Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey

by William Least Heat-Moon

Ohio is notable in having so many markers still in place, as it is also in having so many miles of the National Road and early Route 40 still extant, a number of them yet open to travelers forgoing parallel Interstate 70. In some locations, Old 40 remained a thoroughfare even if it had lost its federal number; in other segments, the road was a forgotten piece of pavement serving only farm machinery or as a court for a basketball game. Across those rolling hills, the outliers of the middle Appalachians, U.S. 40 was concrete here, asphalt there, but in its finest permutation it was well-laid bricks shined by eighty years of rolling tires.

  Along the way were the old stone-arch bridges known for their configuration of a stretched S as well as a recent concrete-bridge in the shape of a Y, the fifth with that design at Zanesville. A mile south of it, we stopped near the Muskingum River for lunch at Nicols, a café from the age of FRESH HOT NUTS machines, the one at Nicols still functioning with heat furnished by a twenty-five-watt lightbulb. Over our sandwiches, Frank continued the stories and histories, never detouring from U.S. 40 or doubling back or losing his way, the whole time smiling as do people who have found passionate purpose; happily for him, his was taking him years to express in its fullness. Even when he talked of police who, in the age of terrorism, would stop to question why he was photographing a bridge or even a stretch of road in the middle of some vacant nowhere, he smiled. If he had more difficulty than Stewart in getting permission to climb a tower or grain elevator or to stop along a four-lane to take photographs, even those tangles of red tape made him smile because they were U.S. 40 red tape.

  Frank said, “Stewart’s road notes don’t help me much in locating people who appear in one of his photographs, but I enjoy trying to find them. There were never many, of course, and only a few are still around. After almost sixty years, finding them is harder than identifying some of his locations, but by using the Internet, I discovered one person living in India, and she remembered Stewart. But the most recognizable faces of all, two small boys, cute little guys, in front of row houses on West Fayette Street in an African-American section of Baltimore, I haven’t even come close to finding out their fate. I showed the picture around the neighborhood but learned nothing.”

  “Of all the miles along your beloved highway,” Q said, “which are your favorites?” Frank closed his eyes as if he were watching U.S. 40 unreel in his head. When he’d reached San Francisco, he said, “Kansas. The openness of the prairie, I just love, even though a patrolman in Wamego — a different one every time — seems to come along whenever I stop there to photograph that site. And Berthoud Pass over the Rockies west of Denver is special. And there are a couple of dozen diners along the way I really like. The S bridges. A decommissioned section in Reno. Should I keep going?” She asked what he didn’t like, and to that there came no ready answer, but finally he said, shaking his head, “Out west, rattlesnakes. They like rocky outcrops that are also good places to take a photograph.”

  We rolled on eastward to the location of the purported first highway fatality in Ohio, in 1835 (surely somebody went down before that), then on again to a splendid eighteen-foot-wide section of old brick pavement ascending a sweet curve up a hill, the road transformed into a country lane by the interstate a mile or so south. While I was kneeling to run my hand over the smoothed bricks, a weathered fellow paused in his pickup to nod at my admiration of the paving men’s skill. He understood my response but spoke not a word as he watched. I asked when the section was put down, and the man said, “Nineteen and eighteen, right after the war. Somebody thought the Army might need a good surface to get somewhere — in case some kaiser decided to come on over here and try to put a gun under somebody’s snoot. I call it the Kaiser Billy Road.”

  A decade later, those bricks, solid things without lightening holes, became a section of U.S. 40. They were so well-set, their joint lines still more straight than warped despite the steep slope and braking vehicles and the pull of gravity. Each brick weighed ten pounds, and a square foot required exactly four and a quarter of them, and that meant every mile, minimally, held more than four-hundred-thousand bricks. If you’ve ever laid a walkway or patio using ordinary perforated, wall brick half the thickness of those heavy pavers, your hands, knees, arms, and back may give perspective on what it took to get an American flivver out of the mire and across the countryside.

  At the hilltop village of Norwich, Ohio, Frank pointed at a small monument to the librarian and scoutmaster Rollin Allen who in the 1970s formed a preservation committee of one and took a seat on top of a mile marker to prevent a construction crew from removing or harming it. His perch, an original stone, still stands, although no longer does its savior.

  Not far from the short and narrow S bridge of 1830 over Fox Creek, once a hiding spot for slaves escaping along the Underground Railroad, we left the old route to take up a few miles of an even older one following a ridge to the south. From Zane’s Trace we could look across a creeked valley to the clear delineations of the National Road, the old B&O tracks, U.S. 40, and Interstate 70. Frank said, “The Trace was a real labor to cut through the forest in here. One traveler commented, in the early days it was ‘a tight fit for a fat horse.’”

  Beyond the Trace, just before sunset, we turned back toward Westerville and entered the interstate clogged with traffic, traffic exhaust, and exhausted drivers doing their best to contain their exasperation. Frank said, “I love driving. Maybe not on a highway like this but on the kind that Stewart called equal. He wrote about dominating, dominated, and equal highways, the category determined by how well a route is integrated with the countryside it passes through. A multilane tends to dominate because you’re more conscious of it than the land around. In a city, the highway gets dominated by the surroundings. But on an equal road, you’re aware of the road and also what’s beyond it. That was his ideal type for motoring.”

  Brusca believed the scholarly work on U.S. 40 surpassed that of any other American highway, including Route 66, which has spawned numerous glossy picture-books repeating images of the same defunct gas-stations, rusting EAT signs, and tawdry motels. I tossed in that Route 66 is epitomized by an alleged piece of the Blarney Stone displayed along it — another synecdoche. A traveler can pay to kiss a bit of Blarney Stone or, without fee, rub the smooth belly of milestone Number Ten. Q, considering the choice, said, “I’ve been able to whistle Bobby Troup’s tune since I was fifteen-years old, but nobody ever told me about the National Road or all that Highway Forty has — everything except a catchy tune. And I grew up along Forty.” To her challenge, I took Troup’s song and tried to substitute route numerals and towns (Columbus is a bear for a lyricist); the rhythm and rhyme failed utterly, and I returned to the original, but Q noted only my fumbled word: “Did you just sing ‘Get your kitsch on Route Sixty-six’?”

  “Forty is one of the highways Jack Kerouac drove on the five trips he compressed into three in his On the Road,” Frank said. “The novel doesn’t contain a whole lot of identifying landmarks except in the cities along it where he stopped, but I’ve got his routes mapped out pretty well now, I think.”

  Over a good supper of hummus and pita, olives and feta, Frank talked about another photographer inspired by George Stewart’s landmark book of the landscape. Soon after U.S. 40 appeared, William Price, a World War II pilot, decided to pay homage to Stewart by taking aloft a war-surplus four-by-five aerial-reconnaissance camera and flying the length of Route 40 in 1954 and again the next year. Although there were long gaps without pictures, he still came home with almost two-thousand images — about twice the number Stewart made — the best of which he hoped to put into a book.

  “I’d heard of his photographs for some time,” Frank said, “but I didn’t believe they really existed. I dismissed stories about them. Then I got a call out of the blue from a man telling me about Price’s work. Right away I drove to Mister Price’s apartment in New York City to see them. He was up in years and a little frail, and he had trouble identifying the locations of some of his im
ages, although I could help with that.

  “I liked him. I respected his conscience — his belief in social and economic justice. He had a good heart, it seemed. He was a progressive thinker who spoke openly of being in love with America. But he still got blacklisted by McCarthy and those people, and I think it harmed him. Stewart also had an encounter with McCarthyism when the University of California tried to force teachers to sign a loyalty oath. He refused and wrote a book about it. The Year of the Oath.”

  A careening tractor-trailer rig interrupted the conversation, but Brusca responded only with his smile momentarily flickering, then he continued. “Here were two men dedicated to preserving the landscapes of America, and they’re accused of disloyalty. But for Price, even worse than McCarthy’s blacklist was a fire in his apartment. All of his negatives, every one of them on hundred-foot rolls of film, were burned up, and all he had left were his contact sheets. There went his hope for a book.” FXB shook his head. “Price’s experience impressed on me the fragility of images. I do everything I can to stave off perishability, but it’s still my biggest fear.”

  The last evening I was with Frank, I asked about the financial costs of his project. I think I knew the emotional ones. He said, “Even if my Highway Forty work gets into print and becomes a wild, financial success, I still wouldn’t break even. The expenses and getting time off from work force me to go slowly.” And then, as if to clarify, the smile disappeared. “But then I’m not in it for the money.”

  I told him about years ago when I was struggling along writing my first book, a road narrative of sorts, and how I often imagined the manuscript never finding a publisher and ending up in an attic where somebody would come across it a century later. A readership of one, but one seemed better than none, especially if that one would say, “So that’s how the hell it was in 1978.” My lone imaginary reader kept me going on those dark nights of a writer’s soul.

  “If I never get mine published,” Frank said, “fifty years from now I hope someone at least will find my virtual-reality panoramas, those three-sixty-degree images, and realize how they’re a window into a past time. I keep reminding myself I’m trying to put something together for later generations. I believe that.” And then his smile, which again had vanished for a moment, returned, and he said, “I have to believe that. Otherwise, what am I doing?”

  7

  A Tortfeasor Declines to Take a Victim

  AS ONE OF THE WAYS I may pass time while waiting for an auto mechanic or dentist or barber — when I’m without a book — I’ll draw faces I see near me, or I may draw up a list (often a mental one) of just about anything. Like a scent from the past — Proust’s madeleine — a list can provoke memory, mine often working backward: instead of reminding me what I’m to do, my enumerations may recall things I’ve done.

  A couple of years ago, on a gloomy day of repeated vexations, I sat waiting in the barbershop and, finding myself bookless, I started a list titled “Six or Seven Times I Nearly Died.” Even before I was summoned to the chair, I gave it up because I realized the number was greater than six or seven. The close calls were, if not infinite, certainly innumerable: stumbles on stairs or spills from bicycles and one motor-scooter failing to break my neck; a rifle-range ricochet grazing me above the heart but not hitting it; a ship’s hawser snapping in my hands but not cutting me in half; my appendix going awry at home rather than on a hike in some remoteness. So on and so forth. Think of your own list. Every moment alive is a chance to die. That last sentence went through my head as I watched the barber’s straight-edged razor, a half-inch from jugular veins, glide down the neck of a relaxed customer laid back in the chair; to him, “close shave” meant only a smooth chin.

  At the moment I put a period to that sentence, I’ve been alive for some two-point-one billion seconds, and that means more than two billion times — and counting — I’ve escaped death. Even if most of those instants can’t be termed hairbreadth escapes, there remains perfect assurance one particular future second will halt the count to fulfill that consequent and lone certainty of having been born. But it is about a particular grouping of those seconds, an incident occupying only a small cluster of them, I want to relate to you; it’s a story I told Q when we were winding our way across the rippled landscape of northern Pennsylvania. In the anecdote are tracks of a different order, ones leading to other tracks farther along.

  I remembered the occurrence when I looked down from a high bridge over the Allegheny River. As you’ll soon see, bridges are relevant to the place we were headed. The event I was speaking of happened years earlier but only a few months before I took off on a long journey I described in my first book. Had things gone the way I advised on one October night, it’s highly unlikely I’d have been around to write that book — and three that followed. In other words, a woman’s rejection of my advice on the night in question made possible this sentence now before you. (There may be a sour reader or two who has just uttered, “Damn her rejection!” Perhaps in thinking that, I’m recalling a letter of some years ago from a man who disliked my books and assured me his opinion was sound because he had pressed on, reading every word in each one. Q recommended I reply — although I didn’t — with a note saying, “Dear Sir: Today one can find effective treatments for obsessive-compulsive behavior.”)

  In the late ’70s, I was finishing up work for a (post-Phud) degree in photojournalism at the University of Missouri; the culminating project of our class was visual documentation of life in the rivertown of Glasgow, Missouri, population about twelve hundred. The other photographers were talented, and competition for space in the book we would publish was intense because those who produced good pictures had a chance at the best jobs. I’ve long believed what I lack in natural gifts in a field, I might overcome with dedicated diligence laced with a dollop of audaciousness, efforts once called by a senior family member “harebrained schemes.” Since I, by a decade, was the oldest in the class, I was the most in need of a job, which is to say I was the most desperate.

  The broken topography of Glasgow makes getting a good photograph of the townscape difficult. The lone place for a panoramic riverine view was from the railroad bridge across the Missouri, an old span blocking visibility from a parallel highway-bridge. I calculated no one else would go to the halfway point of the aerial trackway because — besides the question of trespass — just to look down between the open ties at the swirling currents sixty feet below had to discourage anyone whose brain, well, was not that of a hare. But, to be certain I’d have no competitor for the photograph, I planned to make it after sundown when the opolis lights would reflect off the black river; darkness, of course, would also help cover trespass. (My solicitor, Q, assures me Missouri statutes of limitations make this confession, a generation later, impossible to prosecute successfully.)

  Once I got the idea, I was incapable of escaping it, and I figured I was doomed to execute it. I even spoke of it in those very terms. I believed the maxim “No guts, no glory,” which to a journalist means “No guts, no story.” So, one moonlit night in October, I set out for the long and narrow bridge, two adjectives I should have given more attention. With me was a classmate, a young woman innocent of the risk involved and lacking any real knowledge of what sudden immersion into a cold river can do to the capacity to draw a breath, unaware of the speed with which water half the temperature of the human body can incapacitate it. At her insistence, I agreed to her joining in.

  A prudent journalist would have learned the train schedule beforehand, an easy thing to do. I did not. I simply drove us to the bean fields in the bottoms on the west bank where we climbed up the high grade and onto the long, raised trestle leading to the bridge. We started a cautious stepping from tie to greasy tie, watching our feet, inescapably seeing below the swirling currents shining in the moonlight. At the center of the bridge, I stopped and began struggling to secure the tripod atop the slick ties. Because the antiquated bridge had only a single track, there was no place to work except r
ight in the middle of the rails. I worried about my camera slipping between the ties into the river so unnervingly visible beneath, and I mentioned my concern. She replied, “You might worry about one of us falling through. I guess I forgot to tell you, but I can’t swim.” Yes, she had forgotten that fact, and yes, I too had thought of falling — every step of the way out. We were above the barge channel where the cold water was deepest and swiftest. (The bridge deck was later rebuilt, and the gaps narrowed.)

  I should declare here that part of my naval training entailed an abandon-ship exercise beginning with a jump off a twenty-foot tower, followed by a long swim, followed by fifteen minutes of treading water. A large buddy whom I had to help — that is, push off the high platform — whose sorry swimming barely got him to the treading, had to keep an underwater hand clandestinely locked to my hip to stay afloat. We made it. I should also remark, as a sixteen-year-old I completed a Red Cross water-safety course called Junior Lifesaving.

  Those professed qualifications, unfortunately, did not ease her mind as she kept fixed on the river below. They didn’t much ease mine either, and I had to remind myself not to rush the work while she, holding to a girder of a bridge without any safety rail whatsoever, tossed out distractions about dumb ideas and her stupidity in not watching from shore. I suggested she stop looking down. She said, “If a train comes along, there’s no place to go except down. I’m saying my life right now is all about down. D-O-W-N. It rhymes with D-R-O-W-N.” A moment later she added, “Of course, there’s also back the way we came, but I doubt even you, Mister Hotshot, can outrun a train.”

  You don’t try to outrun a train, I said. You drop between the ties and hang until it’s safe to come up. “Or,” she said, “until you fall into the Missouri.” That’s better than being greased by a locomotive. It was about then I accidentally dislodged a piece of something, and we watched it drop to the river. The splash was not so unsettling as the time required to get to the splash.