Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (13 page)

Not long after the move to the boggy, frog-riddled creek bank, Charley died, and Rhene’s story shifted unpredictably once more. Now into her fifties, she forsook hermitry and stepped out of her unexplained shackles and commenced reclaiming the life she’d been educated for. She began performing on a local television morning show that aired her singing, accompanied by her own hand and sometimes by one of her goats which would, said Lambert, “join in songs with distinctive bleats at all the appropriate intervals.” The village seemed to accept the lady who could so single-handedly divert them through one means or another, even if she remained the Goat Woman and they appeared to countenance her amusements much as a street-side audience does an organ-grinder’s monkey: “Why, look at that little thing bang those cymbals!”

Although no longer sequestered, Rhene continued to live apart, and I don’t believe she entirely slipped the village tether; rather, she found ways to express herself within its constriction, not letting it choke off her song. She continued lifting her seven instruments until her final few years when true dementia dropped a slow curtain down over her bright performances, and she went into a nursing home, and there she died at eighty-three.

Should you visit Smackover someday, you can see the little medicine-show wagon and you’ll hear about the Goat Woman, but ask after Salome, and you’re likely to get only a “Who?” Don Lambert finds apropos a poem from Emily Dickinson:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you — Nobody — Too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise — you know!

How dreary — to be — Somebody!

How public — like a Frog —

To tell one’s name — the livelong June — 

To an admiring Bog!

13

The Ghost Bird

W
HAT HAPPENED THE NEXT MORNING
was either an author
sighting or a case of mistaken identity; but whichever, Q believed I was happy the Louisiana state line was not far distant.

From Smackover we joggled onto a county road as near the Ouachita as we could get — although the river was out of view — to follow Route 68 southeasterly until it cut away toward the oil-and-gas town of El Dorado (a more accurate name would be El Dorado Negro). Like so many other settlements west of the Appalachians, it was named purely out of optimistic expectations. Untypically though, three quarters of a century after its founding, El Dorado managed to consummate its name when oil was discovered near the town in 1920. (Speaking of oil, we were now far enough south to hear the word pronounced to rhyme with
bowl;
and some people had added an
r
and dropped the
i
in the name of the river: the Warsh-taw.)

El Dorado (Elda Rayda) is also the county seat, and its flourishing courthouse-quadrangle gave some historic polish to the usual crudities oil produces at the fringes of a town. On the square, we went into a bookshop I hoped would have something about the Ouachita, but I came up with, as I recall, only a natural history of polecats and, from an accommodating clerk, detailed descriptions of various routes to Louisiana, none of which would get us to a shore of the river. We were inside long enough for a sunny day to turn stormy; as the rain fell, the clerk, a smiling sexagenarian, said, “The Devil’s beating his wife.” I took it for the title of a new book. “No,” the man said. “I mean the rain. My mother used to tell me it rained when the Devil beat his wife.” I hadn’t known Old Harry had a wife. “Mildred,” Q said. “A shapely number, although that long tail was a drag.”

As we were going to the door, the shop phone rang, and I heard the clerk, in almost a whisper, say, “No, still here, but you better hurry if you’re going to catch him.” I presumed he was talking to the mother of the teenager standing at the science-fiction shelf. When I opened the door for Q, the clerk called out, “I know who you are!” I looked around to see whom he was talking to, and ’twas I. He gave a confiding wink and said, “Coming soon to a town near you.” I returned one of those smiling nods we use when we fail to comprehend and don’t really want clarification. That was a mistake.

Once outside, Q asked what I made of it. It’s possible, I said, that he took me for an itinerant vinyl-awning salesman. “No,” she said. “It sounded more accusatory. Like you’re on the loose. An escapee from an institution.” We all, I answered with manifest profundity, are on the lam from one institution or another. With that, we took up the road again.

While it’s true on the way out of town I checked the rearview mirror once or twice — only in accordance with safe driving — and drove a mere one mile per hour below the speed limit — as was prudent — and signaled well before a lane change — courtesy my only thought — Q asked, “Are you keeping an eye out for cops?” Of course not, I said. No more than the next guy on the loose. And to prove I was in no hurry to cross the state line, I took a digression eastward to the Felsenthal Lock and Dam in the Ouachita swamplands. I rest my case.

She asked whether I’d ever paid the parking-meter violation I’d been tagged with in that beach-town tourist trap. Attorney that she is, her next questions, I thought, employed the words
warrant
and
arrest
rather more freely than clarity required. At the lock, to prove my conscience nearly clean (who would pay a fifty-dollar fine for failing to put a quarter in a meter at midnight?), I said I was going into the headquarters to get information from a uniformed Army Corps of Engineers ranger — one, for all I knew, authorized to wear a large-caliber sidearm. “That,” my attorney advised, “is just how guys on the lam get apprehended.”

Although marital counselors are divided on the issue, I stand with those — mostly male — who believe a husband appearing timid in front of uxorial authority cannot later expect a wife’s acceptance of his reasons why, say, roundabout Route 58 is a better choice than direct Route 52. Gentlemen readers, you catch my drift.

Inside, I demonstrated a professional interest in the lock and dam, evidenced by informed questions (so I thought), but the result was a rebuff: “Can’t allow you out there — not since Nine-Eleven.” At that moment in our national history, a citizen who questioned anything linked, however far-fetched, to the airliner-as-weapon events of three years earlier could seem unpatriotic, even unfeeling, never mind that the strategic value to a terrorist of a little-used lock in a remote swamp was only somewhat greater than that of the nearest Arkansas chicken coop.

Not long before the rebuff, I heard this story from a man whom I will introduce you to later. He, a highway historian specializing in resurvey photography, told me: “I stopped in western Kansas along a stretch of old U.S. Route Forty in the middle of nowhere so I could photograph the road. Almost immediately a deputy sheriff pulled up and began questioning me. He refused to believe I was writing a book about an old highway, even after I pointed out my license plate:
ROUTE 40.
He went over to feel the plate for embossed letters to see if it was the real thing. After running the usual radio checks, he told me to move on. I asked what possible target was anywhere within view of my camera. He said, ‘Have you ever heard of Nine-Eleven?’ That was supposed to explain everything.”

Well, I’ve heard of it too, and I’ve also heard of bored officials wanting to throw some weight around. To many travelers in America these days, it’s clear those paired, historically horrendous digits are more effective in rationalizing unnecessary denials of public access to public places than the earlier “Insurance regulations won’t allow it.” No one today wants to put national security at risk by taking a snapshot of sweet Granny Davis as she toddles through the airport metal-detector.

Q and I left the office. A man I’d spoken to earlier, on seeing our license plate, asked how turkey hunting was in Missouri, a topic I’m versed in about to the same degree I am in oxidative phosphorylation. But this was the South, only six miles from Louisiana, where technical knowledge is less important at such a time than one’s willingness to call up some little ol piece of relevant lore. I said I had early acquaintance with turkey tracks but I didn’t hunt the birds, although I sometimes fed them. He saw we were willing to listen, a simple act that will earn as many friends in the South as buying the next round. So he talked turkey, and that led, unexpectedly, to his saying, “If you want to see the dam, I’ll take you.” He was a lock operator and, out of season though it was, dressed ready for a turkey hunt — should one present itself. To keep his invitation from coming back to vex his employment, since I’m not sure we were within the new (alleged) regulations, I’ll leave him anonymous.

He led us into the lock house and across the dam, much of our conversation going on while we watched a beaver swim up and perch itself on a washed-out tree trapped below the tainter gates where the animal began a nonchalant grooming. Given that the beaver is an unofficial mascot of the Corps of Engineers — America’s dam builders — I asked whether the critter was trained or an animatronic thing. “He just started showing up,” the operator said. “I wish he’d tug that log out of there.”

Formal engineering of the lower half of the Ouachita began in the 1870s with the removal of snags and proceeded to deepening the channel and the eventual construction of six locks and dams between Camden and the mouth at Jonesville, Louisiana, near where the river enters the broad floodplain of the Mississippi. That work created 337 miles navigable not just during seasonal rises but throughout the year, a modification that required turning the free flow of more than half the river into a stair of slack-water pools. Felsenthal, elevation fifty-four feet, gives the Ouachita the distinction of dropping from near the highest point in Arkansas to its lowest. Over its last half, no other navigable river in America is so removed, so hidden away from the common haunts of humanity. The Ouachita is a long meandering off by itself.

The Ouachita River in southern Arkansas.

After the calamitous Mississippi River Flood of 1927, engineers of the Ouachita began adding levees, dikes, “drainage structures,” and pumping plants. There’s even a flood wall in Monroe, Louisiana, that can fold down to serve as a walkway and observation platform. Because the terrain of the Ouachita, all the way from a little north of the Arkansas-Louisiana line on southward to its mouth, is dissected by natural wetlands fed by creeks and bayous, it was sensible during the engineering of it to create several wildlife areas, large and small, which now sprout from it like leaves on a stem. Those places have become havens for aquatic life and birds both resident and migratory.

This region, formed by the sea and shaped by flowing freshwater, by rainfall and humidity, is sodden and soggy here, saturated and soaked there, a land where periodic inundation is the heartbeat of its natural body and the determiner and enforcer of its ways of life, whether fish or fowl, moss or mosquito, mollusk or man. Even the hopefully named town of Waterproof, in its first location, got washed away by the Mississippi.

The terrain isn’t easily adaptable to human ends, and that has made it a sanctuary, an adytum in the temple of nature for the so-called Lord God Bird (people seeing the large ivory-billed woodpecker for the first time supposedly uttered, “Lord God!”). It is the most famous American ghost bird, which is to say, it may or may not still be with us beyond those in specimen drawers. The last unquestioned sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker occurred in 1944, less than forty miles east of the Ouachita, along one of its tributaries, the Tensas (pronounced and sometimes spelled “Tensaw”). In his 1842
The Birds of America,
John James Audubon says of the crow-sized woodpecker:

It is a beautiful bird, and its rich scalp attached to the upper mandible forms an ornament for the war-dress of most of our Indians, or for the shot-pouch of our squatters and hunters, by all of whom the bird is shot merely for that purpose. Travelers of all nations are also fond of possessing the upper part of the head and the bill of the male, and I have frequently remarked that on a steamboat’s reaching what we call a wooding-place, the strangers were very apt to pay a quarter of a dollar for two or three heads of this woodpecker.

The remarkable power of the bird appears in an incident related by an earlier ornithologist, Alexander Wilson. One evening, after he returned to his North Carolina hotel room with a wounded ivory-bill he’d collected, he stepped out for forty-five minutes. When he returned, Wilson found “the bed covered with large pieces of plaster, the lath was exposed for at least fifteen inches square, and a hole large enough to admit the fist, opened to the weatherboards, so that in less than an hour he would certainly have succeeded in making his way through.”

On a hunting trip in 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt, keenest of Presidential birders, came to the widely spread bottomland-forests of northeastern Louisiana. He wrote of the trees: “In stature, in towering majesty, they are unsurpassed by any trees of our eastern forests; lordlier kings of the green-leaved world are not to be found until we reach the sequoias and red-woods of the Sierras.” Although he wasn’t after ivory-bills — birds on the wing a hunter could mistake for ducks — Roosevelt said, “They seemed to me to set off the wildness of the swamp as much as any of the beasts of the chase.”