Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (37 page)

The Light was less spectacular than suggested by the most fanciful claims, so much so that had someone not initially observed it prior to the electrification of the county, the phenomenon might not be noticed today. In fact, when we arrived, I
had
seen it, only to be convinced by Q that it was a moving vehicle. As we were leaving, she said, “It’s my first UFO,” adding before I could cavil, “Unexplained Flickering Orb.”

The Quapaw Ghost Light is remarkable but not incredible, modest but worth its myth, possessed of the power of the peculiar, and among the many phantasms of the Ozarks, Spooky is one of the few to come forth predictably and allow examination. You can’t hear, touch, smell, or taste it, but you can’t doubt seeing it if your patience allows. The Light’s little, but it’s old, now reliably older than nearly all who go out for a gander.

I might have been content to leave things at that, except for my curiosity about that last detail: just how old was the Quapaw Quoz?

[
READER ALERT:
Anyone wanting to encounter the Hornet eidolon wrapped in its mystery or those wishing to preserve its “inexplicability” should head for chapter 11 to join the mosey again a few miles west of the Devil’s Promenade.]

10

How Tadpoles Become Serpents

A
RETURN TO THE
Joplin library and another look through the Ghost Light clippings clarified one aspect: most of the published stories about it came from writers who, not having witnessed it, relied instead on hoary hearsay or on witnesses of noticeably uncritical or biased mind (testimony from anybody who could turn a buck off Spooky was prone to distortions). In those worn-out accounts was a sameness with abundant repetitions of unsubstantiated and dubious allegations and considerable evidence of one memory enhancing, reinforcing, and doctoring another. Whenever a new claim got introduced, it would get repeated and adulterated as it evolved from fabrication to fable to virtual fact. Many of the scribes needed a close shave with Occam’s razor. On the other hand, the few reports of empirical scrutiny (I exclude firing a rifle at the phantom) matched what Q and I saw, as did descriptions from the most informed residents we talked with.

We copied reports and returned in the light of day to the Promenade to walk part of it, take some measurements and photographs, set up binoculars to look west at noon. Watched by slot-eyed goats, I knocked at a dilapidated dwelling near where we’d first seen the apparition; the door stood open and within the dimness a single candle burned, but no one responded except an aged, barked-out cur either groggy or ready for the Other Side. We went west to Miami (in Oklahoma it’s My-AM-ah) to the courthouse to examine early maps of Ottawa County. A clerk, averring she’d once jumped into her boyfriend’s arms when the Spook came up to hover over the hood of his parked car, rejected my suggestion he’d planted an accomplice in the bushes.

Later, I sorted the accounts into three stacks: one from writers who had not actually witnessed the Light (much the largest pile); another from those who casually saw the thing and wrote judiciously about it
soon
afterward; and the third and fewest from Occamists going forth with inductive razors.

Even though many post-1950 stories claimed the Light appeared in the late 1800s, to the last one they were anecdotal and unauthenticated, and only a couple acknowledged there might be, over more than a century, several causes of illuminations. The earliest published account I found (a few weeks later because it was oddly missing from the Joplin library) appeared in the
Kansas City Star
in 1936. Written by A. B. MacDonald (who had won a Pulitzer Prize for solving a murder in Texas five years earlier), the long piece was the first to cut through the manifest malarkey. Still, nearly all subsequent sketches either ignored MacDonald or tried to obviate his conclusion by asserting, in the disingenuous words of the current Joplin Convention and Visitors Bureau, “the source of the Light remains a mystery.”

In late 1935 when MacDonald arrived at the Devil’s Promenade, with him was Logan Smith who had lived along it for some years and had watched the occurrence hundreds of times. Its source was, Smith told the reporter, auto headlamps coming from the new federal highway east of Quapaw. On a map, he showed MacDonald the perfect alignment over several miles of Route 66 with the Ghost Light road, even though the Spring River Valley intervened. He pointed out the long view westward was essentially downhill: Quapaw, in spite of the interruption of rolling terrain, is almost two hundred feet lower than the east end of the Promenade. Convinced, MacDonald made no attempt to test the theory.

A decade later another
Star
reporter, Charles Graham, persuaded two men from the Army base at Camp Crowder, Missouri, twenty miles from the Promenade, to join him in an unofficial investigation of the Route 66 theory. Flashing automobile headlights from the west, they re-created at will the coming and going of Spooky: he danced at their command.

Over the following twenty years, new research confirmed those results, one of them noting local observations of the phenomenon increased after completion of 66, and someone else correlated appearances of the Light with traffic flow on the highway. An examiner noted that vehicles with different kinds of lights moving differently (passing, turning, speeding up or slowing down, heading east or west), as well as changing atmospheric conditions, would create variations in the display and activity of the phenomenon. Sometimes stars twinkle and sometimes they don’t; sometimes they’re visible, and sometimes not; the Moon has a halo one night and a cross the next; it may be yellow, orange, or white — maybe even blue. Graham attributed certain variations to afterimages that can occur in viewers staring at a brightness, and another researcher theorized refraction of light might also contribute. Of particular note, all of them said the luminosity could not be seen from any low point on the Promenade. Each one of the verifiable experiments on the headlamp theory coincided precisely with what Q and I witnessed.

I thought,
Well, that’s that.
I realized I was almost — almost — disappointed at rational explanation. Some Nodgort, wanting mystery over factual revelation, worked to challenge what I’d found: What about all those claims the shining existed before automobiles? What about the discovery that Graham’s and a later researcher’s tests had been made not from the current Spook Light Road, E-50, but from a parallel one, E-40, the Hornet Road, a mile north and one that does not align with U.S. 66? Oberon and Titania danced and capered in the crannies of my skull. “Yes!” they sang out. “The mystery remains!” Q too, I have to disclose here, showed pleasure the solution was still, so to speak, up in the air.

Off we went into Oklahoma and on toward New Mexico, content in witnessing an event that trussed up science like a dead pig hung in a tree for country butchering. Some weeks later when we were home again and I was putting away maps of the journey, I looked once more at the forty-five-degree
angle
Route 66 makes between the Kansas state line and Quapaw, Oklahoma, a run of four miles. That’s when I remembered: across the prairie country, the earliest federal highways did not usually make such an angle; instead, for economy, they followed the old section-line roads commonly running toward only cardinal compass-points. Ninety-degree turns were everywhere. Reason flashed on in my mind and sent dark-loving Robin Goodfellow back into his recess: the current route of U.S. 66 in northeastern Ottawa County is not the original used from 1926 to 1932. That first 66 ran the cardinal directions, as old road-maps and a close reading of Graham’s
Star
story prove. On the north side of Quapaw, the first highway aligned perfectly with E-40, the initial Spook Light Road, the one from which the tests were made, thereby corroborating early claims the wonderment had moved south, as it indeed it had, south to E-50, the current Promenade which lines up with a later section of Route 66 now sharing traffic for two miles with U.S. 69. Commentators negating the early researches for being on “the wrong road” did not understand the reconfigured highway. Those unable to remember the past are condemned to botch the present. Or, to corrupt another Americanism, bungled history is bunk.

The Spook Light Roads in northeast Oklahoma.

I read again the investigations based on mensuration and found them making new sense. When reporter Graham asked an engineer, who claimed he solved the puzzle in 1930, why he’d not published his solution, the man said, “We thought it would be more fun just to let people go on believing the mystery.”

That brought to mind an old psychological experiment examining the effects of suggestion and expectation: Volunteers in a room illuminated by only a pinpoint of light were asked to “draw on paper the path of a moving beam.” Their pencils marked out arcs and angles and tangents and squiggles to create mazes of graphite. After the overhead lights came on again and the subjects learned the pinpoint had not moved even so much as a quintillionth of a millimeter, they expressed disbelief, disappointment, and more annoyance than surprise. Idols of the tribe are powerful.

Something else came to me: when I was in the Navy, at sea, smokers were prohibited from lighting up on deck because the flare of a match could be seen by enemy eyes a mile or more away.

And one final remembrance: that old story of the Episcopal pastor explaining sin by telling his congregation about drinking so thirstily at a spring he nearly swallowed a tadpole. A year later, a Methodist deacon in the next county over mentioned how Catholic Father So-and-So, getting senile, swallowed a tadpole that changed to a frog in his gut. And sometime thereafter, a fulminating Baptist told of a Pentecostal preacher going to a spring to get a salamander he could swallow and cough up before his stunned audience to prove the Devil lies within everybody. At the Episcopal pastor’s death, several people two counties away knew for certain a Mormon in the grip of Satan had died from eating one too many serpents.

But, above all, what about the “fact” always trotted out to disprove the headlamps solution — those anecdotal reports allegedly as old as the first Quapaw into the territory — that the Ghost Light existed before the automobile? Even accepting such unsupported assertions, I suspect people in 1880 did not spend all their hours after sunset in darkness. A lantern, a bonfire, an eastbound locomotive, would offer illumination enough to create Spooky, especially if refraction proves to be involved. And, I should add, any piece of country over the years may well exhibit occasional luminescent appearances of several kinds from natural causes, particularly a place with wetlands and old mines. There likely has been more than one Ghost Light.

A few days ago I gave this explication to a friend who had long wanted to see the small marvel, and he said, “Now you’ve gone and ruined it for me!” I asked whether knowing a rainbow is a spectral display of refracted light kept him from enjoying one. I proposed that in the three million miles of American roadways, the physical factors necessary for the creation of the Quapaw Light are, if not unique, then at least rare and remarkable enough to make it worth encountering. In the long view, doesn’t satisfaction from enlightenment surpass the tenebrifics of mystery? Isn’t, in the end, a humble schoolmaster greater than the slickest magician?

And keep in mind (I should have added), the Quapaw Light exists on the fringe of the Ozarks where fable, fundamental faith, fabrication, and fallacy have long had their way with fact, where superstition suppresses science, where belief in evolution can defeat a politician or get a preacher drummed out of a church, where it will be a long time before a spectrometer can hold against a ghost-o-meter.

11

Last Train Out of Land’s End

Y
OU HAVE, PERHAPS,
seen the old photographs or films of horse-drawn vehicles — wagons, buggies, traps — and men afoot lined up on a vast treeless stretch of the southeastern Great Plains, as white people (“boomers”) took position to take possession: they were ready for one of the races (“runs”) into native lands to grab a few acres of what was soon to be given away to anybody who could drive a stake into a piece of unclaimed soil. The Indian Territory was about to be remade into Oklahoma. In Choctaw, the name means “red people,” but today, it’s somewhat of an irony of American nomenclature.

Oh yes, tribal America is still there in numbers, but many a Pawnee or Ponca will give you a howdy and a blue-eyed wink. I don’t know whether the Choctaw have a word for
amalgamated,
but as time steps along, a new name for the state could prove usefully accurate, if not popular. Across the country, when I meet a person with some Indian ancestry (even if in Vermont or California), the native strain is most often Cherokee; in fact, years ago, I was wed to one, and before that spent much time with two other women of that noble line. A Choctaw woman (she’s another story) once said to me, “What is it with Anglos wanting to be part Cherokee? I think it must be the name — it sounds, well, cheery. Choctaw sounds serious. And Creek or Kaw? Forget it.”