Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon

generally southeasterly, a course it holds until it gives itself (with a change of name near its mouth) over to the Red River a few miles above its juncture with the Mississippi. By the time it makes its last sharp bend below Hot Springs, the Ouachita has left the mountains and, soon enough, even any hills of consequence. In effect, the river, at this point, flows off what was, five-hundred-million years ago, the ancient continental edge of an emergent North America into the great Ouachita Embayment (today called by geologists the Mississippi Embayment of the Gulf Coastal Plain), a massive levelish landscape covering much of the lower South. I have no idea how many local residents realize they’re living on a former sea bottom, although I do know I’ve not yet come upon anyone there who knew, despite that detail being fundamental in shaping their lives.
    Beyond the sprawled, multilane strip of franchise businesses at Malvern, the land was rolling pastures broken by pockets of woods; those pastures — having replaced mountain forest — meant the means of earning a living also changed with the landscape, a crucial factor in determining the origin of early settlers, since migrants like to settle in territory reminding them of home. The Ouachita Valley was no longer Ozarkian-Appalachian Arkansas but now rather more expressive of a deeper South where sin lurked in the pasturage and perdition loomed above a fallen land heavy with impending Apocalypse. The Baptists were almost unchallenged, and their church signs carried bold ipse dixits: REPENT, or WHEREVER DEATH FINDS YOU  —  ETERNITY KEEPS YOU, or one interrogative,  R U REDDY?
    I confessed to Q what I was
reddy
for was a “meat and three,” my preference being fried chicken, green beans, black-eyed peas, and greens, with a side of mashed potatoes and cream gravy. A bottle of pepper sauce at hand.
    When we crossed to the west bank of the Ouachita, we entered a realm of convivially named communities forming on the map a truncated triangle anchored on the east by the river and centrally linked, perhaps to temper any excessive sociability, by a tributary called the Terre Noire. Within that trapezoid of congeniality were Friendship, Amity, Pleasant Hill, Delight, and Harmony Grove, but lying outside, as if excluded, were Ogemaw and Bodcaw, two pretty good names to keep in mind the next time you entertain a child with a tale of ogres and bogles from a dark land.
    I discovered the trapezoid that night in Arkadelphia, a name coined to play not just upon the state but also upon a bit of Greek: an ark of brothers, an arc of friends. We felt the South full upon us.

9
    Dunbar’s Spectacles
    I F I TELL YOU OUR QUARTERS THAT NIGHT  — the best we could come up with — were not far from where the Caddo River disembogues into the wooded Ouachita, and if I say on the next morning we walked across a two-lane road to a little cookhouse of evident longevity serving up a good and freshly prepared meal right down to the yams, you may have an image of rural quaintness to make you regret being, at the moment, an armchair traveler.
    Well, those descriptions are true, as is this: the motel was near an exit on Interstate 30 and right next door to the drive-up window of a burger chain boasting its quality with the slogan “Billions and Billions Served.” (In American corporate logic, quantity
is
quality.) So: river juncture / interstate exit; historic café / franchise drive-up.
    My thought that morning just north of Arkadelphia was, any eatery holding out against the omnipotence of the world’s largest burger chain across the road might be doing so because of quality based on taste rather than on billions of anything. Perhaps the owner of Bowen’s Restaurant had not yet become a purveyor of box food: grub, amalgamated in Hoboken or Fresno, some kitchen guy dumps from a carton, adds a little water to, gives it a couple of minutes of electronic zapping, and presto!, an entrée