Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey Read online

  During the time we talked with the lock operator — and long after the beaver had paddled off — not a single tow or even a bass boat approached. The timber mill just yonder of the dam didn’t use barge transport, nor did many other industries near the Ouachita. The operator said, “Up here at this season we’ll get only three or four tows a week, almost all of them carrying petroleum from the Gulf on toward Smackover for refining.” I said to rebuild more than three hundred miles of a natural river for three or four tows a week seemed like a boondoggle in the boondocks. “Things change in the summer,” he said. “Then, every month we’ll lock through almost four-hundred wreck boats.” Wreck boats? “You know — recreation boats.”

  Because taxpayer subsidies to get crude oil from the Gulf to Smackover — or a bass boat to a fishing hole — are not insignificant, I asked why the oil wasn’t refined closer to the wellheads and sent north by pipelines. “Hey!” he said. “You’re talking about my job!” And Q, in all civility, said, “I’d think we’re talking economic common sense.”

  14

  When Eyeballs Develop Taste Buds

  THREE THINGS REVEALED we’d left Arkansas and crossed into Louisiana: a small signboard of welcome, a few trees strung with Spanish moss, and an observably less-littered roadside. But Union Parish was cutover country, so thoroughly cut down that a R£PENT painted on the lid of an old fifty-gallon oil drum and hung from a scraggly surviving pine may have had environmental import. Gus Kubitzki, remembering former years when such arboreal urgings were more numerous along Southern and Midwestern roads in scripturally overdosed counties, called them Jesus Trees. In this era of slick electronic-lures to redemption, I confess to missing those earlier notifications of the necessity for immediate contrition (THE END IS NIGH) and improved conduct (DONT NEVER DO NOTHING GOD DONT WANT YOU TO). I realize my attitude is a simple nostalgia in the same category as a preference for little Burma-Shave signs instead of monstrously massive and wattaged monopole-billboards. But what the hell? Once upon a time, even a shaving cream could wax eschatological with happy doggerel that for miles could stick in your head — or, worse, a ceaselessly chanting child’s:

  THE MIDNIGHT RIDE

  OF PAUL

  FOR BEER

  LED TO A

  WARMER HEMISPHERE.

  BURMA-SHAVE

  The old Jesus Tree tidings, homemade as they were, invited participation, although some responses edged toward blasphemous sarcasm. In Alabama in the ’50s I was on a piece of scraggled, scrambled blacktop through exhausted and eroded fields, a place relieved only by a series of spiritual dispatches hanging from or leaning against Jesus Trees. Here was postwar recycling, for that painter of penitence had used household appliances otherwise headed for the nearest gully: a refrigerator door, the side of an oven, the lid of a washing machine. When he’d exhausted those, he turned to dismembered pieces of automobiles: doors, hoods, trunk lids, tires, and twice an entire vehicle.

  Painted across two wringer washers and a barrel was ARE YOU ON THE PATH TO HELL? to which a second hand had added WHERE ELS£ COULD THIS ROAD GO? To WHERE WILL YOU SPEND £TURNITY? the same second brush had appended PLEASE NOT IN THIS COUNTY. On the side of a defunct Hudson, a single word had been painted over to read: PREPARE TO MEET THY MECHANIC. The last sign, on a vintage school bus carcass, was VENGENCE IS MINE SAYETH TH£ LORD with a phone number added by the telltale, ministering, editorial hand; when I called it, a woman answered, “County Road Department.” A traveler in that day found more community along the highways because there was something personal in those expressions; as an Alabamian told me then, “You know, don’t you, neighbor, every dang one of them little peckerwood signs was all hand-did?”

  The highway turned east to cross the river for the first time in a hundred miles, and it entered Ouachita Parish, dropped south again, and led us to a stretch of multilane in sore need of either repentance or vengeance. It wasn’t so much the local P industries (paper, plastics, phones) escaping control as it was a congested franchiseland shot through with billboards: here was the veritable face of Anywherica, a hub of Nightmarerica under the control of the Lord of Misrule, this one subclassified as the Outskirts of Monroe, Louisiana. We were complicit with the Abbot of Unreason in taking a room along the Strip (our only choice, as far as we then could determine), but we sought atonement by heading to the river flowing past the old heart of the city. I had found in the phone directory a listing for a restaurant with three qualities to commend it: its name (Mohawk Tavern), its longevity (since 1952), and its downtown address.

  The Mohawk existed somewhere between historic and weary-worn, neither fully one nor the other, a place Q described as history-worn. You probably know the Mohawks are as Southern as any Upstate New York native can be; my guess is the number of full-blood Mohawks who have ever set foot within a mile of Louisville Avenue in Monroe, Louisiana, is about proportionate to Apaches on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on Tuesday last. For that reason I liked the name as much as the wall-mounted turkey-on-the-wing and the cast-concrete pelican perched on the bar, a bird big enough to serve as a bollard to tie one’s dinghy to. If you’ll discount dust on a stuffed sailfish and on the racks of antlers and Jack Dempsey’s sparring gloves hanging from on high, the tavern was like a well-groomed dowager who manifests her age not by trying to hide it but rather by keeping herself brushed and sponged and knowing the secret of flattering lighting: turn the lamps down, boys. The dark wood-paneled walls absorbed so much of what the fluorescents cast from the high ceiling, the light seemed to wear out before reaching us, bathing Q in a foggy dusk.

  It wasn’t until we took a seat at the long bar where a man was shucking oysters that I noticed what would prove to be the best feature of the Mohawk beyond honest food: the waiters wore dark trousers and pressed white-linen jackets giving off more brightness than the overheads. All the waiters were men, each was Negro, and every one of an age to have just missed service in World War II. They were, perhaps, selected for their distinctive physiognomies. Should I ever actually pursue my long-dreamed book of photographic portraits, titled something like Faces in America, I think I’ll begin with the staff of the Mohawk.

  I’ll mention here that African-American settlement along the length of the Ouachita, for a Southern river, is far less than you might imagine, especially compared with the Mississippi or even with the rich flatlands immediately east of the lower Ouachita. It was to this latter country that a free-Negro New Yorker, Solomon Northrup, was taken in 1841 after being abducted and sold into slavery to work the cotton fields. A dozen years later, having regained his freedom, he wrote in his poignant Twelve Years a Slave about his labor near Bayou Boeuf, a tributary to the Ouachita:

  When a new hand, one unaccustomed to the business, is sent for the first time into the field, he is whipped up smartly, and made for that day to pick as fast as he can possibly. At night it is weighed, so that his capability in cotton picking is known. He must bring in the same weight each night following. If it falls short, it is considered evidence that he has been laggard, and a greater or less number of lashes is the penalty.

  These days in America, when a black and a white unknown to each other meet, they both do well to consider — even yet — where such history lies, and if the two are to become friends or colleagues, sooner or later that question must be acknowledged and answered. When the meeting is brief and purely transactional, it can be glossed over, although I assume everyone longs for the day when such history, while not forgotten, won’t impinge on the potential for humane relations.

  The white-jacketed men enhanced their distinction of countenance by a comportment rarely seen these days outside of a restaurant in Italy. They neither introduced themselves nor stated the obvious (“I’ll be your server tonight,” as if to clarify they were not standing beside your table to repair a transmission); nor did they violate privacy (“How’s that plate of jambalaya taste?” Didn’t know a plate could taste); and certainly they didn’t refer to eating
as labor (“Are you still working on that rice?” Are we seated in a construction zone?). And they were content to allow the artifacts of a good meal — bowls, cutlery, crumbs — a long-enough presence to justify the preparation: there was no untimely sweeping the table clear in hopes we’d pay up and get out.

  Like experienced court reporters, the waiters took down our words precisely and remained virtually invisible until called upon, at which sign they came forward with a deliberateness not to be altered by a choleric chef or a cranky customer. Movement so lentissimo, a perfection of age, is a lovely thing (if it’s not in the left lane, in front of you). The men, attired and choreographed so smartly, made fine theater. Q said, “I think the decline of service demeanor in restaurants coincides with the demise of waiters in white jackets.” I said, Isn’t that about the same time restaurant patrons — including church ladies in Sunday bonnets — became “guys,” as in, “You guys want nonsmoking?” (I should acknowledge here the South is still largely and blessedly free of that gender-corrupted phrase, the ubiquitous “you all” continuing to hold at bay the loathsome “you guys.”)

  My tip, the pour boire (this was La Louisiane), amounted to a quarter of the bill, which the waiter accepted with a simple nod as if expecting no less for capital service he knew to be more lost than practiced in America.

  “The food!” you cry. “What about the food?”

  Very well, anticipant reader, food at Mohawk Tavern: the menu made it clear we were in the northeastern corner of bayou country and not all that far from the Gulf. We each took a bowl of gumbo with rice to lead us to a plate of boiled Gulf shrimp atop a bed of chopped iceberg lettuce encircled by slices of hard-boiled eggs. It was simply served. There were no dishes overwrought with froufrou flourishes worked by a graduate of a culinary institute. The emphasis was on palate, not presentation. While I understand what I’m about to quote edges toward boorishness, I believe it has merit: Gus Kubitzki once said when faced with an overpriced, pretentious restaurant entrée (his description I can scarcely believe, but he claimed the dish was “Abyssinian nicket-goat” stuffed with curried truffles simmered in ewe’s milk), “If the evolutionary process wanted me to like this, my eyeballs would have taste buds.”

  15

  To Photograph Every Mile

  A COUPLE OF MONTHS BEFORE setting out to travel the Ouachita Valley, I had an electrician rewire a storage space I was converting into a small exercise room. I explained to the man, only a few years younger than I, old folks don’t need storage — they need muscle. The remark found resonance in him and considerably slowed the job, since he apparently wasn’t able to talk while simultaneously holding a tool or length of conduit. He put down his screwdriver to exposit more clearly his means of teaching his grandson rudiments of basketball to help the boy make his school team.

  “I never played down to him. He had to match me, but it didn’t take long before he could outrun me, outjump me. That young body! Hell, he could get it to piss over the hood of a pickup.” He stopped. “Excuse my phraseology, but you know what I’m saying.”

  He took a length of conduit, measured it, and put it down once more. “Oh, man! To be seventeen again!” (Conduit up, conduit down.) “He could outdo me in every way but one, and I had that advantage only because he couldn’t see it, no matter how I tried to explain it.” (Screw-driver in hand, screwdriver back into tool belt.) “Time!” he said, referring to what he was using too much of for my project. “The boy doesn’t know what to do with time except to burn it. That’s my one advantage. If he isn’t fiddling with an electronic game, he spends his time dreaming impossible things — climbing Mount Everest or dating some starlet of the hour.”

  Having forgotten the conduit measurement, he remeasured. “I tell him, ‘Okay, you can outrun me, but what good is it if you’re not running to some productive place?’” (Here, a piece of conduit actually got attached to the wall.) “I tell him he’s like a trash collector, except he goes around just collecting days so he can haul them off to dump them.” (Junction box screwed to the wall.) “Time’s his enemy because he’s got too much of it, and it’s my enemy because I’m running out of it.” I could see why. (Next length of conduit measured and set down.) “Old Mother Nature’s a smart-ass, you know. When you finally learn how to use time, you can’t even piss over a hubcap.” (Conduit remeasured.) “Excuse my phraseology, but you know what I’m saying.”

  The electrician’s ramble was to come back to me across the Ouachita in West Monroe at Gabbeaux’s Bayles Landing Restaurant, a riverside place, once a small fish market where warp and lean would be among the accurate words to describe it. Q and I were there to have lunch with a man, Glenn Gore, whose work she had learned of a month before I met the electrician. At Gabbeaux’s, beyond its interior of angles skewed enough to serve as a film set for a surrealist dream sequence, we took a table on a patio of generally true plumb lines.

  Across the Ouachita rose several multistorey buildings in downtown Monroe where stood the large courthouse at the site of the 1790 Fort Miro, the Spanish outpost that received Dunbar and Hunter and rented them a boat better suited to the ascent of the river than the clumsy vessel they’d struggled to drag that far upstream. Fifteen years after the Forgotten Expedition passed through, the steamboat James Monroe reached the garrison. The settlers, hoping to encourage further custom, toyed with the name of Fort Miro as if playing with alphabet blocks and managed to erase the Hispanic lineage by commemorating both the economic promise of the first steamboat bravely ascending the Ouachita and the current President who, as a plenipotentiary, was a signer of the documents conveying title to the Louisiana Territory to the United States. Miro became Monroe, and with the change, the citizens turned on its head the more common practice of naming ships after cities. Later residents have fuzzed over the Spanish founding even further by pronouncing the name of the old fort to rhyme with high flow, a parallel not frivolous given the rise the river can effect there.

  Few courthouses so boldly face a watercourse as does that of Ouachita Parish, the third building on the location, a neoclassic edifice of white stone and Ionic columns, one that might have been lifted from Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. The federal government, in a sense, helped clear the grounds of an earlier and lesser building by authorizing Admiral David Porter’s ironclad gunboats to cannonade the town in 1863. Nothing of Fort Miro or of a couple of previous courthouses still stands, and vanished too are the early-twentieth-century houseboats where lived mussel-shell gatherers who once supplied button makers. And also gone with the winds of changing technology is the carbon-black industry that manufactured, among other things, pigment for ink out of natural gas from nearby wells. Now the gas is sent elsewhere for heat and power generation. Some street names in the old African-American section of shotgun houses proved equally evanescent: Adam and Eve Alley, Concrete Quarters, Owl Lane (all changed to honor civil rights workers), but Congo Street remained, as did, in a white section, Polly Anna.

  Still in existence too, although no longer on the banks of the Ouachita, were creations of the first inhabitants, ceramics of wondrous beauty found in an oat field on the former Glendora Plantation, later demolished for an industrial site. Thirteen miles north of what would become the Mohawk Tavern, archaeologist Clarence Moore in 1909 turned up pots, bowls, jugs, bottles, and receptacles with sculpted figures, all made from local clay incised and painted with remarkable scroll patterns. One cannot really apprehend the Ouachita Valley without laying eyes on the ceramic art of those people. Here is a pre-Columbian vessel, its hues buff and brick red, that in itself may convey a deeper sense of the river valley.

  On the morning we sat beside the Ouachita, it was making an easy descent, its passage as insouciant and heedless as an adolescent’s hours. Had the old river a mind, it would surely see us all — William Dunbar, the mussel-shell collectors, even the Glendora potters — not so much as sharing a continuum as belonging to the same moment. Could I only develop a like notion of time, maybe a few more
things would make some sense.

  We read the menu: five-pound bucket of boiled crawfish, price on request (Q: “You aren’t, are you?”); spicy boudin balls (waitresses tired of that old wisecrack); fried crawfish tails (and that one too); catfish chips (not to be confused with those of the buffalo); an assortment of gumbos, étoufées, bisques, jambalayas; and, of course, red beans and rice. The menu in mind, Q said, “Does this mean we’ll be staying an extra week?”

  Glenn Gore was a man of modest height, sixty-four years old, dark hair with a little seepage of gray at the temples. He carried some Choctaw blood, signs of which showed if one knew what to look for (not coloring or cheekbones of popular perception; earlobes are a far better indicator). He was born about thirty miles downriver, near Columbia, but he had been in Monroe since his second year. For almost a third of a century, he’d been living on the banks of the Ouachita where he started fishing and hunting at an age when he was too small to see over the steering wheel and too big to stay inside the fence. Around 1910, his grandfather sold vegetables to the steamboat crews when they stopped to lock through the old dam below Monroe. Because the city takes its municipal water from the Ouachita basin, you could say that the river flowed through his heart as well as his brain. Take away the Ouachita, and you’d not have Glenn Gore, at least not one anybody thereabouts would recognize. I should mention here that he preferred listening and modest statement of fact to the free-flowing palaveration so happily abundant in the South.

  An engineer trained not formally but in industry, he identified himself as a photographer, although his initial work as an artist was with scratchboard, a nineteenth-century technique of engraving a reversed and negative image on a coated surface. It was a scratchboard scene that led him to discover a link between his art and the river, which is also the link between his being alive and the reason for his being alive. In 1989, needing backgrounds to use in his wildlife engravings, he took a camera and went down to the Ouachita to shoot not rabbits but scenery. Then he began trying to find published images of and information about the river but came up with only bits and pieces so limited and scattered that, even if assembled into one volume, the book would still be woefully incomplete.