Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey Read online

  Copyright © 2008 by William Least Heat-Moon

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: October 2008

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Photo restorations by Ailor Fine Art Photography. Illustrations are by the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-04018-1

  Contents

  I.: Down an Ancient Valley

  1: The Letter Q Embodied

  2: Mrs. Weatherford’s Story

  3: Rivers and Dominoes

  4: The Wandering Foot

  5: A Planetary Washboard

  6: Inscribing the Land

  7: The Forgotten Expedition

  8: High-Backed Booths

  9: Dunbar’s Spectacles

  10: A Fifty-Foot Femme Fatale

  11: Architect of Phantasmagoria

  12: The Goat Woman of Smackover Creek

  13: The Ghost Bird

  14: When Eyeballs Develop Taste Buds

  15: To Photograph Every Mile

  16: The Buzz Under the Hornet Nest

  17: Connections and Continuums

  18: A Grave History

  19: Extracting Sunbeams from Cucumbers

  20: A Cannonball Clean Through the Parlor

  II.: Into the Southeast

  1: A Quoz of Conviviums

  2: The Black Lagoon

  3: Arrows That Flieth by Day

  4: Dead Man Stream

  5: Road to Nowhere

  6: Bales of Square Mullet

  7: A Taste of Manatee

  8: Playground for the Rich and Famous

  9: In There Own Sweat

  10: The Truth About Bobbie Cheryl

  III.: Into the Southwest

  1: Apologia to Camerado Reader

  2: That Batch from Down Behind Otis

  3: In the Light of Ghosts

  4: A Poetical History of Satan

  5: Gladiator Without a Sword

  6: God Help the Jury

  7: A Triangle Becomes a Polygon

  8: Though Dead, He Speaks

  9: Dance of the Hobs

  10: How Tadpoles Become Serpents

  11: Last Train Out of Land’s End

  12: A Quest for Querques

  13: One-Hundred-Seventeen Square Feet

  14: After the Fuse Blows

  IV.: Into the Northeast

  1: In Hopes Perdurable Reader Will Not Absquatulate

  2: Hoisting Jack

  3: Spontaneous Bop

  4: Ten M To B

  5: Building a Time Machine

  6: Finding the Kaiser Billy Road

  7: A Tortfeasor Declines to Take a Victim

  8: Forty Pages Against a Headache Ball

  9: No More Than a Couple of Skeletons

  10: What Raven Whispered

  V.: Into the Northwest

  1: Out There Beyond Last Chance

  2: The Widow’s Man

  3: How Max Oiled the Hinges

  4: Querencia

  5: What the Chatternag Quarked

  6: A Smart Bike

  7: Railroad on Stilts

  8: Printer’s Pie

  VI.: Down an Old Waterway

  1: Following the Magenta Line

  2: At the Temporary Edge of America

  3: Where the Turkey Buzzard Won’t Fly

  4: He Is Us

  5: The Gift of Variant Views

  6: Hardtails and Crankshafts

  7: Veritable Poverty For Sale

  8: Ob De Goole-Bug

  9: The Oysters of Folly Creek

  10: Meeting Miss Flossie

  11: Fanny Kemble Speaks

  12: Turn Left at the Fan Belt

  Valedictories

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by William Least Heat-Moon

  Blue Highways: A Journey into America

  PrairyErth (a deep map)

  River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

  Columbus in the Americas

  Para Quintana

  By Way of Explanation

  “Upon my honour,” cried Lynmere, piqued, “the quoz of the present season are beyond what a man could have hoped to see!”

  “Quoz! What’s quoz, nephew?”

  “Why, it’s a thing there’s no explaining to you sort of gentlemen.”

  —Frances Burney,

  Camilla,

  1796

  I.

  Down an Ancient Valley

  Down an Ancient Valley

  Before It Shall All Be Disenchanted

  1.The Letter Q Embodied

  2.Mrs. Weatherford’s Story

  3.Rivers and Dominoes

  4.The Wandering Foot

  5.A Planetary Washboard

  6.Inscribing the Land

  7.The Forgotten Expedition

  8.High-Backed Booths

  9.Dunbar’s Spectacles

  10.A Fifty-Foot Femme Fatale

  11.Architect of Phantasmagoria

  12.The Goat Woman of Smackover Creek

  13.The Ghost Bird

  14.When Eyeballs Develop Taste Buds

  15.To Photograph Every Mile

  16.The Buzz Under the Hornet Nest

  17.Connections and Continuums

  18.A Grave History

  19.Extracting Sunbeams from Cucumbers

  20.A Cannonball Clean Through the Parlor

  Before It Shall All Be Disenchanted

  Alexandria, Louisiana, April 21, 1835

  Dear Sir —

  You remember the promise you exacted from me last summer in Philadelphia to visit the Maison Rouge Grant on the Ouachita. You see I adopt the good old French orthography of that river. I know not whether your motive was to give me pleasure or to inflict a salutary discipline. If the latter, should you take the trouble to read this, I shall have my revenge. In any view, I cannot doubt that it originated in a benevolent wish in some way to confer a benefit. I am now seated to give you a sketch of my mode of performing that promise. I spin this long yarn with the more confidence, being aware that you cannot but take an interest in reading surveys, however inadequate, of a region so extensive, so fertile, so identifed with your name as its possessor, into the alluvial swamps of which, in your bygone days, you too have plunged.

  The Ouachita is a beautiful river, of interesting character and capabilities; and, although unknown to song, classical in forest narrative and tradition, as having been the locale of the pastoral experiments of the Marquess Maison Rouge and Baron de Bastrop, as well as many other adventurers, Spanish, French, and American, not to mention its relation to American history as the point where Aaron Burr masked his ultimate plans of ambition and conquest. I wish to seize some of its present fresh and forest features, before it shall all be disenchanted by being transformed into a counting-room flower-garden or cotton plantation. I will even hope that this sketch will awaken pleasant reminiscences of your own extensive journeys and stirring incidents in these remote central forests. You may, therefore, christen this prelude to my Ouachita trip a preface or an apology, at your choice.

  —Journal of the Rev. Timothy Flint,

  From the Red River to the Ouac
hita,

  or Washita, in Louisiana in 1835

  1

  The Letter Q Embodied

  AS TRAVELERS AGE, we carry along ever more journeys, especially when we cross through a remembered terrain where we become wayfarers in time as well as space, where physical landscapes get infused with temporal ones. We roll along a road, into a town, past a café, a hotel, and we may hear stories and rising memories. Then our past is got with feet, and it comes forth: There, I met her there. Or, That’s the place, that’s where he told me about the accident. Since each day lived gets subtracted from our allotted total, recollections may be our highest recompense: to live one moment a score of times.

  For me, having now become an elder of the road, these risings of memory from a specific topography can almost lead me to believe all previous miles have gone to create some single moment, and then I can see how meaning begins in and proceeds from memory. Backseated children able to find only boredom beyond car windows — if they’re looking out — are nevertheless laying a foundation for meaning to arise one day when they’ll need significance far more than experience.

  My occasional stories to Q, which some particular landscape happens to evoke, serve to pass a stretch of slow miles as the tales also fortify my memory. I think she doesn’t mind my rambles now and then, perhaps because in a “previous Administration” (an earlier marriage) she once crossed the length of Kansas in silence — unless you deem as conversation that quondam husband’s “We gotta stop for gas.”

  Q is my wife, Jo Ann, a moniker for which she’s never felt much kinship. In fact, with nomenclature she’s not been lucky, even in her church. When it came time for confirmation, her elder sister convinced six-year-old Jo Ann every female saint’s name was taken except one: Dorothy. That name, linked to the pluck of the Wizard of Oz heroine she admired, contributed to her deciding she possessed the power to fly if her belief was firm enough: she straddled a kitchen broom, her toy cat strapped to the bristles, and from the top of the basement stairs, leaped. She broke no bones, and if you consider falling in a slightly horizontal pattern to be flight, she flew. But she no longer trusted in half-reasoned faith.

  But as Jo Ann grew up to become Jan (her tomboyishness would have made Joe not inaccurate), she learned to speak Spanish and visited Mexico, and found herself intrigued by a Yucatán place-name taken from a Mexican revolutionary hero, all the better that he was male: Quintana Roo. Quintana Roo — the state, not the man — is the territory of the quetzal, the plumed serpent sacred to the indigenous Maya, especially to the Quiché, and perhaps the most stunning bird in the Western Hemisphere north of the equator; to her, it’s a creature of fascination.

  Not long after our meeting, she told me about her delight in things beginning with the letter Q, a revelation at a restaurant-supper one night that struck a note within me — someone who has always loved the seventeenth letter for its rarity: a mere seven pages in my desk dictionary, while neighbor P gets 120. I like to think sinuous Q (only O has a more purely geometric form) makes up for its paucity in entries by its peculiarities of meanings, by its pictographic capital-shape (a serpent curling out of its den, a tethered balloon floating away, a hatchling with one foot out of the egg), and by its unbreakable bond with its beloved U. Of greater import are those quirky words we’d not have without Q: quark, quack, quadrillion, quantum, quidnunc, quoits, quench, quisling, quilt, quipster, quince, quincunx, and that most universal nonword on the planet, QWERTY. And, should I not mention that recondite Christian holy day, Quinquagesima, Shrove Sunday?

  Is there another letter with such a high percentage of words both jolly and curious, so many having to do with quests and questions and quintessences? Is it not a letter of signal qriousness? How could a fellow of the quill not love the letter Q? How could a defender of the underdog not love a letter that’s the least used on a keyboard, the one that never takes on finger-shine?

  Nonetheless Q, alphabetically superfluous, has tricks: For the tongue there’s quick and quiche; for meaning there’s queer and queen; and there’s quell (put down) and quell (well up). And to enhance its mystery, Q has a dark side, words to give you qualms: queasy, quagmire, quarantine, quarrel, quibble, quinsy, quash, quackery, quietus, quake, quicksand, quadratic equation.

  It’s a letter that has suffered loss, thinning our language as we went about minding our p’s while forgetting our q’s; if Shakespeare possessed those lost words, why can’t we? Here’s a quorum of such quatches ripe for revival, ready for your quaintance: quaddle (grumble), quizzity (oddity), querken (stifle), quiddle (dawdle), querimony (complaint), queme (pleasant), quetch (go), queeve (twist in a road). And there’s the handy quisquilious: in one sense it refers to something composed — like a life, a book — of odds and ends, and in another import it means rubbish.

  I can see now the letter one of you will write me:

  Dear Mister Fancy Author,

  I’d like to querken your quiddles on the quizzities of the letter Q because they aren’t queme and leave me quaddling and full of querimony. Stick to the queeves and get quetching on your way to your quisquilious Quoz.

  Querulously yours,

  Ace Reeder

  So that brings us to quoz: a noun, both singular and plural, referring to anything strange, incongruous, or peculiar; at its heart is the unknown, the mysterious. It rhymes with Oz. To a traveler, it’s often the highest quaesitum. For me, everything — whether object, person, or event — when seen clearly in the depths of its existence, in its quiddity, is quoz, and every road, every alley, the hall to your parlor, the course of a creek, the track of a comet, all are a route to quoz for any traveler, any querist willing to question, to go in quest, to ask the cosmic question of medieval church drama: Quem quaeritis? Whom do you seek, O pilgrim?

  Forgive me, quick-witted reader, if this quodlibet to Q has made you querimonious; I’ll leave the letter and return to Q, the woman, after I tax you with one more notion. The vocabulary of our language is an abundant — and often untapped — storehouse of concepts neatly embodied in a few squiggles of ink or in a column of air vibrated by vocal cords. To fail to embrace and thereby honor a rich vocabulary is a sacrilege advocated by those who would reduce the expanse of our lexicon to fit their own limited expression; these are often novices and drudges and certain book reviewers who ought to be confined to the exposition of instructions for installing a water heater. A genuine road-book should open unknown realms in its words as it does in its miles. If you leave a journey exactly who you were before you departed, the trip has been much wasted, even if it’s just to the Quickee-Mart.

  During that restaurant-supper, I admitted to Q — call it a quid pro quo — that since my boyhood, when my favorite number was five (I could handle it mathematically easier than, say, seven or nine), I’ve longed to be not William but five-lettered Quint. Its Roman version, Quintus, helped lead me in high school to enroll in Miss Nell Adams’s Latin I and II. How different my life might have turned out with Spanish or French, I don’t know, other than to say that somewhere among the ancient declensions of Rome and the Etruscan qu- words, I was becharmed by a girl seated in front of me, and for the next five years I discovered all that goes with infatuation. So you see, the letter Q has shaped me in ways beyond my comprehending, even now as I write these words.

  While this recital of our pasts came forth, I think Q and I began to recognize a fellow traveler sitting across the table. There we were, our imagined names revealing more about us than could ever those strapped onto us by others. For me she was Quintana, only later becoming simply Q.

  But I’ve become neither Quint nor Quintus. Because we met through a forgotten manuscript of William Clark — the William of the great 1804 to 1806 western expedition, he who is buried not far from where Q grew up along the Missouri River, he whom she was then writing a book about (the very undertaking that introduced us), he whom I am named after — Q has not been willing to yield up my William, and so to her, Will I am and remain.

  Sh
e is a historian who left the practice of law not long after she discovered Clark’s logbook of his 1798 trip down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans, a voyage — virtually unknown and totally unexamined until her research — he made six years before his ascent with Meriwether Lewis up the Missouri River and on to the Pacific. It was a journey I had made and written a book about just before I met Q. Over the course of the travels we were about to undertake, she would tell me from time to time of her surprising discoveries about William Clark descending the Mississippi into Spanish territory. So, along with my stories triggered by our passing a place I’d visited before, we began traveling miles overlaid with several dimensions of time. During these travels, Q was a quinquagenarian, and it was sheer chance we began them in the old lands of the Quapaw, and not far from the ancient Tunica “town” Quizquiz [Kees-Kees].

  Because she’s important to these roads to quoz, I’ll try to set her before you now and then, but not by physical description except to say she is slender, with straw-colored corkscrew hair that can draw from men long glances that amuse me. No husband should undertake to describe his wife in detail, especially a wife who practices law and knows something of libel, invasion of privacy, and, when pressed, can even explain the Rule Against Perpetuities. It’s unwise to monkey — in print, at least — with such professional counsel. I think she will emerge from her own words and doings which I hope will catch her quintessence and maybe even a touch of her mystery emanating from her quietness.

  For now, let one incident reveal something of Q, an event in her eleventh year. Walking home from her parochial school with her friend Deborah, the pretty girls in their perky uniforms — white blouse, navy-blue pleated skirt, matching kneesocks — Q saw two lads from the public school approaching. As the children passed, one of the impious Protestant boys said, “You girls are sluts.” Never breaking slide, Q gave him a raspberry. Deborah whispered, “What’s a slut?” Young Q had no idea, but it sounded intriguing, so the girls went to the town library only a block away and opened the fat dictionary on a pedestal under the tapestry of George Washington. There, in the greatest single volume of American lexicography — Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd edition — they found the word. Narrowing the definitions meant looking up several other terms, but it was the illustrative citations from esteemed sources that shed light: