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

silences as they can be in, to pick a place, Hennepin County, Minnesota. Talk in Dixie is built on personal details, not usually egocentric bloviations but rather narrative particulars: the cottonmouth story, Cousin Otho’s DWI arrest, reasons for the divorce, exactly why Flobelle’s corn bread is good. A rural Southern waitress is, by assumption if not definition, a conversationalist. Within moments, the sojourner is likely to learn her marital status, her children’s names, the mood of the cook, the quality of the preacher’s last sermon. When I’m in a Southern eatery, if I learn any less than all that before the hoppin John arrives, I assume I’ve been scowling about corporate malfeasance, or maybe it was just that turnip pie or the peanuts in the RC Cola not sitting quite right.
    During those hours I find myself alone on a long and numbing interstate highway, to speed the miles, I may retell the best story I heard that morning as a way of remembering it; or, when I’ve failed to find one, in desperation I might take up some question that could be seen as a precursor to mental unhinging. On a road across North Dakota a few years ago — do not judge me on this unless you’ve driven through North Dakota a half-dozen times — I began wondering how many people I’d meet if I lived to be fourscore and ten. I defined a “meeting” in the simplest terms: a face-to-face exchange containing a clear, if momentary, recognition between me and another. It could range from a hello, a wave, even a drive-by mooning, to a lifelong friendship (which counts as only a single meeting). Because the chance for error was so great and I wanted a high number, I tried to err on the side of a generous total. My high school had about eighteen-hundred students, so I tallied each one. You get the idea. I enumerated through my years, summing as I went, and what I came up with surprised me: only about a hundred-thousand people over ninety years. Then I reckoned — this was just guessing — that of those encounters, more than ninety-nine thousand were pleasant or at least neutral.
    While it’s true a crossing of the Great Plains can do things like this to a human mind, my reason for it was to learn how many stories or pieces of them I’ve missed over the years. It was clear: too often I’ve failed to rise above the high-backed booths of my life, show myself, and make an acquaintance. So many quoz awaiting, so many stories overlooked, even avoided. As Thomas Jefferson wrote his daughter Maria when he was concerned about her mental health:
    I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it as it goes; and that every person who retires from free communication with [the world] is severely punished afterward by the state of mind into which he gets, and which can only be prevented by feeding our sociable principles.
    From 1793 to 1797 I remained closely at home, saw none but those who came there, and at length became very sensible of the ill effect it had upon my own mind, and of its direct and irresistible tendency to render me unfit for society and uneasy when necessarily engaged in it. I felt enough of the effect of withdrawing from the world then, to see that it led to an anti-social and misanthropic state of mind, which severely punishes him who gives in to it: and it will be a lesson I never shall forget as to myself.
    Samuel Johnson said it in five words: “Solitude is dangerous to reason.” Jefferson might have added that a democracy dependent upon mutual tolerance and shared concerns cannot long survive without open communication. I can think of no greater reason for taking to the American road.
    The Ouachita River, following its mountains, makes an overall run due eastward until it nears Hot Springs where it jogs itself into three abrupt turns as if lost and uncertain which way to head next. The fall of the land decides things for it and sends the river off