Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Of the seven original, uninterrupted two-lane transcontinental highways, all are junior to 40 which can trace one of its several origins back to 1651. It was among the earliest topographical sinews holding America together. With independence secured, few threats concerned George Washington more than the fledgling Union fracturing into separate nation-states. Believing physical communication central to unity and commerce, the perpetually practical Washington worked for and invested in a canal and roadway to link the eastern seaboard with the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. (George, incidentally, lost his first battle along the future path of 40.) In this sober light, the National Road is the Appian Way of America, and it was the central overland-route Anglo-Americans first used to come into the heart of the country.

  Frank Xavier Brusca was not Anglo-American. His paternal grandparents arrived here from Priverno, Italy, a village not far from the actual Appian Way. He was raised in Catholicism but through DNA testing later found he may have in his ancestry a few Sephardic Jews forced out of Spain by the Inquisition, some of whom, the conversi, converted to the Church of Rome. Ancestors aside, Frank inclined toward Quakerism and also, while not a spiritual path for him, vegetarianism (nothing better than a supper of eggplant Parmesan or mapa tofu). Frank’s teenage daughter, Elaine, sometimes accompanied him on his research excursions along 40 or on train trips the pair took simply to see the country. His wife, K.C., not much of an automobile traveler, honored his obsession but did not share it.

  He was of modest height and broad-shouldered, and without his vegetarian diet and cycling, he might have edged toward the stocky. He was bespectacled and wore his hair and beard closely cut, but what you were more likely to remember about him was a nearly ceaseless expression of contentment, an evident delight often matched to the degree U.S. 40 was in his mind. With the highway not far from consciousness, his dreams also must have put a smile on him, a result of a requited devotion.

  That gift of the old highway (aided by a little tofu and his bicycle) had carried him into his fiftieth year the last time I saw him, but that number was less important than other figures you might want to translate into days necessary to acquire or create them: he had about a thousand U.S. road-maps of the oil-company variety. Of them, he said, “My mother called me one morning after I’d moved to my own place. She said, ‘Frank, I finally did it — I threw out all your maps.’ I dropped what I was doing and rushed to my parents’ house and pulled the maps from the trash bins at the curb. And that was even before I really knew how much they would mean to my project.” Frank Brusca without maps was Count Basie without a piano, Bern-hardt without a stage, the Bambino without a bat.

  He also owned some seven-thousand postcards depicting scenes along Highway 40. But what he had in even greater numbers were documented photographs from his own hand: more than three-thousand high-resolution black-and-white images, nearly the same number of color transparencies, and at least twenty-thousand digital images. From that treasury, he was slowly and methodically assembling electronic files and a manuscript to document sixty years of U.S. 40 as it had passed through alterations, some so slow they looked like stasis, others of shocking swiftness, some that ravaged and others that renewed, all of them across a continent of landscapes sharing a single highway.

  Even as dominating as his absorption was, for nearly two years after their wedding he was reluctant to share it with K.C. because of his concern for what she might think of a man who dreams highways as other men dream of picking the right lottery number. Then, on a trip to Indiana along 40, she at the wheel, Frank began making notes in a way he hoped was not surreptitious but simply inconspicuous. A recently wed man, he did not realize then that a husband writing notes on his knee will catch a wife’s eye as if he’d pulled a kitten from his pocket. “What are you writing down?” she said. And suddenly, indeed, the cat of proverb was out of its bag, and Frank had to come clean and admit to a passion that dare not speak its name: he was hopelessly enraptured by 3,100 miles of pavement. He awaited her response, and that’s when he learned their union was strong. If K.C. thought his interest a touch eccentric, she neither laughed nor discouraged him. Discouragement arrived from elsewhere soon after.

  In 1983, husband-and-wife geographers Thomas and Geraldine Vale published U.S. 40 Today: Thirty Years of Landscape Change in America, a photographic resurvey of some of the sites Stewart had recorded almost a third of a century earlier. Frank said, “When I saw their book, I was crestfallen someone had beaten me to the project. I was devastated. It took a long time to recover and find my way again. Their work was good, but it was incomplete because they rephotographed only about seventy-two percent of Stewart’s hundred-and-fifteen images appearing in the two editions of his book. And their goal was different, especially so after I began to rethink mine. They made trips over three years. My travels now cover thirty years — even though I consider my first twenty-three years as preliminary fieldwork.”

  FXB did not toss off answers. He weighed a question and framed his responses as meticulously as his repeat photographs. “You could say their book — after I rallied from my dismay and disappointment — I think it helped me clarify and expand what I was trying to do. My project became bigger, far bigger once it was alive again. Then, thanks to the World Wide Web, I realized my interest — maybe not my obsession but at least my fascination — might be uncommon, but it wasn’t unique. There are other Route Forty road enthusiasts out there. Some of them like neon signs or old motels or diners. I love those things too. A lot of people go for roadside architecture or some other aspect of commercial archaeology, but I haven’t found anybody else documenting the highway to the degree I am. And here’s a big difference — I want to continue documenting Forty till I no longer can.”

  Using four different cameras — two manual 35 millimeters, a medium format, and a professional digital — Brusca over the years had hunted down and photographed all but six of Stewart’s sites, including several that never appeared in U.S. 40. Some views were extraordinarily difficult to locate exactly, one of them even forcing Frank to examine half-century-old cracks in a sidewalk to confirm it. After he unequivocally established the location of a site, he would make three types of images, each with multiple exposures, and record the date, hour, and minute, the latitude and longitude, the weather, and the traffic statistics. If an exact viewpoint was no longer possible — like the roof of the demolished President Hotel in Atlantic City — he considered other solutions, such as hiring a boat or helicopter to get his camera in position. If tree growth obscured a vantage, he waited till winter; for one old water-tower no longer in existence, he got permission to climb the microwave tower that replaced it; if a neighborhood had become dangerous for a visitor with expensive cameras, he asked the police to join him. The best repeat photography demands such persevering exactitude, and Brusca was untiring in rephotographing a scene accurately.

  On his return home, he made digital overlays of his images with Stewart’s to create in stunning precision a deep view into time. The work of two photographers became considerably greater, especially when Frank added his 360-degree panoramas, each of them requiring at least two dozen linked images. “I always wondered what existed beyond the view of Stewart’s lens,” he said. “What the view was behind him. Nobody will have to wonder that about mine.”

  George Stewart was a novelist, historian, and professor of English at the University of California, and the man who first gave names to storms (inspiration for Lerner and Loewe’s “They Call the Wind Maria” came from his novel Storm). Wanting to portray and interpret the typical, ordinary, and commonplace actualities along the Main Street of America, Stewart was not much interested in people or fine scenery or the picturesque. If an image of his does contain an individual or two, it’s usually happenstance; if a photograph rises above merely a good snapshot, it was more the result of beautiful terrain than art. Although a friend of landscape photographer Ansel Adams, Stewart was after something else: he wanted his book to say only, “
Thus it was when I passed by, in my time.” He understood common does not mean trivial. Because George Stewart, the first practitioner of “photographic odology” — the study of roads — chose U.S. 40 before anyone else was documenting a highway as a place in itself, no other route in the world can surpass the continuity of images when Brusca combines his with Stewart’s.

  Frank said of him, “He was traveling in the golden age of American two-lane highways when U.S. Forty was the major cross-country route. He recorded it just before the interstate system came along and began overrunning it or turning it into frontage and secondary roads. In his pictures and words, you can hear the future coming on fast. But still today, there’s much more of Forty left than of Route Sixty-six. Most of Forty is still there, even in places where it no longer has a number. Out west you can sometimes see a defunct strip running off to nowhere.”

  It’s useful to remember that the highway, like the Oregon and Santa Fe trails, was a complexity of intertwined roads, never a single thoroughfare. Not only did it continually change many of its alignments, it also in places had simultaneously several paths: Business Route 40, Commercial Route 40, City Route 40, Truck Route 40, Alternate 40, Bypass 40, Temporary 40, Detour 40, Old 40, New 40, 40 South, 40 North. Trying to visualize its structure across the body of America is like trying to see the circulatory system in your body.

  One afternoon I asked FXB to pull from his computer a map of the various alignments over the years 40 has struck across Missouri and through my town. Later I learned what I was asking for: it took him one evening — three decades and one evening. But the result is a lovely piece of cartography just now unavailable in any other library anywhere except Frank’s (and mine).

  With technology unknown to Stewart — or even to the Vales — Brusca created in his computer overlays a kind of digital motion-picture of the past, as he morphed Stewart’s images into his own later ones. It was a time machine allowing virtual travel into yesterday: on a screen, two-lanes become four, an old tavern vanishes into thin air, trees give way to billboards (more rarely, vice versa), a suburb rises from a pasture, a Studebaker becomes a Subaru. But the mountains abide and sometimes also the forest on them, and the prairie is still prairie, and it is those images that give promise we are not yet too late to control the juggernaut of landscape destruction.

  If Brusca’s work is not exactly time-lapse photography, then it is time-gap photography. His time machine, of course, can travel backward only to 1949 before turning around to come forward, moving across both years and space, but if you believe an image of what is to come can be discerned from what has gone before, then you can see in his work a future emerging.

  And from that movement, questions arise: Where is Brusca’s virtual highway leading? What will the future learn from us? And about us? Will people of another time judge our quotidian, creepingly incremental changes to be as significant as the cataclysmic ones bound to happen? Is the slow rise and slower collapse of the Colosseum a parallel to the empire that built it? Are the uncounted days of scientific failure preceding a single microstep forward in discovering the plasmodium parasite in the guts of an anopheles mosquito — are those humdrum laboratory hours equal to the brevity of a Presidential assassination or the collapse of a skyscraper? Is Stewart right that the commonplace is not synonymous with the inconsequential? When it’s happening, just where is ordinary history?

  6

  Finding the Kaiser Billy Road

  BECAUSE THE NATIONAL ROAD MILESTONE in Ellicott City is for me a quoz of the first order, I appreciate its close escape from being swallowed by the old building behind it as I do its significance, longevity, uniqueness, and the way it sits there with its weather-battered face like a plump way-god to bless all who pass. One October evening years ago, it further imprinted itself into my memory after I overheard personifying words spoken by a woman whose pearls and haute coiffure led me to take her for a Howard County peeress. Atop the marker was a jack-o’-lantern truly giving Number Ten the look of a compact statue. Her gentleman, clearly familiar with the stone, pointed it out to her and, by way of explanation, said, “There’s the little chap, my dear,” and she said, “Why, Albert! You didn’t tell me he’s a cute little son of a bitch!”

  I suppose he is, and I suppose one person’s son of a bitch is another’s way-god, but I know Number Ten has enough power to have a life within my life — another attribute of the best quoz. That piece of aged granite has led me beyond its own particular mile into mileages and places and people far more distant. A good quoz of a way-god can do that too.

  Some time ago the marker began transforming my abstract conception of the National Road into a material reality that comprehension and memory could visually grasp; an intangible notion of cultural transport and transmission suddenly had form and body, and the stone became a synecdoche for the old high-road itself linking the Atlantic seaboard with the great central rivers leading to the Gulf.

  Number Ten is a piece of infrastructure that once helped build the Union and maintain it against rankly greedy men who plotted to fragment America for personal gain. (Consider the likes of conspirator Aaron Burr wanting to “detach” certain territories, or James Wilkinson scheming a personally lucrative secession of Kentucky and Tennessee to Spain; General Anthony Wayne called him “the worst of all bad men,” and a business rival said Wilkinson was “a mammoth of iniquity . . . the only man I ever saw who was from the bark to the very core a villain.”) For reasons of fragmentation alone, I believe the Ellicott City mile marker meant almost as much as their own hearthstones to Washington and Jefferson and Madison, all of whom may have ridden past it. As arteries of tissue and their supporting structures are to a heart, so are arteries of communication and their components to a democracy.

  From the Beyond I hear my old stiff-backed American history professor, a sarcastic avatar of negativism, scolding, “Hold on there, Socrates!” (We all were Socrates, women too.) “Is a single hunk of rock of real societal significance compared to something like an atomic bomb or an analgesic to ease an arthritic joint?” Today I’d answer him in my blue-book with: When Number Ten was set in place, America needed transport more than either an atomic bomb or the easing of the President’s lumbago because the ready movement of a national economy and its culture — for better or worse — was of greater import than nuking Indians or easing the movement of George’s spinal column. (Socrates could then take his C minus and go home in good conscience to sleep the bliss of a baby.)

  When I met Frank Brusca, I had no idea how many other National Road mile markers existed. But he knew. In fact, he knew more about the mileposts — whether in granite, sandstone, cast iron, wood, or replica fiberglass — than anybody else on earth, and he could show me his photographs of every one he’d found, which was nearly every one still in existence. (I admire such unquestioned expertise in a field because I have no unquestioned expertise in any area except in my own history, about which I can say, without concern for contradiction, I am the sole authority and will likely remain so; that, however, does not mean my version, to pick one example, of what happened between me and a throw pillow and a lamp shade fifteen New Year’s Eves ago cannot be gainsaid.)

  Frank knew Ellicott City took its name from three founding brothers, one of them father to surveyor Andrew Ellicott who in 1798 (the time Number Ten was set) laid out and oversaw the physical cutting of a boundary between the United States and Spain, a line today visible as the Florida border below Alabama and Georgia. (Ellicott, coincidentally, became a chief witness in the 1811 court-martial of General James Wilkinson.)

  These are some of the reasons, forbearant reader, that brought Q and me to Westerville to visit Frank Brusca in his home eleven miles north of Old Highway 40. One Wednesday morning we were all in his van with the license plate ROUTE 40 as he drove us east through southern Licking and Muskingum counties, the whole way narrating, at first concentrating on sandstone markers still standing at the side of what used to be the National Road before i
t became U.S. 40. In places, the highway was just shy of being chockablock with them, and a resident here or there had turned the 170-year-old posts into little gardens with a surround of flowers, while other people had whitewashed them and blackened in the inscriptions to make them easily legible from a vehicle. They were a kind of secular road shrine, like those little wayside, wooden crucifixes once prevalent in the Tyrolean Alps or the carved-rock dosojin protecting travelers in old Japan. These American stones, though, honored not deities but history and continuance, things only now and then accorded respect along a U.S. highway.

  For each one, FXB could give a story or detail; he even knew particulars about virtually every mile missing its stone, and his narration bespoke his life as a chantey does a sailor’s. At one of the spots lacking a marker, he told of a man of wealth and some national recognition (whom he didn’t want named) known to send out a crew to dig up a loose milepost for his collection, only to lock it in a warehouse. Frank was disturbed by such questionable removal of public property and responded in several legal ways, one of which was to buy at auction for two-hundred dollars a single Ohio stone and return it to its original place. Brusca does not have enough hundred-dollar bills to protect the remaining markers in Ohio, let alone in four other states, and that’s another reason his thorough documentation is important. “In England,” he said, “there’s a Milestone Society to look after their markers. We need one here too.”