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

typically possessed of a single culinary characteristic — heat. Across a nation of speed-eaters, cooking has often come to mean heating. Even worse than the stuff being not very good is, you’re likely to get a lot of it (quantity
is
quality). Gus Kubitzki, whom you’re getting to know, threatened to open his own cookshack, the Munch & Crunch Lunch, and guarantee his quality with a mea culpa: “If our grub leaves you dissatisfied and yelping, please accept on the house a second helping.”
    A traveler in America today must look longer and with less success than a generation ago to find genuine regional food, and its discovery requires cagier research, such as questioning the town pharmacist or librarian, or reading hand-lettered signs advertising church suppers that might get you nothing more than chicken potpie and green Jell-O, but at other times might furnish you with a plate of panfried chicken delivered up by the county’s last living-resident who still knows how to do it, a Presbyterian lady who measures out cream with half an eggshell and in all things culinarily Southern believes the lard will provide.
    With such commentary in mind, I’ll now offer not an alternative but an expanded view, drawn from road miles enough to give Q the idea of painting a yellow-striped centerline down the middle of my tombstone. We all know franchising has reduced many a Bert and Betty from owners to employees by sundering their little eggs-over-easy café or their chalkboard-special luncheries, but we can forget that a few good chains (not
always
an oxymoron) have also helped purge the land of many — to use a term no longer common — greasy spoons. It’s easy to romanticize the food of yesteryear while forgetting Ptomaine Ptom’s Ptamale Wagon.
    You see, though, this is faint praise. Your own experience may have revealed the
even more
insidious intrusion of box food into places that look for all the world like a genuine local lunchroom; and, indeed, you might observe Bert and Betty in the kitchen. But she is now skilled in the art of microwavery and he’s a peerless pourer who never saw a carton he couldn’t open. At the time I write this, the apotheosis of this trend is the prefried hamburger, but it’s only a question of time before you’ll sit down, if we don’t watch out, to a frozen-and-nuked BLT. I’m working to discover clues to identify such places failing to match up even to chain food, but I’ve come up with only obvious alerts like a door sign warning MICROWAVE IN USE. If the barbecue pit isn’t smoking or the grill sizzling, you might as well kiss the ring of the King of Burgers, kneel to the Queen of Dairies, or salute the Colonel of the Fried-Leghorn Regiment.
    The Arkadelphia downtown near the courthouse was groomed almost to the point of sterility, as if the churchly folk wanted to cleanse its historic soul of all those trespasses they so often seek forgiveness for in themselves, but in the library of Ouachita Baptist University, Q spotted some escaped remnants from earlier days. There, before our eyes, were several things not just of William Dunbar’s time but once belonging to the man himself, including a few items from his excursion up the Ouachita, all of them unexpected: his compass, thick-lensed spectacles, ink-stained pen with metal nib, and, most remarkably, his logbook of the excursion, a journal that had come to light only months before. A video crew, under the direction of the leading historian of the Forgotten Expedition, Trey Berry, was making a documentary at the site of Dunbar’s Mississippi plantation when, without warning, a man whizzed up on an ATV while the cameras rolled; he dismounted and pulled from a knapsack a worn logbook which, until that moment, historians had thought perished years ago in the fire that destroyed Dunbar’s home. Cameras still running, Berry, then editing a new scholarly edition of the Ouachita journal, opened the book and laid eyes for the first time