Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (16 page)

It was apparent: long after his shutter stopped clicking, Glenn Gore would continue to work on behalf of the ancient Ouachita — efforts of which, like some of those who draw life from it, the river was oblivious. What he didn’t say because he didn’t need to was that the struggle also yielded many fine sunrises and sunsets to a man in a johnboat on the river, fishing rod and camera at hand. Being a guardian and advocate and documenter does not exclude joys.

When Q and I left Monroe to continue down the valley, I told her of another lunch I’d had a few years previous, one near Dayton, Ohio. I was eating a sandwich on an overlook above the seventh tee of a golf course. Perhaps because it was about noon on a weekday, all the players were in their retirement years. (What I’m about to say should not be seen as an extension of a possibly distorted view of mine that any game capable of being played while smoking a cigar might belong in a category other than “sport.”) As I watched the balls rise and bounce, I wondered for how many of the players those were golden years of tee shots and tee-vees and little else. Were some of them looking for purpose beyond birdies and
Wheel of Fortune
? Were they citizens whose potential the rest of us were ignoring?

To be of use and thereby earn remembrance — what person of good heart would say no? How many of those men had told a pal, in effect, “Now that I can’t piss over a hubcap anymore, I don’t know what I’m good for”? (Excuse my phraseology, but you know what I’m saying.) How many women (in different phraseology) had wondered something similar? Let me play with the words: isn’t it a given that giving gives the greatest reason to be alive?

Q said, “Do you remember the Smith sisters up on the Blue Ridge in Virginia?” She referred to a pair of spinsters who spent half their lives documenting every wildflower they could near one stretch of the Parkway. Helen and Julia Smith left behind a catalog of data that botanists, ecologists, and who knows who else may one day find to be of crucial significance. And the sisters
by themselves
persuaded the National Park Service to change its mowing practices along the route for the benefit of botanical diversity.

There can never be enough scientists or humanists to gather the simple, quotidian facts of every existing thing, even though accurately understanding the world demands no less. To hell with the height of hubcaps and the reach of one’s stream — it’s the reach of one’s curiosity and civic dedication we need. The power of a single self lies in its capacity to escape and go beyond itself to leave a gift behind. How can any achievement be lastingly significant if it lies outside a community of others? To live more otherly is to live more lastingly. It’s a fundamental law of biology.

16

The Buzz Under the Hornet Nest

T
HE HIGHWAY OUT OF MONROE, U. S.
165, ran due south and stayed on the east side of the Ouachita, paralleling it more closely than we’d found since leaving the streamlet below the headwaters in the mountains, although a levee still kept the river from view most of the way. Despite dropping two-thousand feet and gathering tributary waters for five-hundred miles, the Ouachita appeared not to have enlarged appreciably below the uplands, nor had it become more occluded with sediment, unnatural uniformities I attributed mostly to the dam-and-pool engineering of it. From about Monroe on southward nearly to its terminus, the channel ran against the eastern edge of the low hills of pastures reaching all the way to the Red River; but eastward to the Mississippi lay cotton fields and wetlands, so that for some miles the Ouachita was a kind of zipper between the old steamboating South and the cattleman’s West. In fact, that afternoon we met a Stetson-topped octogenarian whose talk was like a B Western sidekick from the 1940s, by crackee, a feller who complained about rambling into one too many dadblamed DUI convictions and having his daughter take away both his car
and
his horse.

The route: fields of bright-green seedling corn and tractors tilling under cotton stubble; other plots left fallow; cotton wagons neatly lined up until autumn; a dilapidated cotton gin; and, isolated in a plowed field, an abandoned shotgun house from sharecropping days. Every view was of only three colors — spring green, earthen brown, sky blue — until in one landscape stood a single, bright-white cattle egret that drew the eye as does a cut diamond.

Then the highway turned west and crossed the Ouachita over a 1935 hoist bridge seeing its last days; next to it stood unfinished piers for a new, characterless concrete span. The old steel-truss bridge that had lifted and lowered for nearly seventy years and had been whistled and smoked by the last stern-wheelers was raised to let a diesel-electric towboat and its barges pass, the first we’d seen moving on the river.

To the west, below rolling pastures and woody hills, lay Columbia, Louisiana. Visible from the road just beyond the bridge was a sign painted on the brick wall of a worn two-floored building with one side against the levee:
WATERMARK SALOON: OLDEST BAR ON THE OUACHITA
.

From the western edge of the Mississippi floodplain, more than fifty miles wide there, the hamlet sat on a snaky river bend, a sharply turned S, one of a series of even more S’s than you need to spell
Mississippi.
In its low country, the Ouachita is such a sinuous thing, its convolutions have proven too numerous for the engineers to cut through, and in that way the niggardliness of Congress has helped keep the Ouachita from having the appearance of a drainage canal.

We walked the heart of the village — the two blocks of Main Street — from the live oaks on the courthouse square to the Ouachita levee that hides passing barges but not the high superstructures of the towboats, so that a stroller on Main sees pilothouses seeming to glide effortlessly along the top of the earthen embankment like so many donkey carts. At the base of that dike was the Watermark Saloon.

The term
saloon,
thanks in part to old Westerns — both movies and novels — has lost its more elegant connotation of a large social lounge, a
salon,
as the word changed from referring to a drawing room to referring to a barroom. To speak of the earlier meaning, the first saloons reaching Columbia were those built into the heart of passenger steamboats, a detail suggesting to me the Watermark Saloon might carry something of the older concept, since it stood as close to the Ouachita as a large building could without standing in the river. Better yet was evidence in the front window where four players sat at a domino table. Although I needed no further proof, near the entrance was a small sign suggesting a social stratigraphy not uncommon to the life of a salon:
HIPPIES ENTER BY SIDE DOOR.
Of side doors, there were none, not even so much as a coal chute.

Because I’ve never found spirituous beverage and sunlight a salubrious combination, I ordered us a couple of “cola drinks.” The barkeep, Maggie, set them out, and with them a question that blesses a traveler’s quest and promises initiation into local rites. She asked, “What brings you to our town?” I pointed north, toward the river, and said, That. Maggie turned to see what might be behind her she’d never noticed before, something to lure in outsiders. She said, “A brick wall?”

The Ouachita, I said, and in two sentences laid out our descent from the mountains to the river flowing behind the levee behind the brick wall. Maggie, with only a raised eyebrow, stepped away as if suddenly remembering the jiggers needed polishing; her towel went to work while she looked out onto Main Street. Bartenders, along with psychiatrists and barbers, hear many a thing they could term, if they’re indulgent, eccentric. I should think, after forty years, I’d be able to foresee a woman’s retreat in the face of an oddball; but then, eccentricity exists only in the eyes of a beholder. I have yet to meet a true eccentric who knows he is one; in fact, to be aware of it is evidence it’s phony.

Maggie returned and placed her hands flat on the bar in a manner often preliminary to an invitation to leave. It was clear she had considered what she was about to say, and it was this: “You need to talk to Tom, the owner, upstairs.” She returned to her towel, but before I could figure her import, she came back to name half a dozen other people with a link to the Ouachita, all residents we should meet. Her invitation wasn’t to leave the place but to enter it — and not by the side door or even a coal chute.

A broad-shouldered, former construction-worker, Maggie was natally a Minnesotan, one of those Northerners who decide (at least in November through March) precipitation in the form of rain measured in feet, and humidity measured in muttering, is preferable to its more solid boreal expressions. Although she spoke in different terms, she was of the school believing that if warm weather — and what it has created — got removed from the South, then Virginia could as well be Vermont; or Alabama, Alberta. This school holds that had air-conditioning preceded William Faulkner, he’d have become not a book writer (to use Southern lingo) but more likely a bookkeeper. This line of latitude-based thought avers that the mint julep — if invented in a colder climate — would be made not with Bourbon but with schnapps, and it would be sipped not on a leafy front porch but in a pine-paneled rumpus room. Some Northerners with those notions even outrageously maintain nippier Southern weather would result in faster speech which might have helped Dixie turn that war Southerners know by a dozen names.
^*

I asked Maggie where we would find all the people she named, the list now nearly a dozen strong. “Sit tight,” she said. “They’ll find you.” And, indeed, for the rest of our time in the river village, Columbians singly and in twos or threes found us, whether at the Watermark, or out on Main Street, or fifteen miles downstream when we went looking for fried catfish. In a room that let us sleep beside the levee, in a century-old house once the home of a riverman who engraved on the window of his front door not a steamboat but the 1906 battleship
Louisiana
of Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, even there the next morning someone came by with stories, each proffered in welcome as if a bouquet.

On the north wall of the saloon, once a general merchandise, a painted line marked the water level inside the building during the Great Flood of 1927 when the Mississippi backed up the Ouachita all the way into Arkansas; the muddy pool in the store had been deep enough to force a long-legged dog wanting out to swim for it. Also on the wall were boat propellers, a pilot wheel, and photographs of Ouachita paddle wheelers.

But, most important for a salon-saloon, hanging from the high, tin ceiling was a pinecone-shaped, papery nest of bald-faced hornets, the insects, of course, having long ago evacuated themselves as they do each autumn. Somewhere in one of my other books, I’ve suggested a correlation between the dispensation of local tales and a tavern exhibiting taxidermic specimens. Let me here refine that affinity by saying a stuffed moose-head on the wall is most likely to elicit the richest conversations and should be considered the equivalent to a four-star rating; a bison or elk or pronghorn sconce is a degree down, but, in the matter of storytelling, each is superior to the ubiquitous buck deer.

In this system you see a bias toward size — both of the animal and the taxidermist’s bill — and there’s only one exception I know of, and that’s the little jackalope. If that name is new to you, jolly reader, you won’t find it in many dictionaries (lexicographers, please note), for it exists almost exclusively in saloons of the western Great Plains. Fake as it is, an antlered hare proves an ideal indicator of oral fabrications made, like the jackalope itself, from mostly genuine elements recombined into something of another order. In your own travels, you have perhaps encountered a cursing man who comes before an image of the Cross or Holy Virgin and is temporarily dispossessed of oaths stronger than
Dash!
or
Golly gee!
In an opposite yet analogous way, a man beneath a jackalope will discover his treasury of improvisations and concoctions, figments and fables, easily unlatched.

Of late, I’ve noticed that conversations under a hornet nest, one affixed to its natural branch hanging from a saloon ceiling, seem to draw forth a similar flow. A few miles upstream from the mouth of the Missouri River is a convivial taproom with a dozen nests (more in the basement), so many, in fact, when they get mingled in December with other decorations, you may fairly ask whether it’s Christmas or Halloween being celebrated. While the Watermark had only a single nest, you must remember, down South it takes far fewer hornets to put a buzz in the yakkety-yak, whether the talk is verifiable facts or blatant bosh or even inebriated rodomontade.

During our calls on the salon (daylight) and saloon (after sundown), Ouachitalogies buzzed through the Watermark like, well, you know what. There was one about the farmer who planted “Spanish daggers” — yuccas — under the bedroom window of his comely daughter to discourage Peeping Toms. That item led to somebody pointing across the taproom to the peephole in the covered stairway to the second floor, which, allegedly, allowed an earlier owner’s wife to keep tabs on a husband possessed of less than churchly penchants. Then followed an intimation he might have been one of the Toms under the window of the farmer’s daughter.

Somebody said anybody who pronounces the state name
LOO-zee-anna
is a hick, but his proposition didn’t find consensus. A story drifted up about Miss X who learned of her fiancé’s infidelity after she discovered tampons in his medicine cabinet and rejected his defense they were for cleaning nooks and crevices of his motorcycle. A man told another unhappy tale, this one about his “daddy” who used to whip him with a broken fan belt. Then came relief in some jawing about a pair of opposing politicians whose views were “as different as a dozen-and-a-half is from twelve-point-five,” followed by a further mathematically fouled debate about whether those terms had the same meaning since one had a decimal in it, which surely carried greater exactness. And finally, bobbing up was a piece of flotsam from river history about old whiskey boats ascending the Ouachita into dry counties in Arkansas to sell quite legally all the booze a man could carry ashore — either on his shoulder or in his belly.