Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (7 page)

During their exploration of the river in 1804, William Dunbar consistently spelled it
Washita
while partner George Hunter, almost as insistently, wrote
Ouachita,
neither man yielding to the other’s orthography despite a certain sharing of journal entries. As for the Ouachita people themselves, they apparently moved away from the European newcomers — and any troubles with orthography — to join Caddoan relatives, the Natchitoches, farther west.

Among forsythia shrubs just opening into puffs of bright yellow, the road turned northward to skirt the coves and inundated tributaries of the drowned river, its original bed now lying six miles distant, and we entered low hills that wrenched the asphalt around for some way east of Story, another T intersection opolis, a place incapable of catching our fancy any more than the explanation of its name, one (if you will) without much of a story: the first postmaster was Mrs. James Story. And so ended the string of writerly opoli — except for the one farther downriver, the one belonging to you, Reader.

Along our route was an occasional front yard with a tree swing cut from a tire (two of them shaped most artfully into sea horses) or a lawn full of trestle tables offering for sale 165-million-year-old quartz crystals broken out of nearby quarries. The stunning clarity of the polyhedrons turned sunlight into all its visible colors and cast little spectral lights over the grass so that ruptured rainbows danced across lawns.

In the early spring sky, vultures wheeled in their distinctive tilting flight, their earthbound clumsiness transformed into a grace surpassing that of an eagle. Those black eaters-of-the-dead made me think of mortality. “Again?” said Q. To her, they were transformers of decay into life, and she was right, for what was the engendering Ouachita soil itself but moldered mountains and decomposed vegetation feeding the leaf feeding the rabbit feeding the vulture?

The way mortality kept popping up that afternoon, I’m not at all surprised I began to see it in the nomenclature of the upper valley. To name a place is not simply to confirm its existence, even if it subsists only in an imagined land — Erewhon, Quivira, Yoknapatawpha County — with no more actuality than a high-tailed wampus cat. Bestowing a name also extends longevity when a corporeal presence vanishes, when a town (or a human) gets deincorporated. To read an old American road atlas is to travel a land no longer existent except on its pages; names, like bestowers of names and their buildings, come and go. When the last brick dissolves in a ghost town, the place can survive for a while longer, if it is to survive at all, only in the word. The surest refuge, the most certain habitat for a ghost, lies in stories, and perhaps that’s the reason ancient Egyptians, enwrapped as they were with immortality — a meaningless notion unless coupled with mortality — considered the tongue the seat of their eternal souls.

The pyramids of Egypt crumble a little more each year as they work their way back into the desert, but to erase what has been written about them — their histories — would require the obliteration of human civilization virtually everywhere on the planet.

I have no clear idea where or how far a name can carry us, but I suspect, like infinity, it exceeds even our capacity to wonder, and I believe a name bestowed well is another hedge against total annihilation and its realm of the utterly forgotten.

7

The Forgotten Expedition

T
HE LIGHT BEGAN DROPPING,
but it didn’t vanish fast enough to hide the Tophet lying ahead along Arkansas 7, a stretch of road battered with illuminated billboards turning roadside litter into ghostly glowings: wraiths of shopping bags hung in bushes, and cups and bottles shone like burning brimstone. The Ouachitas come to their eastern decline not far beyond the highway, and there, a little north of Hot Springs, the agents of Mammon had marked the topographical terminus with a kind of aesthetic if not spiritual boundary and put the lie to the motto on Arkansas license plates:
THE NATURAL STATE.
Along Route 7, whatever the natural was, it served mostly to turn a buck.

A section of mountaintop had been cut open for “America’s Largest Gated Community,” an advertising slogan Q found poorly reasoned: wouldn’t more people only increase chances of residents meeting up with those they’re trying to escape? Expressing the reverse of what we saw, another slogan for the place — “Welcome to Heaven on Earth” — suggested a paradise residing in covenants about the color of a garage door and whether it could be left open on Sunday, as well as land prices assuring that thy neighbor shall not have a portfolio significantly smaller than thine because, as we all know, inadequate negotiables are a major cause of unmowed lawns and political preferences leaning toward populist positions. Q thought a pretty good alternative covenant could be hammered out of inclusion rather than exclusion, tolerance rather than suspicion, openness rather than fear. She said, “Why not call a state penitentiary a gated community?”

I mumbled how such a degraded stretch of mountain could drive a fellow to drink, and Q, who was at the wheel and has been known to rephrase my sentences into something I can only describe as more convivial, said, “Would a fellow settle for being driven to a drink?” He would, and she did, right after we took quarters in the historic Arlington Hotel a few miles south in old, ungated Hot Springs, in the heart of what was once called the Valley of Vapors. And vaporish it was on that cool evening as we walked along Central Avenue, wedged into the hills, to follow the stream that once carried off about half-a-hundred thermal springs formerly pouring forth openly from the eastern ridge — nearly a million gallons every twenty-four hours. No longer does much of the water rise to see the light of day, piped as most of it is to somewhere else. For Indians and French trappers and hunters, and, in the last century or so, for thousands of Americans who used to arrive by train, Hot Springs has long been a place to seek the loosening of a stiff joint or cleansing of a gland or purging of a tract.

On that Monday night I needed my memory of Heaven on Earth purged or at least loosened, so we went strolling on Central, a pleasant avenue, nicely influenced by the Bathhouse Row restorations of the National Park Service. Things were quiet to the point of being shut down, and cleansing a memory took some walking past gimcrackeries: a wax museum; catchpenny shops selling photos of monkeys in sombreros, cheap incense penetrating even closed doors, primitive wall masks plasticated in Bali, stick-on tattoos, peacock feathers, mood rings,
ELVIS LIVES!
bumper stickers. There were emporia offering T-shirts imprinted, in the manner of our time, with various notices to answer our pressing questions:
I’M WITH STUPID
. Or:
DO I LOOK LIKE I CARE?
And one for the motorcyclist:
IF YOU CAN READ THIS, THE BITCH FELL OFF.

At last we came upon the healing potation we wanted, not an analeptic of sulfur or magnesium but one of spirituous heat rising from a distiller’s craft: a jigger of hooch.

Maxine’s Coffeehouse and Puzzle Bar, we were told, was once a place where ardor got engendered not so much by spirits or thermal waters but by human flesh. Maxine, now a citizen in the City Celestial, was the author of
Call Me Madam
and the operator of an upstairs bordello. To suggest that history, hanging from the walls were various ladies’ intimates, unmentionables, and underlinens in various sizes, but every one of them crimson. Tacked to the high ceiling were smoke-stained dollar bills signed by customers as a kind of calling card. Q, expecting to be given a riddle, asked what made the place a puzzle bar, and Stevie, the bartender, set before us several little perplexities made from nails, or horseshoes, or twisted rods of steel and nickel. She said, “I’ve got more when you figure those out.”

Quicker than was good for any man’s mechanical self-esteem, Q succeeded in stacking up a half-dozen fourpenny nails in a way I’d thought impossible ten minutes earlier. This is one of the very things marriage counselors caution against, but men who wed a woman born a tomboy need either to sharpen their mechanical arts or to modify any notion of manly prowess based on contraptions. It may have been the first puzzle that gave our conversation a certain turn before she dismantled the nails to pass them to me and said, “I was taught calculus is a study of approaching limits, and this arrangement of nails is at its limit.” As I failed several times to stack the nails, I was muttering about puzzles and the approaching limits of exasperation. “By the way,” she said, “when we came out of the mountains and right into billboards and litter and sprawl-velopment, I think it was exceeded limits that got to you.”

The evening was taking an untoward lurch into topics — like calculaic theory — that could only increase exasperation. For years, I knew calculus only as what a dentist removes from teeth. The conversation called for something desperate — like politics.

I began talking about the Presidential election coming up that autumn. I said we were going to get an update on how well the nation might be coming along in recognizing approaching limits and comprehending a new calculus both social and environmental. (Knowing my general innumeracy in mathematics, I put myself at risk in using Q’s metaphor.) Across the country there seemed to be confusions, fears of new vulnerabilities, a growing nihilism leaving people neither engaged nor enraged but just paralyzed in the face of corporate mendacity and greed abetted by actions of a reactionary Administration and its Congress. Would the President’s Orwellian politics of manipulated fears continue to encourage a future of mountains bulldozed into gated communities where residents see the demos as demons? Q, the lawyer in her speaking, paraphrased William Sloane Coffin: “People who fear disorder more than injustice will only produce more of both.”

This conversation, which I give only the gist of, was broken several times by the guitarist who’d been playing to an empty tavern until we came in. His gigs were short so he could sit next to Q who is something of a magician in being able to make me disappear right before the very eyes of certain males. I can be having a deep conversation with some guy about his universal joint, and in walks Q: Abracadabra! I’m no longer there. This is not a complaint. For a writer, it can be most useful to become an invisible set of eyes and ears. Technically, it’s known as fly-on-the-wall reporting.

When the musician returned for another song, I told Q that the last time I was on Central Avenue in Hot Springs, the words
gated community
were more likely applied to a stockyard than to a housing development. That visit, years gone, now seemed to exist in a simpler time, but that perception was an illusion created by memory wearing thin — her quilt metaphor — for times are never simpler and the complexities of existence don’t increase; they just change, although perhaps today they arrive faster and give us less time to duck. As an example, I said the complexity of learning how to bring down a bison with a stick and a sharpened stone is no greater than learning how to buy a stuffed bison online. Q said, “So if I have a spear, and a Quapaw woman of 1804 has a laptop with Internet access, she’ll get her buffalo about the same time I’ll get mine?” That was the theory.

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.”