Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon

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.
    During their exploration of the river in 1804, William Dunbar consistently spelled it
Washita
while partner George Hunter,