Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (6 page)

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
auto
biography: 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.

A few years earlier, in one of my rambles through hinterland America, I began noting an increasing number of gravel roads and dead-end lanes, even rural driveways, marked with “street” signs; the day before, I’d seen a two-lane track into a pasture with a sign:
WHODATHOTIT ROAD.
I interpreted it as commentary on the arrival of 911 emergency service and its requirement to provide identification useful to a fire truck, ambulance, or sheriff. Undoubtedly, some of these names will survive in the sprawling of the nation, as pasture paths get turned into avenues of subdivisions named Highland Heights or Forest Woods and as dead ends get opened and paved into some new Asian auto-plant. Your descendants may one day drive a vehicle assembled on Whodathotit Expressway.

Since public forums can be difficult for an individual citizen to enter, these road names are an opportunity for expression along state rights-of-way, one second only to vanity license-plates. Two days earlier, we came up behind an overpriced, overpraised, overpowered, oversized, Teutonic vehicle with an overweening license-plate:
4U2NV
. I wished ours was
4GETIT
. Or better, that one I saw a few years ago:
IDGAF
(my interpretation begins with “I Don’t Give”). And what about that front plate of
3M-TA3
, a message taking on new meaning in a rearview mirror?

At Pencil Bluff, a T intersection with a cluster of homes and a scatter of businesses — propane distributor, church, gas station, highway-department depot — we pulled up at Hop’s Store, a new building where any character of place had to come from a character walking through the door. I did my part. Inside was a man exceptional in his blandness, a fellow more of shrugs than sentences, who answered a couple of my questions by only raising his shoulders. I asked — my fourth question — why the hamlet was called Pencil Bluff. At that, he actually spoke: “I don’t have any idea.” His interest in the question likely matched his curiosity about counted cross-stitch or bookbinding or linear algebra. Then he shrugged
and
spoke: “Before my time,” he mumbled, as if a man can be expected to know only what occurs during his life.

My practice on the road when I ask such questions is to present them resoundingly so that others may hear; in piscatorial terms, it’s the difference between casting a dry fly and throwing a net — the chances of hauling in
something
increase. On occasion it works, and it did then in Pencil Bluff (once Sock City; why, I didn’t learn). A smiling customer standing to the side whom I’d not noticed before, an oldster so long exposed to the sky he wasn’t tanned so much as simply discolored, offered an answer, his solution corrected and expanded on by the cook making sandwiches at the grill. “Out on the river,” she said, “that’s the bluff, and it’s all slate rock where people here used to get their writing stuff for school. Back in the
Dee
pression.” Communal memory now primed, a woman whose face lighted at the chance to inform said, “It’s out there at the preacher’s hole. The old baptism pool.” And that aroused the shrugging man to speak yet again, his memory opening at last: “There’s big catfish and brim out there in that hole. Durin Lula Jo Parson’s baptism, a catfish swum plumb between her legs, and she took a-hollerin, ‘Hallelujah! Hallelujah! The hand of the Lord’s full on me!’”

I asked where the bluff was, but the directions needed enough clarification that the sunned man said, “It’s easier if I just show you.” He took his sack of sandwiches, and we followed him to his pickup; on the tailgate was one of those little chromed-plastic icthyoidal emblems evangelicals stick to the back end of their vehicles, those fundamentalist fishes so often swimming — however inappropriately — forever leftward across the trunk lids of America.

As we fell in behind him, I said something about catfish holes and baptismal pools, and to the tune of the old hymn, Q sang, “He will make us fishers of quoz if we’ll follow him.” He led us into trees and brush along the north bank of the Ouachita where we came upon a beautifully fractured ledge of dark shale crumbling down to the river. The rock laminations were of some regularity in thickness and broke free into both smooth tablets and slender pencil-like strips. While the slate was of ready cleavage, it wasn’t possessed of enough integrity to serve as a schoolroom blackboard any more than it could as the bed of a billiard table or even as roof tiles, yet it was too hard to function as a good pencil except when scratched against itself, and to that end it served well. Its economic inutility had kept it from being quarried, thereby preserving a splendid riverside outcrop along a section beloved by canoeists. Q turned to me. “Do we have a quoz here?”

Thinking of baptisms and Route 88 place-names, I picked up a small tabletlike piece and, with a sliver for a pencil, scratched, “In the beginning was the Word,” and tucked the slate back into the bluff to await the next freshet that would wash it down to the river. I was thinking not just of John’s gospel but also of Mark Twain’s: “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book.”

Who now can say whether any past citizens here toyed with the notion of the river absorbing their words or considered their pencilings from the bluff being made from seawater and sediment transubstantiated by the ancient compressions of the rising Ouachita Mountains? If some few did think along those lines, they might dispute John’s “No man hath seen God at any time” — provided they could see deity at work through the grand mechanisms of plate tectonics. I suppose it all comes down to where one seeks his thaumaturgy.

This theological wandering had been brought on by the beauty of the old baptismal pool and furthered by an explanation we’d heard that morning for an opolis on down the road: Washita, sitting at the west end of Lake Ouachita, behind the dammed river. Back on the mountain, a man said (in different terms) Washita was an anagram from “
wash
ed
i
n
t
he blood of the L
a
mb.”

Q thought Wablodlam would more accurately carry the message. “But then,” she added, “maybe it’s too close to Bedlam.” I thought it bold for business-people in Washita to offer an opposing etymology in their contention the name has no religious significance, deriving as it does from an Indian word meaning “good hunting and fishing.” Considering the village economy depended in no small way on hunters and fishermen, I found the claim as suspect as the first, but the intrinsic nature of their views was fully Bible Belt where down-home, supersaturated religion faces off with local cash registers. Profitable is the place when they meld: “Let’s build,” says the mayor, “the World’s Largest Observation-Deck Cross. Light it up at night. Install an elevator and charge three bucks a hoist. By God, we’ll be knee-deep in tourists!”

What we do know about the word
Ouachita
is that French trappers met a tribe or perhaps just a moiety who apparently referred to themselves or their territory along the lower river with sounds the Frenchmen imitated as
wah-shee-tah,
the stressed syllables unknown today. I’ve come upon a pocketful of spellings for
Ouachita
but no unquestionable interpretation of its meaning, and that, to me, allows a traveler to infuse it with his own associations; after all, such personal interpretation is a central purpose for traveling: to visit Bogalusa or Chugwater or Pinetucky and to return home with your own definitions.