Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey

by William Least Heat-Moon

  While Tuffy opened the bottles and tried to match varieties to each of us, I looked around the garage for the something: surely it wasn’t the vehicles or basketballs or mower or the three pairs of rubber boots or the — hold it. What’s that thing on the wall above the Wellingtons? Something related to his picket-fence flag? Of similar size and shape, this one made of two planks, riddled with blackened nail punctures, two vertical smears of yellowed white paint, the right side with a jagged hole:

  The Parishes watched me stare at it, and when I turned to them, their faces revealed I’d found the something. I said I knew I was seeing an oddity but I didn’t know what the oddity was. Tuffy said, “You mentioned an interest in river history, and that’s a piece of Ouachita history made out of cypress.”

  I said I was going to need some help. He explained how in using components of the 1830s home to build his new one, he’d uncovered original planked walls, two exterior ones and two inside, all with a similar hole broken through them. The peculiarity was that the puncture in the front wall, the one facing the river, was much lower than the hole at the back; then he noticed all four breachings were in parallel walls and aligned at an ascending angle, with a base that had to be down on the water. Then he understood: the perforations marked the trajectory of a cannonball fired from river level, one likely from a Union gunboat during the Ouachita campaign. He found no other damage, so he cut out the planks around the four holes and turned them into hanging sculpture.

  But why only one shot? “I think it was a warning, because a battery here did fire on the fleet,” he said. “Maybe somebody up here at the house took a potshot at them.” The cannonball reportedly ended up in a field a half mile away.

  Parish passed a beer to each of us, a good thing since I’ve long believed calling-card cannonballs shot clean through a parlor a signal invitation to — if not a prayer — then at least a toast celebrating everyone who’s still alive to raise a glass. I said something along the lines of On behalf of Admiral Porter, may I tardily apologize for such an uncivil action against a domicile. And we drank to that. Then Q raised a second toast: “To that grand old Ouachita and all the wandering feet that reach her shores, long may she wave up!” And we drank to that too.

  II.

  Into the Southeast

  Into the Southeast

  Doing What They Hadn’t Ort to Do

  1.A Quoz of Conviviums

  2.The Black Lagoon

  3.Arrows That Flieth by Day

  4.Dead Man Stream

  5.Road to Nowhere

  6.Bales of Square Mullet

  7.A Taste of Manatee

  8.Playground for the Rich and Famous

  9.In There Own Sweat

  10.The Truth About Bobbie Cheryl

  Doing What They Hadn’t Ort to Do

  Steinhatchee has always been a close-knit community and isolated in as much as it is off the beaten path. The people are independent, resourceful, and filled with pride. All of this is a definite asset if one lives in an isolated, rough territory. But many others have taken advantage of this isolation to use it for hiding from the law or doing something they hadn’t ort to do.

  Many old timers wish for better times and hope someday to be rid of the reputation that had spread far and wide. As the nation becomes over-populated, we need these off-the-beaten-path places to renew our lives and spirit from the rat race of daily living.

  —Elsie Lee Adams,

  Steinhatchee River Falls,

  1991

  1

  A Quoz of Conviviums

  THE NEXT LEG OF THE JOURNEY began in 1969 in Columbia, Missouri, and the source of it was an utter concoction created by my close friend Motier DuQuince Davis. We were then undergoing the academic abuse attendant with getting a doctoral degree in English literature. As PhD candidates, we called ourselves Phuds. Mo and I were pushing thirty, married, and had served our required stints in the military — he in the Army (where he learned to do a parachute-landing fall, and with enough malted relaxant would demonstrate) and I on an aircraft carrier.

  All that is to say we had experience enough to recognize professional hazing, even when disguised by tradition and open acceptance. Although the college was rich with teachers who gave meaning to the term human studies, we happened to fall into a cadre of inflated, neurotic, pluckless, costive-spirited literature professors who possessed a single skill: they could read artfully assembled words and spin out interpretations. If any youthful moisture of soul remained in them, it had turned to mildew. The range of their dry-hearted, withered passions ran only from annoyance to worry, with every petty stage between and nothing beyond. Genuine emotions were only topics in their lecture notes, where they could discourse safely on the rage of King Lear, the suicidal despair of Ophelia, the jollity of Falstaff. Yet it was those sciolists, those hollow Prufrocks never daring to wear their trousers rolled, who dictated our lives, and we dispiritedly acquiesced by assuming our eventual end at some quiet liberal-arts college would justify our acceptance of their means. We fools, as my friend called us, managed such delusion through spineless mutterings over mugs of cheap draft-beer.

  Early one evening, several of us sat in a bar on Broadway in Columbia. Among us was an angular, sinewy student, younger than either Mo or I and innocent of military experience, full of repressed resentment and given to sudden and sometimes violent expressions of it, all of them prudently beyond the oversight of the professors. As the beer began to rile him, he said, “Tonight I’m going to find a fight or a fuck.” Mo, always of calm facade even if turbulent beneath, said, “Sonny, you got yourself there a pretty fair country-western song.” The kid shrugged. “Why not?” he said. “What are we but graduate-school rednecks? Who are we kidding?” He was working himself toward the fighting rather than the other. “What motivates us isn’t a professor. It isn’t even literature. It’s the fantasy of a future professorship. So here we sit in a college-boy bar when we ought to be swinging a pool cue at somebody in a Cracker tavern.”

  Mo, who grew up in Macon, Georgia, said, “Bobbie Cheryl’s Anchor Inn. Outside Davidson, North Carolina. It’s an old roadhouse, falling down the hill into the creek. Men’s toilet’s got no door.” What was he talking about? “Above the bar there’s a ratty stuffed boar’s head wearing a Tar Heel necktie. The floor sags from two generations of dancing feet. There’s a fist hole in the wall above the urinal, but swinging a pool cue will get you tossed out. But you’re not going to find any doctoral candidates in there and no associate professors trying to snuggle up in a rickety hideaway with a coed their daughter’s age.”

  How many words do we hear in our lifetime that are inconsequential flotsam immediately washed out of our lives to leave behind nothing, not even a residue? On the other hand, how many ordinary utterances — lacking apparent significance and free of indications they will survive beyond a moment or two — are there that seem to vanish, yet in some way resurface later, ready at last to shift a life? Bobbie Cheryl’s Anchor Inn — four words — did just that to me, but I had no awareness of its implications for a third of a century. I was blind, in nautical lingo, to Mo’s hook well-set in a hard bottom. I could recognize a metaphor on a printed page but not one in my life.

  His précis of the Anchor Inn put me in it: I could see the red-neon anchor flickering in the window, and on a wall the name spelled out in a script of old ropes, and the back door held closed with barbed wire. I could hear pieces of conversations about deer hunting, women, government regulations, tractors, women, crankshafts, women, football, wives, death. I could imagine us there in front of Bobbie Cheryl herself: she in midlife, married three times and not again, missing a couple of incisors, chain-smoking, tattooed in a time when women had no tattoos, tolerating neither loud cussing nor putting your head down on the bar.

  The Anchor Inn was, surely, a rendezvous of men — and a few women — wearing fertilizer and implement-company billed caps, who let fly with whatever might be going on beneath those hats, their sentenc
es pungent and without pretense and rarely free of egregious solecisms. In the Anchor, a fellow like me would be tolerated and allowed to listen in as long as he kept his education to himself. A fair exchange.

  Such a place had to be empty of vicarious life; it was an out-county dive, a crossroads tavern both in its topographical location and in its people gathered for conviviality. Despite the literariness of the High Professorhood running our lives, those men, several of them failed seminarians, would not deign to recognize the etymological relation between tavern and tabernacle. In their recently resecularized view, a trivial beer-joint could never be a house of Communion.

  The ancient Romans, heathens to the new Christians, had a word for the Anchor Inn: convivium, a place of wine and song and conversations on matters requiring no decisions of consequence. Bobbie Cheryl’s, I was sure, was full of what our lives lacked because it wasn’t found on a written page; rather it was a place where we might find firsthand stories to put on a written page. It was the difference between secondary and primary sources.

  That night, so long ago, my friend’s talk of the Anchor Inn started a voyage for all of us, although several soon gave it up along the way. We talked how sometime we’d go together to Bobbie Cheryl’s to celebrate our graduation from Phuddom and our release into a world not drawn from fiction but from actuality. After that night, for me at least, the Anchor Inn became archetypal and legendary, and — I see now — it helped carry me on through and smack out of academia. I think these very sentences — and likely most of the others I’ve written over the last quarter century — wouldn’t exist without that anchor of a roadhouse and its promise of convivium. Bobbie Cheryl sang a siren song that for years I could only hum because I didn’t understand the words.

  But I’m getting ahead here.

  Mo and I both eventually emerged with our Phudentials which in the end proved useless in those years when teaching jobs in our field all but evaporated. He joined the advertising department of a large Southern insurance company and earned a good salary, more than he ever would have from any imagined life dispensing nimble conspectuses to enraptured undergraduates. I continued to spiral down for some time, even after I hit the road to pursue stories of a kind the Anchor Inn surely was full of. Mo earned enough among the underwriters and adjusters to buy a thirty-seven-foot sloop and become a blue-water sailor whenever he could escape the office; he no longer needed an Anchor Inn, to confuse my metaphor, to buoy him. As for me, I underwrote my writing with a job clerking in the county courthouse and, later, one hoisting things on a loading dock, and yet another delivering bundles of newspapers in the wee hours. But always, I knew, out there somewhere in America were the Anchor Inns, the Dew Drop Inns, and all those taps owned by all those Shortys and Luckys.

  Not long ago, when the Ouachita was still flowing fresh through my life, I received a letter from Mo saying he’d left the insurance office with enough in a retirement account to free him at last to write, and he was eager to pursue a book about the vanishing watermen’s taverns along the Florida Gulf Coast. He’d met an artist who was ready to paint watercolors of what he hoped to find. His letter suggested a quest was key to his idea. The taverns, lying at the end of roads stopping at a waterfront, avoided advertising, and in effect put themselves in secret locations, allowing patrons the joy of discovery. He was anxious to start right away, before the dwindling places vanished entirely. In his letter I saw the promise of a quoz of conviviums. At his side, I’d follow his tracks.

  2

  The Black Lagoon

  Q AND I STARTED for the Florida Panhandle south of Tallahassee. There we were to meet Davis. At sunset on a Sunday we came into a landscape of subterranean percolations of water rising through limestone to form rivers and creeks and lakes, only to, as if having seen enough of the new Florida, disappear again into the pervious rock, sometimes reemerging as a spring or resuming as a stream willing to try the territory again. While not hollow, Florida a few inches down is as porous as a weathered thighbone you might find in a High Plains pasture. Lake Iamonia, near the Georgia line, has come and gone more than once during my years of traveling the state. In this view, water surrounds Florida on four sides: east, west, south, and underneath. It’s a piece of loosely stuck geology not so much affixed to the continent as merely anchored for the night.

  That invisible hydrological nether-realm creates almost all the allure I’m able to find in a place afflicted for some years by nearly a thousand new residents a day. Even though it was the first “state” successfully settled by Europeans, as late as 1900 the greater part of Florida was still wilderness, a situation the people ever since have been working to eradicate. (Given the flooding population, Floridians ought to cotton to a visitor like me who comes in, spends a few bucks, fails to see what they see, and soon gets out, leaving folks a dollar or two ahead.) If you have neighbors thinking of moving to Florida, recommend they first drive multilane U.S. 19 from Crystal River to Clearwater; if they can view that stretch as the happy fulfilling of their dream and of the American way, then the state may indeed be for them. If, on the other hand, they find it a harbinger of the end of sensible life, then they may be better off redirecting their exodus. That’s why, after all, North Dakota exists — for those who want, for the price of only five or six months of winter, to kiss good-bye life-absorbing congestion in search of a mall.

  But synthetic Floridorable was elsewhere on the Sunday evening Q and I arrived in the Apalachicola National Forest in Wakulla County in the eastern end of the Panhandle. Although just fifteen miles south of Tallahassee, we were surrounded by an ostensible wilderness. In the falling darkness, the narrow road through the thick hummock-land rose only slightly above the swampy terrain and appeared to be floating on pontoons. The air was thick with the scent of woods and water, and when we stopped once to take the place in, from the thicket came squeaks and rasps and murmurs, stridulations, tremolos and low caterwauls bemingling into a polyphonic, boggy concert of contrapuntal voices. It was an ancient kingdom, not a “magic” one but real, safe for a little while longer in a piece of vanishing Florida. A half century earlier, Edwin Way Teale, the American naturalist, wrote of that very place in his North with the Spring, a narrative about one leg of his seventy-five-thousand miles of road trips around the continent:

  It was the voice of the dark, the swamp, the vast wilderness of ancient times. It links us — as it will link men and women of an even more urbanized, regimented, crowded tomorrow — with days of a lost wildness.

  When Teale reached the banks of the Wakulla River in 1953, he wanted to photograph the snail-eating limpkin, a bird once “highly esteemed as food,” he said, and so intrepid or unsuspecting it was easily slaughtered until nearing the edge of extinction by the 1920s. Unlike the passenger pigeon, the limpkin shed its fearlessness, became more suspicious of humanity, less tolerant, and retired to newly created sanctuaries where, after several of its generations, it again had become bolder and more visible by the time Teale arrived. Yet, at Wakulla today, the limpkin is still listed as rare.

  We stopped at the Wakulla Springs Lodge, a Spanish Colonial–style building — white stucco walls, Moorish arches, red roof tiles, marble floors, grand fireplace — that seemed to fit the lowland, if any human structure can fit a swamp. Old Joe, the eleven-foot stuffed alligator whose age allegedly was two centuries, lent his presence to the mood. After hours of long miles, to stumble into a corporate motel is merely to end the day, but to reach a place imbued with its own native territory is to arrive (the word comes from the Latin, toward shore), to fetch up on a distant strand.

  The lobby had a high ceiling of exposed cypress beams painted with what were, perhaps, Aztec-inspired designs; the guest rooms — furnishings, bathroom fixtures, and possibly the lightbulbs — were from the 1930s when the lodge was built. In its aura of forgotten Florida, the place was ideal for a search into its disappearing remnants. As we went outside to survey the terrain in the moonlight, the clerk warned, “Keep your eyes open
for gators, because they’re out there.”

  The freshwater spring, with the largest volume issuing from a single fissure on the planet, is the source of the Wakulla River and the reason the lodge exists. It was into that fountain, which Indians considered the home of four-inch-tall homunculi who danced in its depths on moonlit nights, that Tarzan (in the person of Johnny Weissmuller) made several high dives. And from it some years later emerged a creature to disturb the sleep of many a child in the 1950s. Soon after Teale’s visit, a movie crew came along to gape 185 feet straight down into the clarity of the pool to determine whether filming in its depths was feasible. They asked a young Tallahassee man, Rico Browning, to swim it for some test footage to see if native aquatic plants looked exotic enough to stand in for a lost Amazonian river.

  The director watched Browning’s powerful and rhythmic underwater stroke, a strangely beautiful quarter-rotating crawl. It was perfect for the antediluvian creature in the 3-D fright film he was about to make. He had Browning fitted out in a sponge-rubber suit that turned him into the amphibious subhuman Gill Man who performed marvelous aquatic maneuvers. It helped that Browning, so I heard, could swim underwater while holding his breath for four minutes.

  Over the past fifty years, I had believed The Creature from the Black Lagoon (a movie that inexplicably keeps appearing in my books, although I’ve seen it only a couple of times) was filmed on a Southern California back-lot pool. I’d never thought it possible to look into the real “lagoon.” The spring and its surround, while neither a back-lot set nor a piece of Disney World plasticity, nevertheless were once in the sights of those very theme-park developers.

  There are thousands of springs in Florida, several of them famous attractions, including one with mermaids performing under-water modern dance with the help of air hoses. But Wakulla is a quieter place, and that quiet allows its distinctions — geological, ornithological, mythological — to arise quietly and naturally like its translucent water. There is even the legend, claim a few local historians, it was on the Wakulla River where an Indian shot an arrow into the neck of Ponce de León to end his quest for a Fountain of Youth Eternal.