Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey
Read Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey Online
Authors: William Least Heat-Moon
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Travel, #Philosophy, #TRV025000
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
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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
11: Architect of Phantasmagoria
12: The Goat Woman
of Smackover Creek
14: When Eyeballs Develop Taste Buds
16: The Buzz Under the Hornet Nest
17: Connections and Continuums
19: Extracting Sunbeams
from Cucumbers
20: A Cannonball Clean
Through the Parlor
8: Playground for the Rich and Famous
10: The Truth About Bobbie Cheryl
1: Apologia to Camerado Reader
2: That Batch from Down Behind Otis
4: A Poetical History of Satan
7: A Triangle Becomes a Polygon
10: How Tadpoles Become Serpents
11: Last Train Out of Land’s End
13: One-Hundred-Seventeen Square Feet
1: In Hopes Perdurable Reader
Will Not Absquatulate
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
1: Out There Beyond Last Chance
5: What the Chatternag Quarked
2: At the Temporary Edge of America
3: Where the Turkey Buzzard Won’t Fly
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
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 Ouachita,
or Washita, in Louisiana in 1835
The Letter Q Embodied
A
S 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.