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

on William’s original on-the-river text. A weaker scholar might have succumbed right there before the camera.
    In the library, as I looked at some of the very words that had drawn Q and me into the valley, I felt I was seeing the tracks the man had left behind for us to follow, and his reality expanded from ghostly to an actual historic presence, physically perceivable: there were his neatly inked sentences set down perhaps by the pen now lying next to the logbook, words brought into focus by the spectacles. I could almost hear Dunbar’s nib scratching across a page:
    At 10 h. a.m. our people returned from the hot springs, each giving his own account of the wonderful things he had seen: they were unable to keep the finger a moment in the Water as it issued from the rock; they drank of it after cooling a little and found it very agreeable; some of them thinking that it tasted like Spicewood tea.
    Where is the American who has not had the urge to touch the sandal of the Statue of Liberty or buy a wooden seat when the old ballpark got torn down? Isn’t there within us a basic urge to verify the past by tactilely connecting with it?
    Q and I went again to the valley road and followed Arkansas 7 through tilled bottomlands that soon disappeared into pinelands, but the Ouachita was visible only from graveled side roads crossing it. Nondescript little houses of the ’60s and ’70s interrupted the forest, and in the opolis of Sparkman, oblivion was being held off for the moment by a new bank and its electronic-sign scrolling out mortgage rates and biblical citations. No moneylender there was going to be driven from the temple.
    The road twisted its way on southward to another salvation-and-shekel sign, this one with rhyme seeming to trump reason: SAVE THE LOST AT ANY COST. Q eyed me, and I said, although I couldn’t prove it, I had never intended to bankrupt anybody.
    Beyond the few houses and trailers clinging to a couple of well-built churches that were Ouachita, Arkansas, the highway entered a broad clear-cut of broken snags and bent saplings. Come see, come saw. The detimbered place was so disabled and wasted it looked like a Mathew Brady photograph of the aftermath of Pickett’s Charge. But, where the forest still remained, small lots opened for homes looked vacuumed rather than mowed, although the tidiness did not get neighborly and extend past one’s own turf to the littered waysides farther along. It was as if the sawed-down forest had taken the hearts out of the residents and turned them inward.
    Camden, Arkansas, has that rare topographical feature along the river, a natural landing. Sitting at the head of navigation, it calls itself “The Queen City of the Ouachita,” but it was another sign at the edge of town that brought us to a halt: HOT BOILED CRAWFISH. I tried the door. The place was shut up tight, I told a disappointed Q, and probably it was just as well because we were still too far north for good mudbugs. It was too soon.
    The best arrivals in a region are those a traveler accomplishes gradually enough to see hints of change — topographic, cultural, culinary — slowly grow from promise to fulfillment, because nothing prepares you for a regional meal any better than a leisurely earned progress, where there’s time for anticipation to whet imagination and appetite. Airplanes allow us to arrive before we’re ready. Do you prefer quick bread or a leavened loaf? Bashed expectations, however small, require distance to play their part in the crescendo leading to a memorable repast: a crawdad shack with a locked door; a barbecue pit with dead embers; a whiff of roasting chiles and a sign: WON’T BE READY TILL TOMORROW. Still, the steadfast traveler abides, continues along, and then one evening the door’s not locked, the crab pot’s at boil, and the table’s set. The most grateful eaters, like the most appreciative lovers, have known a heartbreak or two.
    We walked the town center near the