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

moved to California, so that today nearly two-thirds of Montgomery County is national forest, and top-of-the-chain wildlife — black bears and pumas — have returned.
    A few years earlier, in one of my rambles through hinterland America, I began noting an increasing number of gravel roads and dead-end lanes, even rural driveways, marked with “street” signs; the day before, I’d seen a two-lane track into a pasture with a sign: WHODATHOTIT ROAD. I interpreted it as commentary on the arrival of 911 emergency service and its requirement to provide identification useful to a fire truck, ambulance, or sheriff. Undoubtedly, some of these names will survive in the sprawling of the nation, as pasture paths get turned into avenues of subdivisions named Highland Heights or Forest Woods and as dead ends get opened and paved into some new Asian auto-plant. Your descendants may one day drive a vehicle assembled on Whodathotit Expressway.
    Since public forums can be difficult for an individual citizen to enter, these road names are an opportunity for expression along state rights-of-way, one second only to vanity license-plates. Two days earlier, we came up behind an overpriced, overpraised, overpowered, oversized, Teutonic vehicle with an overweening license-plate: 4U2NV . I wished ours was 4GETIT . Or better, that one I saw a few years ago: IDGAF (my interpretation begins with “I Don’t Give”). And what about that front plate of 3M-TA3 , a message taking on new meaning in a rearview mirror?
    At Pencil Bluff, a T intersection with a cluster of homes and a scatter of businesses — propane distributor, church, gas station, highway-department depot — we pulled up at Hop’s Store, a new building where any character of place had to come from a character walking through the door. I did my part. Inside was a man exceptional in his blandness, a fellow more of shrugs than sentences, who answered a couple of my questions by only raising his shoulders. I asked — my fourth question — why the hamlet was called Pencil Bluff. At that, he actually spoke: “I don’t have any idea.” His interest in the question likely matched his curiosity about counted cross-stitch or bookbinding or linear algebra. Then he shrugged
and
spoke: “Before my time,” he mumbled, as if a man can be expected to know only what occurs during his life.
    My practice on the road when I ask such questions is to present them resoundingly so that others may hear; in piscatorial terms, it’s the difference between casting a dry fly and throwing a net — the chances of hauling in
something
increase. On occasion it works, and it did then in Pencil Bluff (once Sock City; why, I didn’t learn). A smiling customer standing to the side whom I’d not noticed before, an oldster so long exposed to the sky he wasn’t tanned so much as simply discolored, offered an answer, his solution corrected and expanded on by the cook making sandwiches at the grill. “Out on the river,” she said, “that’s the bluff, and it’s all slate rock where people here used to get their writing stuff for school. Back in the
Dee
pression.” Communal memory now primed, a woman whose face lighted at the chance to inform said, “It’s out there at the preacher’s hole. The old baptism pool.” And that aroused the shrugging man to speak yet again, his memory opening at last: “There’s big catfish and brim out there in that hole. Durin Lula Jo Parson’s baptism, a catfish swum plumb between her legs, and she took a-hollerin, ‘Hallelujah! Hallelujah! The hand of the Lord’s full on me!’”
    I asked where the bluff was, but the directions needed enough clarification that the sunned man said, “It’s easier if I just show you.” He took his sack of sandwiches, and we followed him to his pickup; on the tailgate was one of those little chromed-plastic icthyoidal emblems evangelicals stick to the back end of their vehicles, those fundamentalist fishes so often