Read Online Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: William Least Heat-Moon
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yield fungibles. Unlike Lewis and Clark, the two Scottish immigrants showed scarce interest in anything beyond material resources, and it seemed to me that, could the men join us in a wee dram, their view of a gated community and its implications might not accord with mine. After all, the Hot Springs of our time produces fungibles that surely surpass their imaginings. Further, Dunbar was a wealthy owner of slaves (fungible) and a large plantation raising cotton (fungible); Hunter was a frequent speculator in realty (fungible) who also dabbled in distilling whiskey (fungible) and engaged from time to time in quests for valuable ores (fungible). In fact, Thomas Jefferson’s instructions to Dunbar for the exploration up the Ouachita cautioned him to discourage Hunter from turning the voyage into a hunt for gold and silver.
Remarkable it would be if Dunbar envisioned what now lay outside the tavern door, and that implied incapacity in me to envision what, two centuries distant, would lie out there along Central Avenue (other than surely Elvis will yet live). One day, readers of this sentence will know the answer, and so to them, I pass along that question with the hope the refusal of my generation to imagine consequences has not got them into a real pickle.
I had to wonder: What would William and George say about the Valley of Vapors which they knew as a place empty of people and containing only a couple of derelict log-huts used seasonally by trappers seeking the healing waters? Would the fungibles brought in by gates and T-shirts, mineral waters, and visitors sipping in a tavern bestrung with crimson lingerie fulfill their hopes for what their explorations would open? Men of the old mechanical arts as they both were, would they see the arrival of a technological nation as inevitable, one that would necessarily doom ways of living the territory had sustained for ten-thousand years? And would they believe technology and its concomitant abuses of lands and human spirits were also inevitable? Was Hot Springs, Arkansas, two centuries after their visit, anything like what they had in mind? Did they consider anything beyond the extractive phase? Did they ever try to reckon consequences?
At that point in our conversation, the television replayed a spring-training home run by one of those jocks who points heavenward when he crosses the plate. I was paying no attention to the game until the admiring guitarist offered up to Q another aperçu intended to manifest his masculinely profound mind, this one on the role of possible celestial interest in the outcome of a small, horsehide sphere meeting an ash shaft. He said, “If God is spending time getting fly balls over a fence, no wonder this world is so screwed up.”
Almost a hundred miles from Maxine’s Coffeehouse and Puzzle Bar rise the headwaters of the Ouachita — although in 1804, before engineers tinkered with the river, the distance was greater — but Dunbar and Hunter went no farther upstream than Hot Springs. President Jefferson’s original plan called for Dunbar to lead an expedition up to the source of the Arkansas, where the contingent would portage to the presumed nearby location of the wellspring of the Red River and descend it to its juncture with the Mississippi not far downstream from “The Forest,” Dunbar’s plantation a little south of Natchez. As an idea, it was fully Jeffersonian in its logical neatness. But the American West eats up logic and neatness, as it does those whose ignorance of the region causes them to misjudge and fail to live within its limits.
The headwaters of the Arkansas and Red rivers are not a portage away from each other unless you call four-hundred miles a portage, but it would be some years until any white man of influence would learn that detail. Not long before the Grand Excursion, as Jefferson called this southern counterpart to the expedition of Lewis and Clark, was to set forth, another detail of the American West arose.
Remarkable it would be if Dunbar envisioned what now lay outside the tavern door, and that implied incapacity in me to envision what, two centuries distant, would lie out there along Central Avenue (other than surely Elvis will yet live). One day, readers of this sentence will know the answer, and so to them, I pass along that question with the hope the refusal of my generation to imagine consequences has not got them into a real pickle.
I had to wonder: What would William and George say about the Valley of Vapors which they knew as a place empty of people and containing only a couple of derelict log-huts used seasonally by trappers seeking the healing waters? Would the fungibles brought in by gates and T-shirts, mineral waters, and visitors sipping in a tavern bestrung with crimson lingerie fulfill their hopes for what their explorations would open? Men of the old mechanical arts as they both were, would they see the arrival of a technological nation as inevitable, one that would necessarily doom ways of living the territory had sustained for ten-thousand years? And would they believe technology and its concomitant abuses of lands and human spirits were also inevitable? Was Hot Springs, Arkansas, two centuries after their visit, anything like what they had in mind? Did they consider anything beyond the extractive phase? Did they ever try to reckon consequences?
At that point in our conversation, the television replayed a spring-training home run by one of those jocks who points heavenward when he crosses the plate. I was paying no attention to the game until the admiring guitarist offered up to Q another aperçu intended to manifest his masculinely profound mind, this one on the role of possible celestial interest in the outcome of a small, horsehide sphere meeting an ash shaft. He said, “If God is spending time getting fly balls over a fence, no wonder this world is so screwed up.”
Almost a hundred miles from Maxine’s Coffeehouse and Puzzle Bar rise the headwaters of the Ouachita — although in 1804, before engineers tinkered with the river, the distance was greater — but Dunbar and Hunter went no farther upstream than Hot Springs. President Jefferson’s original plan called for Dunbar to lead an expedition up to the source of the Arkansas, where the contingent would portage to the presumed nearby location of the wellspring of the Red River and descend it to its juncture with the Mississippi not far downstream from “The Forest,” Dunbar’s plantation a little south of Natchez. As an idea, it was fully Jeffersonian in its logical neatness. But the American West eats up logic and neatness, as it does those whose ignorance of the region causes them to misjudge and fail to live within its limits.
The headwaters of the Arkansas and Red rivers are not a portage away from each other unless you call four-hundred miles a portage, but it would be some years until any white man of influence would learn that detail. Not long before the Grand Excursion, as Jefferson called this southern counterpart to the expedition of Lewis and Clark, was to set forth, another detail of the American West arose.
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