Read Online Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon - Free Book Online
Authors: William Least Heat-Moon
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out.”
Quicker than was good for any man’s mechanical self-esteem, Q succeeded in stacking up a half-dozen fourpenny nails in a way I’d thought impossible ten minutes earlier. This is one of the very things marriage counselors caution against, but men who wed a woman born a tomboy need either to sharpen their mechanical arts or to modify any notion of manly prowess based on contraptions. It may have been the first puzzle that gave our conversation a certain turn before she dismantled the nails to pass them to me and said, “I was taught calculus is a study of approaching limits, and this arrangement of nails is at its limit.” As I failed several times to stack the nails, I was muttering about puzzles and the approaching limits of exasperation. “By the way,” she said, “when we came out of the mountains and right into billboards and litter and sprawl-velopment, I think it was exceeded limits that got to you.”
The evening was taking an untoward lurch into topics — like calculaic theory — that could only increase exasperation. For years, I knew calculus only as what a dentist removes from teeth. The conversation called for something desperate — like politics.
I began talking about the Presidential election coming up that autumn. I said we were going to get an update on how well the nation might be coming along in recognizing approaching limits and comprehending a new calculus both social and environmental. (Knowing my general innumeracy in mathematics, I put myself at risk in using Q’s metaphor.) Across the country there seemed to be confusions, fears of new vulnerabilities, a growing nihilism leaving people neither engaged nor enraged but just paralyzed in the face of corporate mendacity and greed abetted by actions of a reactionary Administration and its Congress. Would the President’s Orwellian politics of manipulated fears continue to encourage a future of mountains bulldozed into gated communities where residents see the demos as demons? Q, the lawyer in her speaking, paraphrased William Sloane Coffin: “People who fear disorder more than injustice will only produce more of both.”
This conversation, which I give only the gist of, was broken several times by the guitarist who’d been playing to an empty tavern until we came in. His gigs were short so he could sit next to Q who is something of a magician in being able to make me disappear right before the very eyes of certain males. I can be having a deep conversation with some guy about his universal joint, and in walks Q: Abracadabra! I’m no longer there. This is not a complaint. For a writer, it can be most useful to become an invisible set of eyes and ears. Technically, it’s known as fly-on-the-wall reporting.
When the musician returned for another song, I told Q that the last time I was on Central Avenue in Hot Springs, the words
gated community
were more likely applied to a stockyard than to a housing development. That visit, years gone, now seemed to exist in a simpler time, but that perception was an illusion created by memory wearing thin — her quilt metaphor — for times are never simpler and the complexities of existence don’t increase; they just change, although perhaps today they arrive faster and give us less time to duck. As an example, I said the complexity of learning how to bring down a bison with a stick and a sharpened stone is no greater than learning how to buy a stuffed bison online. Q said, “So if I have a spear, and a Quapaw woman of 1804 has a laptop with Internet access, she’ll get her buffalo about the same time I’ll get mine?” That was the theory.
Her reference to 1804 was an allusion to our reason for being in the narrow, thermal valley where precisely two centuries before William Dunbar and George Hunter had reconnoitered for a month. Above all else, the explorers were looking for potential resources there and along the Ouachita farther downstream that would produce commodities to
Quicker than was good for any man’s mechanical self-esteem, Q succeeded in stacking up a half-dozen fourpenny nails in a way I’d thought impossible ten minutes earlier. This is one of the very things marriage counselors caution against, but men who wed a woman born a tomboy need either to sharpen their mechanical arts or to modify any notion of manly prowess based on contraptions. It may have been the first puzzle that gave our conversation a certain turn before she dismantled the nails to pass them to me and said, “I was taught calculus is a study of approaching limits, and this arrangement of nails is at its limit.” As I failed several times to stack the nails, I was muttering about puzzles and the approaching limits of exasperation. “By the way,” she said, “when we came out of the mountains and right into billboards and litter and sprawl-velopment, I think it was exceeded limits that got to you.”
The evening was taking an untoward lurch into topics — like calculaic theory — that could only increase exasperation. For years, I knew calculus only as what a dentist removes from teeth. The conversation called for something desperate — like politics.
I began talking about the Presidential election coming up that autumn. I said we were going to get an update on how well the nation might be coming along in recognizing approaching limits and comprehending a new calculus both social and environmental. (Knowing my general innumeracy in mathematics, I put myself at risk in using Q’s metaphor.) Across the country there seemed to be confusions, fears of new vulnerabilities, a growing nihilism leaving people neither engaged nor enraged but just paralyzed in the face of corporate mendacity and greed abetted by actions of a reactionary Administration and its Congress. Would the President’s Orwellian politics of manipulated fears continue to encourage a future of mountains bulldozed into gated communities where residents see the demos as demons? Q, the lawyer in her speaking, paraphrased William Sloane Coffin: “People who fear disorder more than injustice will only produce more of both.”
This conversation, which I give only the gist of, was broken several times by the guitarist who’d been playing to an empty tavern until we came in. His gigs were short so he could sit next to Q who is something of a magician in being able to make me disappear right before the very eyes of certain males. I can be having a deep conversation with some guy about his universal joint, and in walks Q: Abracadabra! I’m no longer there. This is not a complaint. For a writer, it can be most useful to become an invisible set of eyes and ears. Technically, it’s known as fly-on-the-wall reporting.
When the musician returned for another song, I told Q that the last time I was on Central Avenue in Hot Springs, the words
gated community
were more likely applied to a stockyard than to a housing development. That visit, years gone, now seemed to exist in a simpler time, but that perception was an illusion created by memory wearing thin — her quilt metaphor — for times are never simpler and the complexities of existence don’t increase; they just change, although perhaps today they arrive faster and give us less time to duck. As an example, I said the complexity of learning how to bring down a bison with a stick and a sharpened stone is no greater than learning how to buy a stuffed bison online. Q said, “So if I have a spear, and a Quapaw woman of 1804 has a laptop with Internet access, she’ll get her buffalo about the same time I’ll get mine?” That was the theory.
Her reference to 1804 was an allusion to our reason for being in the narrow, thermal valley where precisely two centuries before William Dunbar and George Hunter had reconnoitered for a month. Above all else, the explorers were looking for potential resources there and along the Ouachita farther downstream that would produce commodities to
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