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

rump — was practiced by American Indians in the eighteenth century, I think is not commonly known in this country. At least I was unaware of the long history of the fundamental moon until our morning in Hot Springs when I happened upon a passage in George Hunter’s journal of his 1796 voyage down the Ohio River to Kentucky, a trip he would repeat eight years later on his way south to join Dunbar for their Ouachita excursion.
    I came upon that bookish quoz while Q and I were in an old commercial springhouse, where we were drinking four-thousand-year-old water coming from eight-thousand feet down. It had fallen as rain when humankind, using reeds and damp clay, was teaching itself to write. Drinking the water was like quaffing cool drafts of time. (In that ancient purity from the Valley of Vapors, lunar scientists once protected pieces of the Moon until they could be studied for the presence of alien organisms. But it’s of moons of another sort I speak now.)
    Between quaffs, I read Q this passage from Hunter:
    Yesterday we were met with a large, long keelboat manned with Indians and one white man from the Illinois country laden with skins. They set it up against the stream along the shore with great rapidity and kept time with their setting poles dextrously; I examined them with my spy glass and found them all quite naked except an handkerchief tied round their heads and a breechclout round their middles; as we approached their boat they perceived my Glass and immediately two of them lifted up their breechclout and stuck out their bare Posteriors.
    If you recall his earlier words about soldiers giving him back-sass on the Ouachita, you may conclude the good Scottish apothecary drew scant respect while on American rivers.
    In rambling through the South, I’ve found displays of affability toward a traveler — even a Yankee — to be remarkably widespread. A couple of years ago, I encountered one source for it. I was in a Tennessee café, an old place with high-backed wooden booths — you hardly see them any longer — that gave visual privacy fore and aft. While I waited for a slice of chess pie, a pale, round head slowly appeared above the top of the adjoining booth, rising like a full moon coming up over the horizon. Once fully risen, the face, not yet of school age, examined me closely until I winked. It vanished quickly, only moments later to rise gradually again for further examination, once more ducking down when I crossed my eyes. Again, after a proper pause, it rose above the booth, this time to find a monster expression known to have sent mothers’ boys running to aprons. The face disappeared in a flash. Moments later, another steadily deliberate rising. The boy took stock of me who had now tired of the game. Plotting a new tack, the little guy announced — with pride and as point of information — “I got a humdinger of a penis and two balls.”
    Before I could respond, the small moon of a head got pulled back down, and I heard a woman say, “Thank you for sharing that, Clevenger.”
    The woman, Clevenger’s mother I soon learned, had not scolded the child either for his directness or for addressing a stranger. “His dad and I try to teach our kids to interpret instead of to judge,” she said. They guided Clevenger in learning to evaluate rather than ignore or avoid someone unknown to him, certain he would learn on his own to smooth his conversational gambits. She had not encouraged reticence or excessive caution before a new face in town. He, so I thought, was coming to understand something about words and community that people of the South can manifest so well. Travelers who cannot find impromptu conversations with almost anyone living south of the thirty-eighth parallel would do well to give up the road at once and get themselves to a qualified counselor.
    I should add here that initial conversations in the South are rarely insipidly polite pleasantries to cover over otherwise awkward