Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (4 page)

On the third day of spring, Q and I found ourselves in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas, a couple of hours west of Little Rock, traveling through the Ouachita National Forest that is largely contiguous with the rumpled belt of those untypically latitudinal mountains. We were there in search of the highest and most distant water of the Ouachita River so that we could follow it for its six-hundred miles from top to bottom, source to mouth. I’ve traveled rivers before — upstream, downstream — but usually atop them,
on
them. This time I wanted to follow
the valley
of a long river to see how it and its humanity fill the shape it has cut for itself. A river fits its vale as a seed its fruit, but to know the pit is not also to know the peach. Could an artist who has never seen a pomegranate paint the fruit from studying its seeds?

If the name Ouachita is one you’ve seen on a map but never heard pronounced, you might want to hear it correctly in your mind: WASH-uh-taw or, more locally, WASH-taw. The people along it take some merriment in a visitor who asks a question about the Ooo-uh-CHITT-uh. No need to divulge how I learned that.

Ouachita is also spelled in a more English fashion as Washita — especially in Oklahoma, where lies the western end of its mountains — but that version can lead people to confuse it with the smaller Wichita Mountains near the Texas Panhandle. The French set down the name in their orthography with reference to a group of indigenous folk and their territory. Although distantly related, the Ouachita people, like the mountains, should not be confused with the Wichita tribe farther west where it maintains a noteworthy presence in western Oklahoma; as for the current whereabouts of the Ouachita, that’s something of a mystery. My guess is that they live on in the blood of several extant tribes more broadly known as Caddo.

Q and I were in the Ouachita Mountains because she had begun talking some months earlier about a “Forgotten Expedition,” one that two centuries ago had the potential to be in significance second only to the Lewis and Clark exploration. Of the numerous words in the English language that will disrupt whatever else I’m thinking about,
forgotten
and
expedition
are two of them. Put them together, and I’ll listen with an interest beyond reason.

Having purchased the unimaginably large tract of land called the Louisiana Territory, Thomas Jefferson knew the first requirement for it was to establish dominion, and to do so Americans had to understand the territory and fix a military and economic presence in it. Lewis and Clark were to perform those functions in the northwest portion of the great purchase and on westward (when they crossed the Rockies at Lemhi Pass on the present-day Montana-Idaho border, they left the United States). For the southwest section — and beyond — Jefferson called upon a Scottish immigrant, William Dunbar, who asked assistance from another Scot, George Hunter.

I’ve not done so, of course, but were I to stand on a downtown corner of Toledo or Boston or San Jose or any other city you might name and wait for
just one
passerby to tell me
just one
thing about the Dunbar-Hunter Expedition, I’d likely be standing there among the citizens weeks later. Such an unawareness, though, is not really their fault; rather it’s the result of historians themselves generally overlooking early explorations into the near Southwest, a situation slowly changing. For myself, I can’t profess to have known much about the two Scots until Q revealed my ignorance; in defense of all of us, I can only say, to find a copy of either explorer’s account was, until not long ago, difficult. Still, a copy of Hunter’s
Journal of an Excursion from Natchez on the Mississippi up the River Ouachita
had been sitting unread on my shelves for several years. The Dunbar-Hunter exploration — the “Forgotten Expedition” undertaken in 1804, exactly two centuries before our arrival in the mountains — seemed to me a useful hook to pull us toward the resident quoz of the Ouachita Valley.

So there we were in the mountains. That morning we followed on a topographic map a narrow blue line, one we assumed to represent the nascent river, a streamlet through a pinched, forested declivity where U.S. Highway 59 keeps close to what we took for the infant Ouachita. It was but six or seven feet wide and narrowing rapidly as we ascended what was no longer a valley but more a broad cleavage in the mountains. As the creek neared the crest of the two-lane, its continuance at last became so indeterminable, we stopped so I could climb a small signal-tower along the tracks of the Kansas City Southern Railway paralleling both creek and blacktop. Oklahoma lay six miles west. I called down to Q we were running out of water. What was now scarcely more than a runnel disappeared under a tangle of wiry brush, and beyond were only seeps and dribbles. She said the map gave no name to the blue squiggles delineating creeklets.

I climbed down and took a taste of the Ouachita without swallowing, and we crossed the road and headed toward a building, a general merchandise set among scraggly pines and still-leafless oaks. I said the name on the store, Rich Fountain, was probably a confirmation we were indeed at the headwaters. Q looked at me with something between compassion and amusement and said, “You might want to reread that sign.” I did:
RICH MOUNTAIN SNACKS, CRAFTS, GROCERIES.
My frequent wishful thinking sometimes allows Q to outsleuth me.

Inside, the wooden place was older than its new facade suggested, and its happy clutter exhaled the classic scent of an old grocery, making me forget the question I came in with, not just because of the smell of food but also because the place was not quaint — it was simply genuine, a quality ever more uncommon these days along the American road.

Q ordered up two cheese sandwiches, a MoonPie, and a couple of “sodas,” despite my earlier advisement that we were now in the land of
pop,
where
soda
could refer to a carbonated ice-cream drink, seltzer, a baking substance, or a bicarbonate of. She, who has her moments of sauciness, said, “That particular usage will never pass my lips.” This is what happens when one grows up near St. Louis where folks insist on pronouncing the state name Muh-zoo-ree, when those of us on the western side know it’s Muh-zoo-rah — just as it’s soda
pop.
We like onomatopoeia. My old friend Gus Kubitzki, of whom you will hear more later, used to insist the term should be spelled
sodaPOP!
and be pronounced with a click of the tongue as if we were Hottentots. Step into an old soda fountain in Kansas City — should you be determined enough to search out one — and order up a “soda,” and you’ll be asked, “What flavor?” If you then name, say, a cola, you’ll be considered insane, for sodas are made usually with vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry ice cream. Our marriage, thus far, has been able to surmount such linguistic variances, much as a number of marriages in Cincinnati have survived the local pronunciations of the final vowel of their city.

I was standing among the shelves of “crafts” and looking at the slow blinks of the resident reptile required in these places, this particular critter an iguana. A lanky man whose dark hair belied his nearly seventy years came up to converse: “He’s direct from Mexico. Won’t eat a bug without pepper sauce and a side of tortillas.” The fellow, dentureless, spoke in deep Ozarkian but said he hailed, years past, from Minnesota. He’d been a long-haul trucker who drew good pay, but the work didn’t allow him to put to use his professed master’s degree in archaeology. He asked me, “Got yourself a skull?” I started to say
No, just sawdust up there.
Then I noticed he was displaying for me a cow skull painted with a desert scene in colors unknown to nature but available on the hood of a stock car or in a peyote-induced dream.

I said I didn’t need any wall art but I could use some information an archaeologist might know. He changed from clerk to professor when I asked if the creek across the road was the Ouachita River. “That’s her,” he said, “and right here’s where she heads up.” He waved toward the front window. “You go a few steps on west, and the water there runs down the other side of the mountain plumb into Oklahoma. This here’s a pass.”

Curious how far his knowledge reached, I asked where the Ouachita went to. “Down the mountain,” he said. How far? “I know she gets over to Hot Springs, but after that I cain’t say. Maybe she just gets soaked up in them springs, and that’s all she wrote.”

We conducted this conversation while he trailed me around the store. In walking from the east-side shelves of cedar boxes and onyx ashtrays to the lima-bean shelf on the west, we’d walked halfway across town: the store and a couple of attendant buildings
are
Rich Mountain, Arkansas. Just beyond the bean cans, effectively the town line, was a domino game where a trio of elders — each accoutred with a mug of cold coffee, a butt-filled ashtray, and an abacus to tally points — sat at an old, rough-sawn wooden table with one chair empty for whoever might turn up next. Over the years, the sliding of the tiles into play at the center of the table had worn through the yellowed enamel-paint and into the wood to create a shadow of a Celtic cross or, to change cultures, the figure of the Zia on the flag of New Mexico, an emblem of light and friendship. I pointed it out to Q who saw the cruciform in the table as a quilt-block design. And it was that too.

The room, with its shelved goods and artless crafts, was turned into an authentic country-store — that abused term of our time — by the domino game, for without it you would have an auto without an engine, a pen without ink, a torso without a heart.

Sometimes a good journey is like stepping into an empty chamber of blank walls, which the traveler is free to make into his own space by appointing it with representative furniture and accent pieces found en route. For my Ouachita room, I’d come upon a graven table. It is just such a quoz that a traveler can carry away into subsequent years, a transport allowing us for a time to snatch a small something from the maw of impending mortality and to have a sound answer to a disturbing question: Was I really present that day if, a few weeks later, it left me with nothing other than a little more sag here, more droop there, and one less day to be alive?

4

The Wandering Foot

M
OTHERS, FATHERS, GIVE FORETHOUGHT
to what you allow your children to sleep under. I don’t mean roofs and rafters; I mean something closer to their skin, their heartbeats, their souls, if you will. My parents, early, put me under a quilt hand-stitched by a paternal great-grandmother, a woman who saw Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg and a few years later packed her things into a covered wagon near Reading, Pennsylvania, and walked beside it all the way to the western Ozarks of Missouri. She knew something of hard travel, and that could be why she especially liked a quilt pattern commonly known as “wandering foot” or “turkey tracks.” It has at least two other names: “flying swallows” and “flying corners.” You can readily see all those images in the pattern.

For each of her first three grandchildren, she made quilts of wandering feet until the death of the youngest, a World War II airman whose plane was brought down over Holland by Third Reich flak — what one could call flying corners of steel. Thereafter, she changed to “snail” or “basket” patterns for the last three grandchildren, her designs becoming ever more ones of security and stasis.

Some years ago I came upon a batch of my father’s photographs in an old two-drawer, wooden cigar box that still smelled of tobacco. The pictures were curling up as they used to do before synthetic backings. One of them showed a child in a white dress making a wobbly pursuit after a flock of semidomesticated turkeys, a breed feathered in their fine natural colors. On the back was penciled, “Bill’s First Steps.” My father had snapped the picture in 1940 on his grandmother’s farm in the Missouri Ozarks. She was the maker of the quilts, the woman who, thirteen years later at age ninety-four, picked my fourteenth birthday to die on. If you will imagine a kind of spiritual mitochondrial DNA, she is my key link with the nineteenth century for reasons that go beyond the story here, but relevant now are her quilts which to me serve as further evidence of ways the peculiar and the seemingly random — the quoz of a human life — can shape it. We can’t choose our ancestors, but they, often in ways never to be guessed, can select pieces of
our
future.

I asked my parents what was going on in that photo and why I was wearing a dress. My mother quickly said, before my father could concoct a tale about boys dressed like girls, “All little children at that age wore dresses then. It was easier.” She was talking of diaper changes. He said, “You saw those turkeys, and you got up off your hands and knees for the first time, and you went staggering after them. I didn’t see you until I heard the women hollering. Your mother was saying, ‘Look! He’s walking!’ and your aunt was shouting at me, ‘Get holt of that boy before those turkeys flog him!’ They’d flogged your little cousin Marlene the year before, and Uncle Charley took a stick and killed one of them.”