Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon Read Free Book Online

other names even more worthy of eccentric distinction: Greasy Corner, Chanticleer, Figure Five, Number Nine, Whisp, Twist, Wild Cherry, Possum Grape, Oil Trough, Seaton Dump. In a state where alcoholically “dry” counties abound, there’s Beverage Town and Gin City, neither name referring to ardent spirits. Since the state university mascot is a boar, you’ll not be surprised to find there Hogeye and Hog Jaw, communities (so the names suggest) apparently lacking a chamber of commerce. Elsewhere, you can imagine the waggery proceeding from a certain concatenation of towns along a northern slope of the Ouachitas between Needmore and Blue Ball, near Nella and Nola, with Harvey lying between them (all these south of Kingdoodle Knob).
    On its official road-map, the Arkansas Highway Department shows almost fifteen hundred “cities, towns, and communities,” and on that list, Ouachita stands out because it is one of a few Indian names in a place with a human presence reaching back thousands of years before the arrival of McDougals, Delaneys, and Ludwigs. An Arkansas gazetteer index reveals no towns named Quapaw (from which the name Arkansas likely descends) or Tula or Tunica. To the founders of the state, it seems, those peoples never were.
    The Ouachita River contributed to that erasure when steamboats brought hundreds of tribal Americans upriver as far as a vessel could ascend and put them ashore to follow the valleys on westward into the “permanent Indian Country.” That’s a tale not of wandering feet but of the forced relocation proposed by Andrew Jackson (Jefferson and Monroe had considered it also) and approved by Congress with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Quapaw went no farther west than required and settled across the Arkansas line in the northeast corner of the Indian Territory on land holding unknown mineral resources that eventually yielded them significant wealth.
    As Q and I followed the descent of the Ouachita off its generating mountain, we came into a valley open enough to push the ridges to the horizon. In places, trees growing close to the highway removed the hills from sight altogether, and there the flow of the river slackened as it widened from a creek to braided shallows a hundred yards across. To the north rose broad-backed mountains, but on the south they were serrations seeming to betoken a different territory.
    State Route 88 was a road I’d for years wanted to travel, not because of the river but because along it, in an orderly spacing like words on a page, are the settlements of Ink, Pencil Bluff, and Story; and to the north in the Ouachitas is Magazine, and southward in the river valley is Reader. Considering my method of writing, driving through that territory gave new meaning to
auto
biography: I write a first draft in pencil, the second in ink from a fountain pen, and only thereafter do I enter the realm of binary digits (although six drafts — three-thousand pages — of my first book came
tickity-tick-tick
out of a typewriter). From that archaic process, this pencil pusher, this ink dribbler, hopes to leave you, the reader, with a story or two.
    To me, the Ouachita Valley was a writer’s paragon of a riverine course as it lured us on with a quoz here and there that became memoranda-book entries to turn into full texts to send on to you in your easy chair so that one of you somewhere, sometime may write me and point out my overlooking something like Scribblers Corner or Oghamville or Wordmonger City.
    The river changed from a pellucid mountain-stream to wide water the color of faded olive-drab Army fatigues, but we saw more of the tributary creeks crossing under Route 88 than the tree-fringed Ouachita itself, and that was acceptable since we were not in pursuit of it but rather its valley. At Ink, where we stopped so I could take a snapshot of the “town” sign, even before I could push the shutter button, a man pulled up to offer a ride, a gesture reminding me of a