Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey Read online

  Several weeks later, looking in a book to verify the names I used for the design on my coverlet, she came across a couple of sentences in Quilts in America: “A pattern called ‘Wandering Foot’ was thought to convey wanderlust. As such, it was never used on a young person’s bed for fear he or she would travel west and never be heard from again; eventually the block was renamed ‘Turkey Tracks’ to break the jinx.” It’s a peculiar sensation to see one’s life reflecting folklore, even if it reverses, well, the pattern. For me, the design is an emblem of anyone’s quest for quoz, a graphic reminder of an ancient notion found in Asian thought: Wandering can help restore one’s humanity and reestablish the harmony once existing between us and the cosmos. I add that even if such harmony is only imagined, a longing for it can humanize.

  I’m indebted to my westering, quilting great-grandmother and to my unsuperstitious father — who taught me how to read both books and maps — for bedding me down under a welter of turkey tracks across a field of blue and for sending me out wandering westward and to every other point of the compass which he also taught me to read. So far, it’s been a pretty good life, pieced together as if a quilt, from books, maps, and an old puritanical jinx.

  Greene County, Missouri, 1940.

  5

  A Planetary Washboard

  THE OUACHITAS TOO HAVE WANDERING FEET — around, up, down. That is to say they’ve been transported and translocated by plate tectonics, orogeny, and erosion, and those forces make them a fit metaphor for a human life and the way we’re born from a uterine sea, carried about until we become self-locomoting and find our elevation rising before sometime later we begin to see the erosions of time on our bodily substance.

  Four-hundred-million years ago, the Ouachitas were sediments. A hundred-million years later, having become shales and sandstones, yet still submerged on the globe far distant from where they are today, they began heading westerly on a collision course that would assist in raising them above the ocean. Once risen, they began moving back down again flinder by flinder toward the sea from whence they came, for nature aboveground seems to abhor a mountain or even a hill: wind and rain and gravity make certain all which rises will fall. Dame Nature is an acrophobe. On Rich Mountain — the name comes from pockets of fecund soil created out of the hard mountain by erosive elements — you can see one proof of that natural abhorrence for height in the so-called rock glaciers, massive swaths of sandstone boulders slipping down the mountain not tokus over teakettle but like a quilt drawn off a bed, sliding down as if pulled, as in fact they are.

  I should mention here a local notion that certain fertile basins on Rich Mountain — places especially good for raising vegetables — are the result of years of feculence left by millions of roosting passenger pigeons (this, of course, before humanity exterminated the last of the species within living memory). Once, the number of wood, or wild, pigeons (think not of a dismal city-bird but a mourning dove decorating itself in handsome red feathering) may have been greater than all other American species combined, and the sizes of their roosting grounds defy easy comprehension. In Kentucky, John James Audubon wrote about one that was three miles wide and forty miles long, and said the excreta covered the ground like snow. He described the arrival of the birds at sundown as sounding “like a gale passing through the rigging of a close-reefed vessel” and causing a mighty air current as they passed.

  The Ouachitas are unusual in America because their trend lies latitudinally in forested ridges, striking a course east and west to create a lateral topography like the Uintas of Colorado and Utah and unlike the great longitudinals of the Appalachians and Rockies on the interior and the Cascade and the Coastal mountains farther west. At two-hundred miles, the length of the Ouachitas makes them the largest latitudinal range in the Lower 48.

  A half-billion years ago, when northern Arkansas lay beneath a shallow sea, a deeper basin to the south, called the Ouachita Trough, accumulated sand and clay sediments almost six miles thick. Even farther south, creeping ominously north, was Llanoria, a mass of land that would eventually collide with the trough and compress 120 miles of sea sediments into only sixty, creating the Ouachita Mountains. Imagine a bulldozer pushing a 1960s Buick up against a huge and unyielding stone-wall until the long hood crumples into lateral folds. If you drive road-cuts through the Ouachitas, you often can see the tortured crumplings of that terrific compression. The rate of uplift, however, has been more or less commensurate with erosion, so the height of the Ouachitas today is similar to much of the Appalachians but modest compared to that of the younger Rockies.

  From the air, these foldings appear like the half-drawn bellows of an accordion and are the major reason that Interstate 35, on its course directly south from the western shore of Lake Superior, shies off halfway down at Kansas City to make for the gentler eastern edge of the Great Plains to end up not in New Orleans, where it rightfully should — given its original bearing — but five-hundred miles farther west in Laredo, Texas. The resulting broad gap between the big bend of the Missouri River at Kansas City and the Red River at Shreveport, Louisiana, is by far the largest area lacking a longitudinal interstate highway in the eastern half of the United States. Thank you, Ouachitas.

  You might suppose, then, they are mighty mountains, and perhaps they are, although their greatest elevation, Mount Magazine, said to be the highest point between the Appalachians and the Rockies, rises only a couple of thousand feet above its valley floor. Still, a few physiographers, seeing them as mere outliers of the larger Ozark Plateau, talk as if they are not truly mountains at all. How many of those professors have hiked them north to south or driven across them in snow season, I don’t know, but I’m sure such an undertaking would rid the debate of a certain fussy academicism, as would a reading not of a textbook but of an Arkansas FAA aeronautical chart: because the top of Rich Mountain can become veiled in clouds, it carries the label HIGH FATALITY AREA. The Ouachitas are mountains enough.

  In years past, I’ve always come into that planetary washboard athwart, and on two of those occasions I’ve had to stop along one of the twisting, transverse routes for a passenger to leave her breakfast along the roadside for the possums, a consequence of transit not unlike that in a boat sailing a short sea. It’s as if the undulated rocks remember their oceanic days and wish to prove it with a gift of motion sickness.

  There is certainly a cause and result in the presence of the Ouachitas and the subsequent absence in them of the deleterious domestication of lands lying east, west, and south. Despite some logging and mining, their roughness has kept humanity thinned to a sensible — that is, sustainable — number, and it has been more difficult here for predatory American economics, with its watchword not of thrift or care or prudence but of avarice, to dislodge the natives from their links with the land.

  The trucker-archaeologist in the Rich Mountain store knew where the Ouachita rose, and he understood how the domino table rested at the top of a watershed, even if he knew not the other end of the river six-hundred miles distant. I said as much to Q, and she mentioned a young waitress we’d met at lunch several months earlier near Norfolk, Virginia. The café sat with its backside nearly hanging over the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, yet our waitress knew neither the name of the channel nor its purpose and certainly not its long history; worse, she had no notion of the ways, however obvious or subtle, the canal shaped her life even though a year previous she’d been “stung” there by a mosquito and required testing for West Nile virus. (It proved negative.)

  When we’re on the road, it’s always a risk for Q, in whatever context, to mention lunch — or breakfast or supper — because roads exist for me, claims she, mainly to furnish reasonably direct connections between cafés and chili parlors, taco wagons and beaneries, eat shacks and confectioneries, burger joints and frozen-custard stands, barbecue sheds and fish camps. In other words, roads are there to tie one reason for living to another.

  Such places are not bountiful in the Ouachitas, and the best I c
ould do then at her mention of food was to pull out dessert. One of the joys of age is watching the young and inexperienced get introduced to life, life in this instance being a MoonPie, of which no true Southerner (Q is a Yankee) can live long without forming an opinion. In Dixie, to be ignorant of a MoonPie is akin to being ignorant of Stonewall Jackson or a boll weevil or a boiled peanut. As evidence of such a claim, I offer exhibit A: The Great American MoonPie Handbook. If you’ve not happened upon the cookie, originally an Appalachian snack for deep-shaft coal miners, it’s a pair of circular wafers sandwiching a marshmallow filling, the whole coated with chocolate or vanilla.

  I unwrapped the little confection and watched her nip into it. Never have I seen her twist her face around when trying a new food, even after that sushi of raw sea-urchin, nor did she just then with her MoonPie. After a second bite for confirmation, she said, “The best part of it is the name.” Some people, I said, consider it a veritable artifact of Southern life. “It tasted like a veritable artifact.” I read aloud the ingredients on the label to reveal the compounded miracle of corn syrups a MoonPie is. “It sounds” — she nodded — “as if it were made by a chemist instead of a chef.” Indeed, such products of our time come not from recipes but from formulas; they are concoctions of crucible and test tube, with nary a sifter or rolling pin near; they smack not of a baking oven but of a Bunsen burner. My longtime friend Gus Kubitzki, whose pronouncements over the years have been companions on my travels, believed ingredient labels on packaged foods should begin WARNING: IF YOU WISH TO ENJOY THIS PRODUCT, READ NO FURTHER. But then, comfortable in his old-school notions, Gus believed that between harvesting and cooking there should be only seasoning — anything else was adulterating.

  6

  Inscribing the Land

  ARKANSAS TOPONYMS HAVE SOME NATIONAL RECOGNITION — preeminently Hope, Flippin, Yellville, and Smackover — but outsiders have not been especially heedful of other names even more worthy of eccentric distinction: Greasy Corner, Chanticleer, Figure Five, Number Nine, Whisp, Twist, Wild Cherry, Possum Grape, Oil Trough, Seaton Dump. In a state where alcoholically “dry” counties abound, there’s Beverage Town and Gin City, neither name referring to ardent spirits. Since the state university mascot is a boar, you’ll not be surprised to find there Hogeye and Hog Jaw, communities (so the names suggest) apparently lacking a chamber of commerce. Elsewhere, you can imagine the waggery proceeding from a certain concatenation of towns along a northern slope of the Ouachitas between Needmore and Blue Ball, near Nella and Nola, with Harvey lying between them (all these south of Kingdoodle Knob).

  On its official road-map, the Arkansas Highway Department shows almost fifteen hundred “cities, towns, and communities,” and on that list, Ouachita stands out because it is one of a few Indian names in a place with a human presence reaching back thousands of years before the arrival of McDougals, Delaneys, and Ludwigs. An Arkansas gazetteer index reveals no towns named Quapaw (from which the name Arkansas likely descends) or Tula or Tunica. To the founders of the state, it seems, those peoples never were.

  The Ouachita River contributed to that erasure when steamboats brought hundreds of tribal Americans upriver as far as a vessel could ascend and put them ashore to follow the valleys on westward into the “permanent Indian Country.” That’s a tale not of wandering feet but of the forced relocation proposed by Andrew Jackson (Jefferson and Monroe had considered it also) and approved by Congress with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Quapaw went no farther west than required and settled across the Arkansas line in the northeast corner of the Indian Territory on land holding unknown mineral resources that eventually yielded them significant wealth.

  As Q and I followed the descent of the Ouachita off its generating mountain, we came into a valley open enough to push the ridges to the horizon. In places, trees growing close to the highway removed the hills from sight altogether, and there the flow of the river slackened as it widened from a creek to braided shallows a hundred yards across. To the north rose broad-backed mountains, but on the south they were serrations seeming to betoken a different territory.

  State Route 88 was a road I’d for years wanted to travel, not because of the river but because along it, in an orderly spacing like words on a page, are the settlements of Ink, Pencil Bluff, and Story; and to the north in the Ouachitas is Magazine, and southward in the river valley is Reader. Considering my method of writing, driving through that territory gave new meaning to autobiography: I write a first draft in pencil, the second in ink from a fountain pen, and only thereafter do I enter the realm of binary digits (although six drafts — three-thousand pages — of my first book came tickity-tick-tick out of a typewriter). From that archaic process, this pencil pusher, this ink dribbler, hopes to leave you, the reader, with a story or two.

  To me, the Ouachita Valley was a writer’s paragon of a riverine course as it lured us on with a quoz here and there that became memoranda-book entries to turn into full texts to send on to you in your easy chair so that one of you somewhere, sometime may write me and point out my overlooking something like Scribblers Corner or Oghamville or Wordmonger City.

  The river changed from a pellucid mountain-stream to wide water the color of faded olive-drab Army fatigues, but we saw more of the tributary creeks crossing under Route 88 than the tree-fringed Ouachita itself, and that was acceptable since we were not in pursuit of it but rather its valley. At Ink, where we stopped so I could take a snapshot of the “town” sign, even before I could push the shutter button, a man pulled up to offer a ride, a gesture reminding me of a sentence with inarguable logic I’d heard on the mountain about the lower valley: “People are people down there.”

  In 1887, citizens at the Ink crossroads gathered to petition for a post office, requesting their settlement be officially named Melon only to be turned down, for reasons unknown to me, although I suggest the possibility someone just might have found the name too silly; after all, wasn’t Tomato, Arkansas, enough? A tale I like but am skeptical of holds that the second ballot to select a name contained the direction to WRITE IN INK, so residents did, and they got their PO, one that closed eighty years later. The fellow who offered me the ride said, “They must’ve wrote in disappearing ink.”

  The afternoon Q and I were there, Ink was a few houses scattered around a road intersection and a church cemetery with a solidly squat pyramid of native rock seeming to mark more the presence of Ink than any particular former citizen’s grave. Unlike their post office, the pyramid, as inextirpable as they could make it, was intended for the ages.

  The officialdom of Arkansas calls such settlements “communities,” but the few residents of Ink, even more loosely, will use the word town which it surely is not, any more than “Y” City — nine miles north — is a city. (Is there another American hamlet or town with a single letter and quotation marks in its name? Incidentally, given the half-dozen scattered houses near the three-way intersection, a more accurate name would be T “City.” While I’m asking, is there another American town with two hyphens besides Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey?)

  Except for New Englanders, Americans have largely turned away from the apt and pleasant words village and hamlet and are today more likely to call these unincorporations hick towns or hoosiervilles or jerkwaters or, more kindly, whistle-stops (there is, in fact, a Whistleville, Arkansas), all descriptions not likely to endear an outsider to the natives. My word for such settlements, when they are free of charm or attractiveness, is unincorptons, a term lacking, as they do, any allure. Not long ago in Opolis, Kansas, where anything metro was clearly missing, Q suggested that very name could be a useful generic term, and she especially liked it in the plural — rhyming with Thermopylae — as in “The opoli of Arkansas are many, but few are quaint.” I’ve come to like it myself.

  We passed a pole sign salvaged, it appeared, from an abandoned gas station and repainted with an arrow pointing toward the river: LITTLE HOPE BAPTIST CHURCH. (Q: “Our Lady of the Holy Negativity.”) A year earlier in
eastern Arkansas, as I was photographing a sign for the HOLY GHOST DISTURBED CHURCH, the pastor came out, disturbed by my snapshooting, and made clear he had scant interest in explaining whether any other local disturbances lay in the Ghost, the church, or his brain.

  On a recent visit to my boyhood hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, Q was taken with the name Country Club Christian Church. I mentioned to her the proposal by Gus Kubitzki (whose name you now recognize, a man known more for professions of sarcasm than faith) that the CCCC folk, in their posh area, were on to something: Why not organize congregations by avocations? The First Church of Latter-Day Duck Hunters? The Reorganized Assembly of United Numismatists? The Full Gospel Guiding Fellowship of Gossips? Sharing divinity among people of like interests would surely be more communal than having the golfer praying next to the skier, the teetotalist beside the oenophile. Gus held that shoulder-to-shoulder prayers focused toward similar wishes would be more fervid and — hence — efficacious: give us this day our daily duck.*

  Arkansas 88 rolled through an area formerly cotton fields and moonshine hollows until the Depression and poor agricultural practices in the pale-orange soil took their tolls. Many residents sold their land to the federal government and moved to California, so that today nearly two-thirds of Montgomery County is national forest, and top-of-the-chain wildlife — black bears and pumas — have returned.