pretty good alternative covenant could be hammered out of inclusion rather than exclusion, tolerance rather than suspicion, openness rather than fear. She said, “Why not call a state penitentiary a gated community?”

  I mumbled how such a degraded stretch of mountain could drive a fellow to drink, and Q, who was at the wheel and has been known to rephrase my sentences into something I can only describe as more convivial, said, “Would a fellow settle for being driven to a drink?” He would, and she did, right after we took quarters in the historic Arlington Hotel a few miles south in old, ungated Hot Springs, in the heart of what was once called the Valley of Vapors. And vaporish it was on that cool evening as we walked along Central Avenue, wedged into the hills, to follow the stream that once carried off about half-a-hundred thermal springs formerly pouring forth openly from the eastern ridge — nearly a million gallons every twenty-four hours. No longer does much of the water rise to see the light of day, piped as most of it is to somewhere else. For Indians and French trappers and hunters, and, in the last century or so, for thousands of Americans who used to arrive by train, Hot Springs has long been a place to seek the loosening of a stiff joint or cleansing of a gland or purging of a tract.

  On that Monday night I needed my memory of Heaven on Earth purged or at least loosened, so we went strolling on Central, a pleasant avenue, nicely influenced by the Bathhouse Row restorations of the National Park Service. Things were quiet to the point of being shut down, and cleansing a memory took some walking past gimcrackeries: a wax museum; catchpenny shops selling photos of monkeys in sombreros, cheap incense penetrating even closed doors, primitive wall masks plasticated in Bali, stick-on tattoos, peacock feathers, mood rings, ELVIS LIVES! bumper stickers. There were emporia offering T-shirts imprinted, in the manner of our time, with various notices to answer our pressing questions: I’M WITH STUPID. Or: DO I LOOK LIKE I CARE? And one for the motorcyclist: IF YOU CAN READ THIS, THE BITCH FELL OFF.

  At last we came upon the healing potation we wanted, not an analeptic of sulfur or magnesium but one of spirituous heat rising from a distiller’s craft: a jigger of hooch.

  Maxine’s Coffeehouse and Puzzle Bar, we were told, was once a place where ardor got engendered not so much by spirits or thermal waters but by human flesh. Maxine, now a citizen in the City Celestial, was the author of Call Me Madam and the operator of an upstairs bordello. To suggest that history, hanging from the walls were various ladies’ intimates, unmentionables, and underlinens in various sizes, but every one of them crimson. Tacked to the high ceiling were smoke-stained dollar bills signed by customers as a kind of calling card. Q, expecting to be given a riddle, asked what made the place a puzzle bar, and Stevie, the bartender, set before us several little perplexities made from nails, or horseshoes, or twisted rods of steel and nickel. She said, “I’ve got more when you figure those out.”

  Quicker than was good for any man’s mechanical self-esteem, Q succeeded in stacking up a half-dozen fourpenny nails in a way I’d thought impossible ten minutes earlier. This is one of the very things marriage counselors caution against, but men who wed a woman born a tomboy need either to sharpen their mechanical arts or to modify any notion of manly prowess based on contraptions. It may have been the first puzzle that gave our conversation a certain turn before she dismantled the nails to pass them to me and said, “I was taught calculus is a study of approaching limits, and this arrangement of nails is at its limit.” As I failed several times to stack the nails, I was muttering about puzzles and the approaching limits of exasperation. “By the way,” she said, “when we came out of the mountains and right into billboards and litter and sprawl-velopment, I think it was exceeded limits that got to you.”

  The evening was taking an untoward lurch into topics — like calculaic theory — that could only increase exasperation. For years, I knew calculus only as what a dentist removes from teeth. The conversation called for something desperate — like politics.

  I began talking about the Presidential election coming up that autumn. I said we were going to get an update on how well the nation might be coming along in recognizing approaching limits and comprehending a new calculus both social and environmental. (Knowing my general innumeracy in mathematics, I put myself at risk in using Q’s metaphor.) Across the country there seemed to be confusions, fears of new vulnerabilities, a growing nihilism leaving people neither engaged nor enraged but just paralyzed in the face of corpo
rate mendacity and greed abetted by actions of a reactionary Administration and its Congress. Would the President’s Orwellian politics of manipulated fears continue to encourage a future of mountains bulldozed into gated communities where residents see the demos as demons? Q, the lawyer in her speaking, paraphrased William Sloane Coffin: “People who fear disorder more than injustice will only produce more of both.”

  This conversation, which I give only the gist of, was broken several times by the guitarist who’d been playing to an empty tavern until we came in. His gigs were short so he could sit next to Q who is something of a magician in being able to make me disappear right before the very eyes of certain males. I can be having a deep conversation with some guy about his universal joint, and in walks Q: Abracadabra! I’m no longer there. This is not a complaint. For a writer, it can be most useful to become an invisible set of eyes and ears. Technically, it’s known as fly-on-the-wall reporting.

  When the musician returned for another song, I told Q that the last time I was on Central Avenue in Hot Springs, the words gated community were more likely applied to a stockyard than to a housing development. That visit, years gone, now seemed to exist in a simpler time, but that perception was an illusion created by memory wearing thin — her quilt metaphor — for times are never simpler and the complexities of existence don’t increase; they just change, although perhaps today they arrive faster and give us less time to duck. As an example, I said the complexity of learning how to bring down a bison with a stick and a sharpened stone is no greater than learning how to buy a stuffed bison online. Q said, “So if I have a spear, and a Quapaw woman of 1804 has a laptop with Internet access, she’ll get her buffalo about the same time I’ll get mine?” That was the theory.