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