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

in the hand.
    Except for the excellent map drawn up from their survey notations about the large and navigable but uncharted Ouachita, the expedition results were small compared to other Jeffersonian explorations, and both men realized their accomplishment was limited, although they — especially the younger Hunter, who outlived Dunbar — became nationally known as a result of the excursion. Upon his return in 1805, Dunbar wrote Jefferson: “The objects which have presented themselves to us are not of very high importance; it must however be acknowledged that the hot springs are indeed a great natural curiosity.” And Hunter told the Secretary of War of his regret the “course was not through a mineral country” and of a wish his “profession might have been more usefully employed.” When the Grand Excursion, in something close to its original conception, set off at last in 1806, both Dunbar and Hunter declined to join it. Thirty years later George Featherstonhaugh, an English immigrant and a federally dispatched geologist, arrived in the Ouachita country to examine the hot springs; without mentioning names, he wrote in his report, “Certainly no man should be presumed a geologist merely because he is a learned chemist or a profound mathematician.”
    The reconstituted expedition, led by Thomas Freeman in 1806, got turned back by the Spanish along the Red River near what is now Texarkana, Arkansas, and was unable to fulfill Jefferson’s plan of fully exploring the Red and Arkansas rivers. So, even including Dunbar and Hunter’s Ouachita voyage, these southern excursions all add up to something useful to territorial expansion but scarcely to anything “grand.”
    That particular historic outcome in no way discouraged Q and me from our objective in following the Ouachita Valley; in fact, Dunbar’s limited success, which helped it become the “Forgotten Expedition,” added an element of intrigue to our path. Not far from Maxine’s Puzzle Bar lay the only diamond mine in the world open to the public. It’s not a shaft but a plowed field where one can lay down a few bucks and take a shovel out into the scrapings and likely turn up, if anything, a yellow or brown diamond in the rough the size of that filling in Uncle Ted’s molar. Such diamond-hunting was an exercise reflective of the excursion we were on: scratching about among tailings of those before us in hopes of coming upon a gem of a quoz to adorn a chamber of memory, a quilt of remembrance.
    Poor Q: I was on the other side of her, saying that if Dunbar and Hunter, penetrating the heavy forests of Arkansas, could choose a license-plate slogan intended to drum up fungible-producing activity in the heavily wooded territory, theirs might be COME SEE, COME SAW. Jefferson himself — and certainly the highly entrepreneurial George Washington — would approve, for they both wanted the land surveyed and opened to the ends of an agrarian society, the far-reaching results of which would prove the undoing of Jefferson’s social and economic model.
    To read the expedition journals of Dunbar and Hunter is to realize the last thing the men wanted was a “natural state” — that is, nature in its own state. Rather, they came to open the great wilderness cache of more than eight-hundred-thousand square miles Jefferson had just bought from the king of France for three cents an acre (four cents after finance charges), and they were there to gather knowledge and specimens to assist even greater extractions. They returned with latitudes and longitudes, with wild cabbages and oilstones and swanskins, all things leading, in their own ways, to a pair of red panties above my head and a baseball player pointing heavenward. Not to mention a guy saying to my wife, “If a jock can pray for a home run, I can pray to know your name,” and she answering, “Blondie Bumstead.”

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    High-Backed Booths
    T HAT MOONING  — the public presentation of an uncloaked human