Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey Read online

  Her reference to 1804 was an allusion to our reason for being in the narrow, thermal valley where precisely two centuries before William Dunbar and George Hunter had reconnoitered for a month. Above all else, the explorers were looking for potential resources there and along the Ouachita farther downstream that would produce commodities to yield fungibles. Unlike Lewis and Clark, the two Scottish immigrants showed scarce interest in anything beyond material resources, and it seemed to me that, could the men join us in a wee dram, their view of a gated community and its implications might not accord with mine. After all, the Hot Springs of our time produces fungibles that surely surpass their imaginings. Further, Dunbar was a wealthy owner of slaves (fungible) and a large plantation raising cotton (fungible); Hunter was a frequent speculator in realty (fungible) who also dabbled in distilling whiskey (fungible) and engaged from time to time in quests for valuable ores (fungible). In fact, Thomas Jefferson’s instructions to Dunbar for the exploration up the Ouachita cautioned him to discourage Hunter from turning the voyage into a hunt for gold and silver.

  Remarkable it would be if Dunbar envisioned what now lay outside the tavern door, and that implied incapacity in me to envision what, two centuries distant, would lie out there along Central Avenue (other than surely Elvis will yet live). One day, readers of this sentence will know the answer, and so to them, I pass along that question with the hope the refusal of my generation to imagine consequences has not got them into a real pickle.

  I had to wonder: What would William and George say about the Valley of Vapors which they knew as a place empty of people and containing only a couple of derelict log-huts used seasonally by trappers seeking the healing waters? Would the fungibles brought in by gates and T-shirts, mineral waters, and visitors sipping in a tavern bestrung with crimson lingerie fulfill their hopes for what their explorations would open? Men of the old mechanical arts as they both were, would they see the arrival of a technological nation as inevitable, one that would necessarily doom ways of living the territory had sustained for ten-thousand years? And would they believe technology and its concomitant abuses of lands and human spirits were also inevitable? Was Hot Springs, Arkansas, two centuries after their visit, anything like what they had in mind? Did they consider anything beyond the extractive phase? Did they ever try to reckon consequences?

  At that point in our conversation, the television replayed a spring-training home run by one of those jocks who points heavenward when he crosses the plate. I was paying no attention to the game until the admiring guitarist offered up to Q another aperçu intended to manifest his masculinely profound mind, this one on the role of possible celestial interest in the outcome of a small, horsehide sphere meeting an ash shaft. He said, “If God is spending time getting fly balls over a fence, no wonder this world is so screwed up.”

  Almost a hundred miles from Maxine’s Coffeehouse and Puzzle Bar rise the headwaters of the Ouachita — although in 1804, before engineers tinkered with the river, the distance was greater — but Dunbar and Hunter went no farther upstream than Hot Springs. President Jefferson’s original plan called for Dunbar to lead an expedition up to the source of the Arkansas, where the contingent would portage to the presumed nearby location of the wellspring of the Red River and descend it to its juncture with the Mississippi not far downstream from “The Forest,” Dunbar’s plantation a little south of Natchez. As an idea, it was fully Jeffersonian in its logical neatness. But the American West eats up logic and neatness, as it does those whose ignorance of the region causes them to misjudge and fail to live within its limits.

  The headwaters of the Arkansas and Red rivers are not a portage away from each other unless you call four-hundred miles a portage, but it would be some years until any white man of influence would learn that detail. Not long before the Grand Excursion, as Jefferson called this southern counterpart to the expedition of Lewis and Clark, was to set forth, another detail of the American West arose. The Osage — people who usually got along better with whites than with any of their native brethren, even those of close consanguinity such as the Quapaw of Arkansas — gave indications that while Jefferson may have purchased from France a huge territory, it wasn’t wise to assume he’d thereby also bought Indian lands.

  Pawhuska, a leader of another group of Osage, alerted the President to a rogue band roaming around the western end of the Ouachita Mountains, and exerting its presence and demonstrating slight interest in a parley with a couple of Scottish immigrants carrying more astronomical instruments than firearms. Jefferson postponed the excursion until the following spring, and so began a run of poor fortune that dogged the endeavor even right to its conclusion. The remarkable good luck of Lewis and Clark wouldn’t be repeated for the great rivers of the southern part of the Louisiana Purchase.

  After Dunbar received Jefferson’s letter deferring the Grand Excursion, he proposed to the President a far smaller reconnoitering, one able to serve as a shakedown cruise and hold the assembled outfit together until spring. Using boats Hunter had brought from the East, Dunbar recommended a retinue of the two scientists and thirteen soldiers put forth from a creek near his plantation, cross the Mississippi, and ascend a few leagues of the Red River to the Black River (as the lower forty-some miles of the Ouachita are called), and proceed to the “hot springs of the Washita,” a place Americans then knew mostly by rumor, although Indians and French trappers and traders had long used the water route leading toward the springs.

  Unlike Lewis and Clark, Dunbar and Hunter were not military men but entrepreneurial gentlemen of science: the former an astronomer and mathematician skilled in surveying; the latter a chemist-apothecary and mineralogist. Indeed, of the four Jeffersonian explorations of the Louisiana Purchase, only the Ouachita expedition was led by scientists, a model of leadership that proved unsuited to the adversities and mishaps of exploration, as you can see in these words from George Hunter:

  The greater part of this day [we] were embarrassed by rapids & shoals, very often getting aground, & then delayed till a person would wade forward & cross the river, ahead of the boat in all probable directions in order to find the deepest water, before we could venture to proceed again. The men, or rather some of them, often grumbling & uttering execrations against me in particular for urging them on, in which they had the example of the sergeant who on many occasions of trifling difficulties frequently gave me very rude answers, & in several instances both now & formerly seemed to forget that it was his duty in such cases to urge on the men under his command to surmount them rather than to show a spirit of contradiction & backwardness.

  For such insolence, William Clark would have pulled out the lash.

  Gathering natural history, the two Scot scientists performed well enough, given limitations the season imposed on fieldwork. But their Ouachita journals, unlike those of Lewis and Clark, are almost barren of what we’d now call ethnology, partly because over their three-and-a-half-month trip, they encountered few people except whites attached to the fort near present-day Monroe, Louisiana. Further, humanity seemed to interest those two men of technical mind less than an unknown algae or a bit of odd rock (particularly novaculite, so-called Arkansas stone Indians used for tools of many kinds). Even the ancient aboriginal mounds along the lower Ouachita, of which I’ll say more later, failed to rouse them beyond idle curiosity. Their exploration had the usual excitements, that is, difficulties of ascending a river — rocks, rapids, mud, opposing currents, cold water — but progress proceeded almost as planned, if we discount, as they never would, numerous intestinal infelicities and Dr. Hunter shooting himself in the hand.

  Except for the excellent map drawn up from their survey notations about the large and navigable but uncharted Ouachita, the expedition results were small compared to other Jeffersonian explorations, and both men realized their accomplishment was limited, although they — especially the younger Hunter, who outlived Dunbar — became nationally known as a result of the excursion. Upon his return in 1805, Dunbar wrote Jef
ferson: “The objects which have presented themselves to us are not of very high importance; it must however be acknowledged that the hot springs are indeed a great natural curiosity.” And Hunter told the Secretary of War of his regret the “course was not through a mineral country” and of a wish his “profession might have been more usefully employed.” When the Grand Excursion, in something close to its original conception, set off at last in 1806, both Dunbar and Hunter declined to join it. Thirty years later George Featherstonhaugh, an English immigrant and a federally dispatched geologist, arrived in the Ouachita country to examine the hot springs; without mentioning names, he wrote in his report, “Certainly no man should be presumed a geologist merely because he is a learned chemist or a profound mathematician.”

  The reconstituted expedition, led by Thomas Freeman in 1806, got turned back by the Spanish along the Red River near what is now Texarkana, Arkansas, and was unable to fulfill Jefferson’s plan of fully exploring the Red and Arkansas rivers. So, even including Dunbar and Hunter’s Ouachita voyage, these southern excursions all add up to something useful to territorial expansion but scarcely to anything “grand.”

  That particular historic outcome in no way discouraged Q and me from our objective in following the Ouachita Valley; in fact, Dunbar’s limited success, which helped it become the “Forgotten Expedition,” added an element of intrigue to our path. Not far from Maxine’s Puzzle Bar lay the only diamond mine in the world open to the public. It’s not a shaft but a plowed field where one can lay down a few bucks and take a shovel out into the scrapings and likely turn up, if anything, a yellow or brown diamond in the rough the size of that filling in Uncle Ted’s molar. Such diamond-hunting was an exercise reflective of the excursion we were on: scratching about among tailings of those before us in hopes of coming upon a gem of a quoz to adorn a chamber of memory, a quilt of remembrance.

  Poor Q: I was on the other side of her, saying that if Dunbar and Hunter, penetrating the heavy forests of Arkansas, could choose a license-plate slogan intended to drum up fungible-producing activity in the heavily wooded territory, theirs might be COME SEE, COME SAW. Jefferson himself — and certainly the highly entrepreneurial George Washington — would approve, for they both wanted the land surveyed and opened to the ends of an agrarian society, the far-reaching results of which would prove the undoing of Jefferson’s social and economic model.

  To read the expedition journals of Dunbar and Hunter is to realize the last thing the men wanted was a “natural state” — that is, nature in its own state. Rather, they came to open the great wilderness cache of more than eight-hundred-thousand square miles Jefferson had just bought from the king of France for three cents an acre (four cents after finance charges), and they were there to gather knowledge and specimens to assist even greater extractions. They returned with latitudes and longitudes, with wild cabbages and oilstones and swanskins, all things leading, in their own ways, to a pair of red panties above my head and a baseball player pointing heavenward. Not to mention a guy saying to my wife, “If a jock can pray for a home run, I can pray to know your name,” and she answering, “Blondie Bumstead.”

  8

  High-Backed Booths

  THAT MOONING — the public presentation of an uncloaked human rump — was practiced by American Indians in the eighteenth century, I think is not commonly known in this country. At least I was unaware of the long history of the fundamental moon until our morning in Hot Springs when I happened upon a passage in George Hunter’s journal of his 1796 voyage down the Ohio River to Kentucky, a trip he would repeat eight years later on his way south to join Dunbar for their Ouachita excursion.

  I came upon that bookish quoz while Q and I were in an old commercial springhouse, where we were drinking four-thousand-year-old water coming from eight-thousand feet down. It had fallen as rain when humankind, using reeds and damp clay, was teaching itself to write. Drinking the water was like quaffing cool drafts of time. (In that ancient purity from the Valley of Vapors, lunar scientists once protected pieces of the Moon until they could be studied for the presence of alien organisms. But it’s of moons of another sort I speak now.)

  Between quaffs, I read Q this passage from Hunter:

  Yesterday we were met with a large, long keelboat manned with Indians and one white man from the Illinois country laden with skins. They set it up against the stream along the shore with great rapidity and kept time with their setting poles dextrously; I examined them with my spy glass and found them all quite naked except an handkerchief tied round their heads and a breechclout round their middles; as we approached their boat they perceived my Glass and immediately two of them lifted up their breechclout and stuck out their bare Posteriors.

  If you recall his earlier words about soldiers giving him back-sass on the Ouachita, you may conclude the good Scottish apothecary drew scant respect while on American rivers.

  In rambling through the South, I’ve found displays of affability toward a traveler — even a Yankee — to be remarkably widespread. A couple of years ago, I encountered one source for it. I was in a Tennessee café, an old place with high-backed wooden booths — you hardly see them any longer — that gave visual privacy fore and aft. While I waited for a slice of chess pie, a pale, round head slowly appeared above the top of the adjoining booth, rising like a full moon coming up over the horizon. Once fully risen, the face, not yet of school age, examined me closely until I winked. It vanished quickly, only moments later to rise gradually again for further examination, once more ducking down when I crossed my eyes. Again, after a proper pause, it rose above the booth, this time to find a monster expression known to have sent mothers’ boys running to aprons. The face disappeared in a flash. Moments later, another steadily deliberate rising. The boy took stock of me who had now tired of the game. Plotting a new tack, the little guy announced — with pride and as point of information — “I got a humdinger of a penis and two balls.”

  Before I could respond, the small moon of a head got pulled back down, and I heard a woman say, “Thank you for sharing that, Clevenger.”

  The woman, Clevenger’s mother I soon learned, had not scolded the child either for his directness or for addressing a stranger. “His dad and I try to teach our kids to interpret instead of to judge,” she said. They guided Clevenger in learning to evaluate rather than ignore or avoid someone unknown to him, certain he would learn on his own to smooth his conversational gambits. She had not encouraged reticence or excessive caution before a new face in town. He, so I thought, was coming to understand something about words and community that people of the South can manifest so well. Travelers who cannot find impromptu conversations with almost anyone living south of the thirty-eighth parallel would do well to give up the road at once and get themselves to a qualified counselor.

  I should add here that initial conversations in the South are rarely insipidly polite pleasantries to cover over otherwise awkward silences as they can be in, to pick a place, Hennepin County, Minnesota. Talk in Dixie is built on personal details, not usually egocentric bloviations but rather narrative particulars: the cottonmouth story, Cousin Otho’s DWI arrest, reasons for the divorce, exactly why Flobelle’s corn bread is good. A rural Southern waitress is, by assumption if not definition, a conversationalist. Within moments, the sojourner is likely to learn her marital status, her children’s names, the mood of the cook, the quality of the preacher’s last sermon. When I’m in a Southern eatery, if I learn any less than all that before the hoppin John arrives, I assume I’ve been scowling about corporate malfeasance, or maybe it was just that turnip pie or the peanuts in the RC Cola not sitting quite right.

  During those hours I find myself alone on a long and numbing interstate highway, to speed the miles, I may retell the best story I heard that morning as a way of remembering it; or, when I’ve failed to find one, in desperation I might take up some question that could be seen as a precursor to mental unhinging. On a road across North Dakota a few years ago — do not judge me on
this unless you’ve driven through North Dakota a half-dozen times — I began wondering how many people I’d meet if I lived to be fourscore and ten. I defined a “meeting” in the simplest terms: a face-to-face exchange containing a clear, if momentary, recognition between me and another. It could range from a hello, a wave, even a drive-by mooning, to a lifelong friendship (which counts as only a single meeting). Because the chance for error was so great and I wanted a high number, I tried to err on the side of a generous total. My high school had about eighteen-hundred students, so I tallied each one. You get the idea. I enumerated through my years, summing as I went, and what I came up with surprised me: only about a hundred-thousand people over ninety years. Then I reckoned — this was just guessing — that of those encounters, more than ninety-nine thousand were pleasant or at least neutral.

  While it’s true a crossing of the Great Plains can do things like this to a human mind, my reason for it was to learn how many stories or pieces of them I’ve missed over the years. It was clear: too often I’ve failed to rise above the high-backed booths of my life, show myself, and make an acquaintance. So many quoz awaiting, so many stories overlooked, even avoided. As Thomas Jefferson wrote his daughter Maria when he was concerned about her mental health:

  I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it as it goes; and that every person who retires from free communication with [the world] is severely punished afterward by the state of mind into which he gets, and which can only be prevented by feeding our sociable principles.

  From 1793 to 1797 I remained closely at home, saw none but those who came there, and at length became very sensible of the ill effect it had upon my own mind, and of its direct and irresistible tendency to render me unfit for society and uneasy when necessarily engaged in it. I felt enough of the effect of withdrawing from the world then, to see that it led to an anti-social and misanthropic state of mind, which severely punishes him who gives in to it: and it will be a lesson I never shall forget as to myself.