Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey

by William Least Heat-Moon

10.What Raven Whispered 403

  On Motoring

  Considering the fixation of the American people upon automobiles and their use, there has been surprisingly little of what might be called personal or imaginative writing on the subject. In the first decade of the century, C. N. and A. M. Williamson delighted the reading public with a series of novels under such titles as The Motor Maid, and The Car of Destiny. But since that time has there been a novel based chiefly on motoring?

  — George R. Stewart,

  U.S. 40: Cross Section of the United States of America,

  1953

  1

  In Hopes Perdurable Reader Will Not Absquatulate

  NOW THAT OUR TRAVELS have reached beyond the halfway mark, perdurable reader, it occurs to me I’ve not yet said anything about the subtitle of this book and its key word, mosey. Maybe you first heard the term from the mouth of a bewhiskered, hornswogglin bullwhacker in some B Western: “I reckon I’ll just mosey on.”

  But you’ll note I’ve turned it into a noun about jogging along literally and figuratively, the destinations little places in the nation or in a notion. It’s a mosey because roads to quoz everywhere are posted “reduced speed ahead.” To hurry, in space or idea, is to miss obscured signposts, hidden turnoffs, or an exit to Sublimity City (Kentucky), or Surprise Valley (California), or even Dull Center (Wyoming). To go leisurely today is almost un-American, so putting mosey, a pure Americanism, into the title of a book about America verges on illogic and invites mocking from any citizen carrying a fastport issued by the Department of Speed in a nation hell-bent for destination if not destiny in the Posthaste Era:

  [TO BE READ PRESTISSIMO] Speedy drive-up window, speed-dialing, speed-reading, speedball, speed freak, speedway, Speedy Gonzales Andale-ándale, immediate access, no waiting, call now — don’t wait, now’s the time, haven’t got the time, hasty decisions, hasty pudding, short orders from a fast-food window, quick lunch and make it snappy, quick stops, quick time, quick count, quick-change artist, quick and dirty, a quickie, double-quick, on the double, be there in a jiff, jiffy copies, instant coffee, instant cash, instant winners, instant replay, instant stardom, overnight success, overnight express, nine-day wonder, fifteen minutes of fame, ten-minute manager, five-minute rice, minute steak, a minute’s all I got, flash-fried clams, flash-dried potatoes, flash drive, in a flash, greased lightning, like a blue streak, express lane, fast lane, fast track in the rat race, fast-talking hustler, fast freeze, fast breeder reactor, can’t hit the fastball, faster than a speeding bullet Upupandaway, zip, zoom, whiz, lickety-split, in nothing flat, in less than no time, a rolling stone gathers no moss, don’t let the grass grow under your feet, make tracks, step lively, step on it, shake a leg, hotfoot it, hightail it, pick ’em up and set ’em down, get in and get out, get the lead out, pour it on, put it in high gear, put the pedal to the metal, run it wide open, ball the jack, highball it, full speed ahead, full steam, full throttle, full blast, hauling ass, barrel-assing, going like ninety, eat my dust, now you see me — now you don’t, Road Runner Beep-beep, going like mad, going like a house afire, speed maniac, speed demon, a bat out of hell, hell-bent for leather, only green lights on god’s highway, never look back — something might be gaining on you, here today — gone tomorrow.

  [TO BE READ ADAGIO MOLTO] On the dead run until you reach the finish line where six pallbearers will carry you at a funereal pace to your six-feet-under to spend eternity at Dead Slow.

  These wanderings into quoz are a mosey because they took three years and four seasons to accomplish their sixteen-thousand miles of journeys to places a goodly portion of the American populace would call “nowhere.” But I believe simply lighting out for the territory, to crib Huck Finn’s words, carries its own sweet justification; to lift another phrase, you might see it as a because-it’s-there approach to exploration. In a hundred ways, America is where it is because its people can be maniacally destination-bound; America is where it isn’t for the same reason. Some of us find that a pleasant circumstance.

  I’ll add here, also somewhat belatedly, any reviewers attempting to find a thesis in these pages will be summarily barred from their writing machines until able to state clearly and concisely the thesis of their lives. Meanings, of course, are another matter. More life happens on the way to the forum than in the forum, and there’s a word relevant to that phenomenon: circumforaneous, the strolling from forum to forum. Whether we like it or not, for better or worse, we all live circumforaneous lives, and that’s why this is a circumforaneous book.

  The word mosey, as does vamoose, probably derives from the Spanish vamos, “we go.” Some lexicographers offer, however, the possibility it descends from nineteenth-century itinerant Jewish peddlers often named (or pejoratively called) Moses; other scholars find its origin in the leisurely and relaxed gait of antebellum, Southern Negroes (“Mose” a not-uncommon moniker) who had little to gain by hurrying to the hot fields. The earliest theory I’ve seen comes from John Russell Bartlett in his wonderfully jolly (although I think not so intended) Dictionary of Americanisms of 1848, which contends the word mosey (he termed it “a low expression”) derives from an Ohio postmaster named Moses who absconded with considerable federal receipts. But absconding is no longer — if it ever was — at the heart of moseying.

  A better term, by the way, for such flight, coincidentally one I learned from Bartlett’s lexicon, is absquatulate. He cites an illustration of its usage:

  Hope’s brightest visions absquatulate with their golden promises before the least cloud of disappointment, and leave not a shinplaster behind.

  (A shinplaster here, as Bartlett explains under that entry, is “worthless currency.”)

  I sometimes read his dictionary as if he intended it to be compendious stories of mid-nineteenth-century life; you need only fill in details between his entries and definitions to see yarns and anecdotes emerge from obscurity like a mud-pout (catfish) caught by a sneezer (thoroughgoing fellow) lazily smoking his loco-foco (self-igniting cigar). That last word carries a five-hundred-word micro-essay I’m tempted to pass along, but editorial judgments suggest I leave certain things to your own further explorations. Bartlett’s citation for sneezer, however, I’ll give to you because I gave it to Q:

  It’s awful to hear a minister swear; and the only match I know for it is to hear a regular sneezer of a sinner quote Scripture.

  She, who often says more with a glance than with words, thereby making it difficult to quote her, considered that sentence, then looked at me, her silence louder than necessary.

  That evening, while we were talking about Bartlett and definitions of mosey as a subtitle, she said, “Let me understand — you’re going to put on the cover of a book a six-word title, and two of those words are quoz and mosey?” I was waiting as she took her time to drop the other glossological shoe. “Aren’t you concerned that readers, even before you start the book’s engine for the journey, will absquatulate?” Ha! said I, feigning certainty, My readers are perdurable, and when it comes to the American language, in them is no absquatulation! (Proof: you are still here, steadfast reader.)

  I’ll bring this particular notional mosey to a conclusion. In 1850, at the behest of Congress, John Russell Bartlett led an expedition into the Southwest, a journey he was eager to undertake because he wanted to see the territory and its native flora, fauna, and peoples. After three years, his frequent pursuits of quoz had turned a federally sanctioned exploration into a grand mosey, and the politicos in Washington removed him as leader. On his return to the East, he published the next year an illustrated account of nearly twelve-hundred pages that has become one of the timeless books on the Far West: Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua. John Russell Bartlett — not to be confused with his contemporary John Bartlett of the Familiar Quotations — belongs to that pantheon of Americans who contribute much but in recognition receive little. The last and only reprinting of his great narrative, at
the moment of writing this sentence, was forty years ago.

  As summer came on, our mosey shifted into cooler territory, with a loose goal of heading northeastward as far as we could without leaving the country. The destination was to be the North Maine Woods, an area about the size of an entire New England state, having no public roads and virtually no paved ones, with the roads that are there marked by checkpoints to allow or deny an ordinary traveler permission to enter. Such an apparently restricted space was a land of quoz I’d never managed to find my way into, and I’d not met anyone who had penetrated its perimeter. Most of my knowledge of it came from Henry David Thoreau who traveled through a corner by canoe in preparation for writing The Maine Woods.

  Again, I must excuse my story for overleaping itself.

  A week before the summer solstice, Q and I left Missouri, paused in central Illinois to see the granite mausoleum where William Grayston’s slayer lies protectively embalmed and entombed for what he hoped was eternity, where his mummified flesh waits to be arisen, his resting place unlike that of the man he murdered who got put into an oaken box set down into a shallow grave and whose corporeality has long since risen in the surrounding cedars to become scented wood seasonally holding berries eaten by waxwings working the miracle of a sylvan Eucharist so that now a thousand trees grow from Grayston’s essence and raise him into the light.

  2

  Hoisting Jack

  WE STARTED FOR INDIANA to meet up with one more rara avis, this one a Canary, James Canary, the conservator of a most peculiar and legendary literary American manuscript: a hundred-twenty-foot scroll of typewritten words on what is now effectively a single piece of paper. It may be the only literary manuscript — when displayed fully — that looks like both its title and topic. Readers of foresight may see what’s coming, because no other American document exactly matches that description of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

  Before going east, I mentioned to a man my wish to see the manuscript, and he said, “I’m with you, buddy. I’ve read his and your road-reads.” The northeastward mosey and its quest for quoz to put into a new road-read seemed to pick up, if not a pattern, then at least a leitmotif of transport: roads, bridges, rails, words. How that came about, I have little idea.

  Our mosey, Q and I, from time to time seemed to reveal emerging patterns, although — even if I lived long enough — I was likely years away from perceiving any grand shapes or the wholeness of them. But on occasion I could see a few pieces, perhaps ones of only minor significance, forming a design. When I catch a glimpse of things arranging themselves, I usually call them coincidences.

  The more days I put behind me, the more I realize — or maybe believe is a better word — the pieces of one’s existence seem in due course to assemble themselves into patterns, into different topographies, whether or not we perceive them. Each piece — a word, an occurrence, an object, a decision — creeps along in search of its position. Once a part is there, perhaps we can change its location or coloration, maybe even forget or ignore it, but we cannot remove it any more than we can delete having lived through yesterday. Our hours, with their invisible magnetism, arrange and rearrange the iron filings we, moment by moment, grind off our existence.

  Sometimes this happens: a person unknown to you walks up, greets you, introduces himself, and thereafter your life is of a changed order. Or: one Monday morning you leave home at a minute past eight instead of the accustomed eight straight-up only to arrive at an intersection at the same second as a running-the-light delivery van. A moment here, a word there, and our lives suddenly lurch off into some new territory requiring a different map.

  Occasionally, when I’m rolling along a two-lane and watching an eighteen-wheeler highballing toward me, I think were it a fired bullet or a slush ball headed my way, I’d be ducking. Yet twenty tons of freight moving at seventy miles an hour an arm’s length from my left ear causes no response other than to hold the wheel steady. At that moment, there is no greater wheel of fortune (or, as a Buddhist might express it, Wheel of True Meaning) than a steering wheel — mine and the trucker’s. Most of the time I live oblivious to the ontological implications of proximity and their potential to make necessary remapping a life. Yet, at the end of each day — given the universal advisability of not occupying a point in space at the same instant as another something — we all could razz existence with a “Ha! You missed me again!” To age is to become good at either ducking or hiding. The elderly are consummate escape artists, although they know with certainty everybody sooner or later either fails to duck or dodge quickly enough, whether it’s away from a speeding vehicle or an even faster pathogen. (Of escapes, I’ll say a little more farther along.)

  The degree that moseying improves one’s ability to duck and dodge, I can’t say, but I believe it does generally assist longevity and, even more, in remapping a territory; and it certainly can improve perception and awareness during the consequent survival. Speed doesn’t get you more time — it just botches what you’ve got and makes for inferior maps.

  The first piece in this northern leg of the mosey may have been a letter inviting me east to help celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of publication of On the Road with an exhibition of the typed scroll that’s a veritable symbol of transport; its words are tracks of many kinds — intellectual, spiritual, actual.

  In Bloomington, Indiana, we met James Canary, the man who would transport the manuscript eastward, he who called himself “the delivery boy.” As conservator of the On the Road scroll, he equally self-deprecatingly could have added, “And the fix-it guy.” At supper one evening, he talked about his long interest in Buddhism and its writings, especially the tantra. “Tantra,” he said, “means woven together.” In ways never planned, his life indeed has been woven together with such details as to make him quite possibly the most apropos person in the world for delivering a small, heavy case containing a long piece of paper worth at this moment about fourteen-hundred dollars an inch. Here are some of those threads, many carrying the look of coincidences:

  Thread One: As a boy, Jim always kept a suitcase packed and ready for the road at a moment’s notice. “I had a good family, but because I was adopted, I could feel maybe I didn’t really belong with them.”

  Two: His adoptive father farmed in south-central Indiana where he occasionally plowed up prehistoric artifacts — stone points and a few grooved axes — that gave young Canary a sense of the depth of the human past and an interest in preserving what remains. Now those points hang on a wall in his home and the axes are in a box nearby.

  Three: The man who wrote a beautiful book on prehistoric artifacts in Indiana was Eli Lilly, the grandfather of the man whose library formed the nucleus of the Lilly Library at Indiana University where Jim later became conservator and where the Kerouac typewritten manuscript resided when not on the road to an exhibition.

  Four: Unusual for an Indiana farmer, Canary’s father also repaired typewriters.

  Five: Teenage Jim’s favorite book was Kerouac’s 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums, in which a central character, Japhy Ryder (based upon the Beat poet Gary Snyder), expressed literary and spiritual interest in things Asian, which resonated with Canary. Consider this sentence from Ryder, speaking about the legendary poet of ancient China Han Shan: “He was a man of solitude who could take off by himself and live purely and true to himself.” Jim said, “My dream became to go off into the woods and practice a craft and translate Buddhist texts.”

  Six: Although Canary didn’t know it then, The Dharma Bums manuscript was one of four Jack Kerouac typed out on long rolls of paper he would tape end to end in a kind of weaving together of sentences.

  Seven: On his first of a dozen trips to the Himalayas, Jim came upon two Tibetan refugees in India who were making paper in the ancient way for use in sacred texts. Those papermakers encouraged his deeper study of Buddhism, papermaking, bookbinding, and the preservation of knowledge, artifacts, culture, and even the planet itself.

  Eight: Jim’s hou
se in the woods lies between Hindustan and Buddha, Indiana, the only towns in America, as far as I know, so named.

  Nine: The man who bought the scroll of On the Road in 2001 happened to live forty minutes north of Canary.

  Not a man of especial height, Jim is nevertheless solid and carries the belly of the famous “Jolly Buddha” frequently represented in statuettes, whose rounded abdomen Asians rub for good luck. In his mid-fifties, Jim wore his graying hair in a slender ponytail almost hidden by white sideburns that, as if electrified, reached out into the world laterally from his temples and upper jaw; they were like antennae feeling for cosmic vibrations. Whenever he stood between me and a bright light, his sideburns gleamed in such radiance they took on the aspect of a partial aureola, a nimbus I think he was unaware of.

  Canary delivered his words quietly enough to require dedicated attention, and, for an American, he was notably tranquil, that state so desired in Buddhism. He followed the counsel of the Taoist Lao-tzu: “The way of the sage is not to compete but to act.”

  If Jim was too young to have been a Beatnik, he didn’t miss the chance at putting in some time as a descendant of the Beats, although he didn’t apply the term hippie to days in the ’70s when he lived in an abandoned log cabin until one winter a fire took it and his library, a housing predicament he resolved by moving into a teepee. He had also lived under the stairs of an old apartment building. He said, “I wasn’t really a hippie — I was just a stair person.”

  To me, the difference between the young Canary and the thousands who once affected hippiedom was that he was authentic, almost an archetype, and he worked to weave together core values of the later ’60s and early ’70s into a useful life able to make a difference in other lives. He was a flowering of flower power and of that high promise honestly and constructively fulfilled. If he never became Japhy Ryder, he did weave a well-patterned life Gary Snyder could respect. Not long before I met Jim, he had carried the On the Road scroll for exhibition to Santa Fe where he met Snyder, then nearing eighty, and told him how his advice that a young poet should learn a trade had given a controlling shape and substance to Canary’s life. Snyder nodded, pleased his counsel had been practicably useful.