Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (9 page)

While it’s true a crossing of the Great Plains can do things like this to a human mind, my reason for it was to learn how many stories or pieces of them I’ve missed over the years. It was clear: too often I’ve failed to rise above the high-backed booths of my life, show myself, and make an acquaintance. So many quoz awaiting, so many stories overlooked, even avoided. As Thomas Jefferson wrote his daughter Maria when he was concerned about her mental health:

I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it as it goes; and that every person who retires from free communication with [the world] is severely punished afterward by the state of mind into which he gets, and which can only be prevented by feeding our sociable principles.

From 1793 to 1797 I remained closely at home, saw none but those who came there, and at length became very sensible of the ill effect it had upon my own mind, and of its direct and irresistible tendency to render me unfit for society and uneasy when necessarily engaged in it. I felt enough of the effect of withdrawing from the world then, to see that it led to an anti-social and misanthropic state of mind, which severely punishes him who gives in to it: and it will be a lesson I never shall forget as to myself.

Samuel Johnson said it in five words: “Solitude is dangerous to reason.” Jefferson might have added that a democracy dependent upon mutual tolerance and shared concerns cannot long survive without open communication. I can think of no greater reason for taking to the American road.

The Ouachita River, following its mountains, makes an overall run due eastward until it nears Hot Springs where it jogs itself into three abrupt turns as if lost and uncertain which way to head next. The fall of the land decides things for it and sends the river off generally southeasterly, a course it holds until it gives itself (with a change of name near its mouth) over to the Red River a few miles above its juncture with the Mississippi. By the time it makes its last sharp bend below Hot Springs, the Ouachita has left the mountains and, soon enough, even any hills of consequence. In effect, the river, at this point, flows off what was, five-hundred-million years ago, the ancient continental edge of an emergent North America into the great Ouachita Embayment (today called by geologists the Mississippi Embayment of the Gulf Coastal Plain), a massive levelish landscape covering much of the lower South. I have no idea how many local residents realize they’re living on a former sea bottom, although I do know I’ve not yet come upon anyone there who knew, despite that detail being fundamental in shaping their lives.

Beyond the sprawled, multilane strip of franchise businesses at Malvern, the land was rolling pastures broken by pockets of woods; those pastures — having replaced mountain forest — meant the means of earning a living also changed with the landscape, a crucial factor in determining the origin of early settlers, since migrants like to settle in territory reminding them of home. The Ouachita Valley was no longer Ozarkian-Appalachian Arkansas but now rather more expressive of a deeper South where sin lurked in the pasturage and perdition loomed above a fallen land heavy with impending Apocalypse. The Baptists were almost unchallenged, and their church signs carried bold ipse dixits:
REPENT,
or
WHEREVER DEATH FINDS YOU
 — 
ETERNITY KEEPS YOU,
or one interrogative, 
R U REDDY?

I confessed to Q what I was
reddy
for was a “meat and three,” my preference being fried chicken, green beans, black-eyed peas, and greens, with a side of mashed potatoes and cream gravy. A bottle of pepper sauce at hand.

When we crossed to the west bank of the Ouachita, we entered a realm of convivially named communities forming on the map a truncated triangle anchored on the east by the river and centrally linked, perhaps to temper any excessive sociability, by a tributary called the Terre Noire. Within that trapezoid of congeniality were Friendship, Amity, Pleasant Hill, Delight, and Harmony Grove, but lying outside, as if excluded, were Ogemaw and Bodcaw, two pretty good names to keep in mind the next time you entertain a child with a tale of ogres and bogles from a dark land.

I discovered the trapezoid that night in Arkadelphia, a name coined to play not just upon the state but also upon a bit of Greek: an ark of brothers, an arc of friends. We felt the South full upon us.

9

Dunbar’s Spectacles

I
F I TELL YOU OUR QUARTERS THAT NIGHT
 — the best we could come up with — were not far from where the Caddo River disembogues into the wooded Ouachita, and if I say on the next morning we walked across a two-lane road to a little cookhouse of evident longevity serving up a good and freshly prepared meal right down to the yams, you may have an image of rural quaintness to make you regret being, at the moment, an armchair traveler.

Well, those descriptions are true, as is this: the motel was near an exit on Interstate 30 and right next door to the drive-up window of a burger chain boasting its quality with the slogan “Billions and Billions Served.” (In American corporate logic, quantity
is
quality.) So: river juncture / interstate exit; historic café / franchise drive-up.

My thought that morning just north of Arkadelphia was, any eatery holding out against the omnipotence of the world’s largest burger chain across the road might be doing so because of quality based on taste rather than on billions of anything. Perhaps the owner of Bowen’s Restaurant had not yet become a purveyor of box food: grub, amalgamated in Hoboken or Fresno, some kitchen guy dumps from a carton, adds a little water to, gives it a couple of minutes of electronic zapping, and presto!, an entrée typically possessed of a single culinary characteristic — heat. Across a nation of speed-eaters, cooking has often come to mean heating. Even worse than the stuff being not very good is, you’re likely to get a lot of it (quantity
is
quality). Gus Kubitzki, whom you’re getting to know, threatened to open his own cookshack, the Munch & Crunch Lunch, and guarantee his quality with a mea culpa: “If our grub leaves you dissatisfied and yelping, please accept on the house a second helping.”

A traveler in America today must look longer and with less success than a generation ago to find genuine regional food, and its discovery requires cagier research, such as questioning the town pharmacist or librarian, or reading hand-lettered signs advertising church suppers that might get you nothing more than chicken potpie and green Jell-O, but at other times might furnish you with a plate of panfried chicken delivered up by the county’s last living-resident who still knows how to do it, a Presbyterian lady who measures out cream with half an eggshell and in all things culinarily Southern believes the lard will provide.

With such commentary in mind, I’ll now offer not an alternative but an expanded view, drawn from road miles enough to give Q the idea of painting a yellow-striped centerline down the middle of my tombstone. We all know franchising has reduced many a Bert and Betty from owners to employees by sundering their little eggs-over-easy café or their chalkboard-special luncheries, but we can forget that a few good chains (not
always
an oxymoron) have also helped purge the land of many — to use a term no longer common — greasy spoons. It’s easy to romanticize the food of yesteryear while forgetting Ptomaine Ptom’s Ptamale Wagon.

You see, though, this is faint praise. Your own experience may have revealed the
even more
insidious intrusion of box food into places that look for all the world like a genuine local lunchroom; and, indeed, you might observe Bert and Betty in the kitchen. But she is now skilled in the art of microwavery and he’s a peerless pourer who never saw a carton he couldn’t open. At the time I write this, the apotheosis of this trend is the prefried hamburger, but it’s only a question of time before you’ll sit down, if we don’t watch out, to a frozen-and-nuked BLT. I’m working to discover clues to identify such places failing to match up even to chain food, but I’ve come up with only obvious alerts like a door sign warning
MICROWAVE IN USE.
If the barbecue pit isn’t smoking or the grill sizzling, you might as well kiss the ring of the King of Burgers, kneel to the Queen of Dairies, or salute the Colonel of the Fried-Leghorn Regiment.

The Arkadelphia downtown near the courthouse was groomed almost to the point of sterility, as if the churchly folk wanted to cleanse its historic soul of all those trespasses they so often seek forgiveness for in themselves, but in the library of Ouachita Baptist University, Q spotted some escaped remnants from earlier days. There, before our eyes, were several things not just of William Dunbar’s time but once belonging to the man himself, including a few items from his excursion up the Ouachita, all of them unexpected: his compass, thick-lensed spectacles, ink-stained pen with metal nib, and, most remarkably, his logbook of the excursion, a journal that had come to light only months before. A video crew, under the direction of the leading historian of the Forgotten Expedition, Trey Berry, was making a documentary at the site of Dunbar’s Mississippi plantation when, without warning, a man whizzed up on an ATV while the cameras rolled; he dismounted and pulled from a knapsack a worn logbook which, until that moment, historians had thought perished years ago in the fire that destroyed Dunbar’s home. Cameras still running, Berry, then editing a new scholarly edition of the Ouachita journal, opened the book and laid eyes for the first time on William’s original on-the-river text. A weaker scholar might have succumbed right there before the camera.

In the library, as I looked at some of the very words that had drawn Q and me into the valley, I felt I was seeing the tracks the man had left behind for us to follow, and his reality expanded from ghostly to an actual historic presence, physically perceivable: there were his neatly inked sentences set down perhaps by the pen now lying next to the logbook, words brought into focus by the spectacles. I could almost hear Dunbar’s nib scratching across a page:

At 10 h. a.m. our people returned from the hot springs, each giving his own account of the wonderful things he had seen: they were unable to keep the finger a moment in the Water as it issued from the rock; they drank of it after cooling a little and found it very agreeable; some of them thinking that it tasted like Spicewood tea.

Where is the American who has not had the urge to touch the sandal of the Statue of Liberty or buy a wooden seat when the old ballpark got torn down? Isn’t there within us a basic urge to verify the past by tactilely connecting with it?

Q and I went again to the valley road and followed Arkansas 7 through tilled bottomlands that soon disappeared into pinelands, but the Ouachita was visible only from graveled side roads crossing it. Nondescript little houses of the ’60s and ’70s interrupted the forest, and in the opolis of Sparkman, oblivion was being held off for the moment by a new bank and its electronic-sign scrolling out mortgage rates and biblical citations. No moneylender there was going to be driven from the temple.

The road twisted its way on southward to another salvation-and-shekel sign, this one with rhyme seeming to trump reason:
SAVE THE LOST AT ANY COST.
Q eyed me, and I said, although I couldn’t prove it, I had never intended to bankrupt anybody.

Beyond the few houses and trailers clinging to a couple of well-built churches that were Ouachita, Arkansas, the highway entered a broad clear-cut of broken snags and bent saplings. Come see, come saw. The detimbered place was so disabled and wasted it looked like a Mathew Brady photograph of the aftermath of Pickett’s Charge. But, where the forest still remained, small lots opened for homes looked vacuumed rather than mowed, although the tidiness did not get neighborly and extend past one’s own turf to the littered waysides farther along. It was as if the sawed-down forest had taken the hearts out of the residents and turned them inward.

Camden, Arkansas, has that rare topographical feature along the river, a natural landing. Sitting at the head of navigation, it calls itself “The Queen City of the Ouachita,” but it was another sign at the edge of town that brought us to a halt:
HOT BOILED CRAWFISH.
I tried the door. The place was shut up tight, I told a disappointed Q, and probably it was just as well because we were still too far north for good mudbugs. It was too soon.

The best arrivals in a region are those a traveler accomplishes gradually enough to see hints of change — topographic, cultural, culinary — slowly grow from promise to fulfillment, because nothing prepares you for a regional meal any better than a leisurely earned progress, where there’s time for anticipation to whet imagination and appetite. Airplanes allow us to arrive before we’re ready. Do you prefer quick bread or a leavened loaf? Bashed expectations, however small, require distance to play their part in the crescendo leading to a memorable repast: a crawdad shack with a locked door; a barbecue pit with dead embers; a whiff of roasting chiles and a sign:
WON’T BE READY TILL TOMORROW.
Still, the steadfast traveler abides, continues along, and then one evening the door’s not locked, the crab pot’s at boil, and the table’s set. The most grateful eaters, like the most appreciative lovers, have known a heartbreak or two.

We walked the town center near the courthouse. The usual architectural uglifications following World War II had swept in and pillaged the historic facades of almost every building older than a seventeen-year cicada, and that left the place looking neither soundly established nor progressively prosperous; instead, the heart of Camden, as with so many other towns across America, looked exhausted here and mummified there.

But on a corner of the central intersection — instead of a parking lot — was a small park built atop the sepulcher of a former nineteenth-century bank, and on the east, like a giant garden wall, the two-storey side of a commercial building was covered with a large mural. Painted by an artist unafraid of colors mixed into hues just short of shocking, it was an impudence among moribund facades, and, although a somewhat standard compendium of local history from a Ouachita steamboat to a 1957 Dodge, it had excellent proportions and depth. Pictured at its heart, seemingly life-size, was the towered Ouachita Valley Bank once standing on the site, and around it were some forty human figures integrated spatially and racially, many sartorially snazzy. Better than any aluminized facade, the muraled brick wall suggested Camden was open for commerce. The intersection had changed from eyesore to eye-stopper.