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

sentence with inarguable logic I’d heard on the mountain about the lower valley: “People are people down there.”
    In 1887, citizens at the Ink crossroads gathered to petition for a post office, requesting their settlement be officially named Melon only to be turned down, for reasons unknown to me, although I suggest the possibility someone just might have found the name too silly; after all, wasn’t Tomato, Arkansas, enough? A tale I like but am skeptical of holds that the second ballot to select a name contained the direction to WRITE IN INK , so residents did, and they got their PO, one that closed eighty years later. The fellow who offered me the ride said, “They must’ve wrote in disappearing ink.”
    The afternoon Q and I were there, Ink was a few houses scattered around a road intersection and a church cemetery with a solidly squat pyramid of native rock seeming to mark more the presence of Ink than any particular former citizen’s grave. Unlike their post office, the pyramid, as inextirpable as they could make it, was intended for the ages.
    The officialdom of Arkansas calls such settlements “communities,” but the few residents of Ink, even more loosely, will use the word
town
which it surely is not, any more than “Y” City — nine miles north — is a city. (Is there another American hamlet or town with a single letter and quotation marks in its name? Incidentally, given the half-dozen scattered houses near the three-way intersection, a more accurate name would be T “City.” While I’m asking, is there another American town with two hyphens besides Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey?)
    Except for New Englanders, Americans have largely turned away from the apt and pleasant words
village
and
hamlet
and are today more likely to call these unincorporations
hick towns
or
hoosiervilles
or
jerkwaters
or, more kindly,
whistle-stops
(there is, in fact, a Whistleville, Arkansas), all descriptions not likely to endear an outsider to the natives. My word for such settlements, when they are free of charm or attractiveness, is
unincorptons,
a term lacking, as they do, any allure. Not long ago in Opolis, Kansas, where anything metro was clearly missing, Q suggested that very name could be a useful generic term, and she especially liked it in the plural — rhyming with Thermopylae — as in “The opoli of Arkansas are many, but few are quaint.” I’ve come to like it myself.
    We passed a pole sign salvaged, it appeared, from an abandoned gas station and repainted with an arrow pointing toward the river: LITTLE HOPE BAPTIST CHURCH . (Q: “Our Lady of the Holy Negativity.”) A year earlier in eastern Arkansas, as I was photographing a sign for the HOLY GHOST DISTURBED CHURCH, the pastor came out, disturbed by my snapshooting, and made clear he had scant interest in explaining whether any other local disturbances lay in the Ghost, the church, or his brain.
    On a recent visit to my boyhood hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, Q was taken with the name Country Club Christian Church. I mentioned to her the proposal by Gus Kubitzki (whose name you now recognize, a man known more for professions of sarcasm than faith) that the CCCC folk, in their posh area, were on to something: Why not organize congregations by avocations? The First Church of Latter-Day Duck Hunters? The Reorganized Assembly of United Numismatists? The Full Gospel Guiding Fellowship of Gossips? Sharing divinity among people of like interests would surely be more communal than having the golfer praying next to the skier, the teetotalist beside the oenophile. Gus held that shoulder-to-shoulder prayers focused toward similar wishes would be more fervid and — hence — efficacious: give us this day our daily duck. *
    Arkansas 88 rolled through an area formerly cotton fields and moonshine hollows until the Depression and poor agricultural practices in the pale-orange soil took their tolls. Many residents sold their land to the federal government and