Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey

by William Least Heat-Moon

  We copied reports and returned in the light of day to the Promenade to walk part of it, take some measurements and photographs, set up binoculars to look west at noon. Watched by slot-eyed goats, I knocked at a dilapidated dwelling near where we’d first seen the apparition; the door stood open and within the dimness a single candle burned, but no one responded except an aged, barked-out cur either groggy or ready for the Other Side. We went west to Miami (in Oklahoma it’s My-AM-ah) to the courthouse to examine early maps of Ottawa County. A clerk, averring she’d once jumped into her boyfriend’s arms when the Spook came up to hover over the hood of his parked car, rejected my suggestion he’d planted an accomplice in the bushes.

  Later, I sorted the accounts into three stacks: one from writers who had not actually witnessed the Light (much the largest pile); another from those who casually saw the thing and wrote judiciously about it soon afterward; and the third and fewest from Occamists going forth with inductive razors.

  Even though many post-1950 stories claimed the Light appeared in the late 1800s, to the last one they were anecdotal and unauthenticated, and only a couple acknowledged there might be, over more than a century, several causes of illuminations. The earliest published account I found (a few weeks later because it was oddly missing from the Joplin library) appeared in the Kansas City Star in 1936. Written by A. B. MacDonald (who had won a Pulitzer Prize for solving a murder in Texas five years earlier), the long piece was the first to cut through the manifest malarkey. Still, nearly all subsequent sketches either ignored MacDonald or tried to obviate his conclusion by asserting, in the disingenuous words of the current Joplin Convention and Visitors Bureau, “the source of the Light remains a mystery.”

  In late 1935 when MacDonald arrived at the Devil’s Promenade, with him was Logan Smith who had lived along it for some years and had watched the occurrence hundreds of times. Its source was, Smith told the reporter, auto headlamps coming from the new federal highway east of Quapaw. On a map, he showed MacDonald the perfect alignment over several miles of Route 66 with the Ghost Light road, even though the Spring River Valley intervened. He pointed out the long view westward was essentially downhill: Quapaw, in spite of the interruption of rolling terrain, is almost two hundred feet lower than the east end of the Promenade. Convinced, MacDonald made no attempt to test the theory.

  A decade later another Star reporter, Charles Graham, persuaded two men from the Army base at Camp Crowder, Missouri, twenty miles from the Promenade, to join him in an unofficial investigation of the Route 66 theory. Flashing automobile headlights from the west, they re-created at will the coming and going of Spooky: he danced at their command.

  Over the following twenty years, new research confirmed those results, one of them noting local observations of the phenomenon increased after completion of 66, and someone else correlated appearances of the Light with traffic flow on the highway. An examiner noted that vehicles with different kinds of lights moving differently (passing, turning, speeding up or slowing down, heading east or west), as well as changing atmospheric conditions, would create variations in the display and activity of the phenomenon. Sometimes stars twinkle and sometimes they don’t; sometimes they’re visible, and sometimes not; the Moon has a halo one night and a cross the next; it may be yellow, orange, or white — maybe even blue. Graham attributed certain variations to afterimages that can occur in viewers staring at a brightness, and another researcher theorized refraction of light might also contribute. Of particular note, all of them said the luminosity could not be seen from any low point on the Promenade. Each one of the verifiable experiments on the headlamp theory coincided precisely with what Q and I witnessed.

  I thought, Well, that’s that. I realized I was almost — almost — disappointed at rational explanation. Some Nodgort, wanting mystery over factual revelation, worked to challenge what I’d found: What about all those claims the shining existed before automobiles? What about the discovery that Graham’s and a later researcher’s tests had been made not from the current Spook Light Road, E-50, but from a parallel one, E-40, the Hornet Road, a mile north and one that does not align with U.S. 66? Oberon and Titania danced and capered in the crannies of my skull. “Yes!” they sang out. “The mystery remains!” Q too, I have to disclose here, showed pleasure the solution was still, so to speak, up in the air.

  Off we went into Oklahoma and on toward New Mexico, content in witnessing an event that trussed up science like a dead pig hung in a tree for country butchering. Some weeks later when we were home again and I was putting away maps of the journey, I looked once more at the forty-five-degree angle Route 66 makes between the Kansas state line and Quapaw, Oklahoma, a run of four miles. That’s when I remembered: across the prairie country, the earliest federal highways did not usually make such an angle; instead, for economy, they followed the old section-line roads commonly running toward only cardinal compass-points. Ninety-degree turns were everywhere. Reason flashed on in my mind and sent dark-loving Robin Goodfellow back into his recess: the current route of U.S. 66 in northeastern Ottawa County is not the original used from 1926 to 1932. That first 66 ran the cardinal directions, as old road-maps and a close reading of Graham’s Star story prove. On the north side of Quapaw, the first highway aligned perfectly with E-40, the initial Spook Light Road, the one from which the tests were made, thereby corroborating early claims the wonderment had moved south, as it indeed it had, south to E-50, the current Promenade which lines up with a later section of Route 66 now sharing traffic for two miles with U.S. 69. Commentators negating the early researches for being on “the wrong road” did not understand the reconfigured highway. Those unable to remember the past are condemned to botch the present. Or, to corrupt another Americanism, bungled history is bunk.

  The Spook Light Roads in northeast Oklahoma.

  I read again the investigations based on mensuration and found them making new sense. When reporter Graham asked an engineer, who claimed he solved the puzzle in 1930, why he’d not published his solution, the man said, “We thought it would be more fun just to let people go on believing the mystery.”

  That brought to mind an old psychological experiment examining the effects of suggestion and expectation: Volunteers in a room illuminated by only a pinpoint of light were asked to “draw on paper the path of a moving beam.” Their pencils marked out arcs and angles and tangents and squiggles to create mazes of graphite. After the overhead lights came on again and the subjects learned the pinpoint had not moved even so much as a quintillionth of a millimeter, they expressed disbelief, disappointment, and more annoyance than surprise. Idols of the tribe are powerful.

  Something else came to me: when I was in the Navy, at sea, smokers were prohibited from lighting up on deck because the flare of a match could be seen by enemy eyes a mile or more away.

  And one final remembrance: that old story of the Episcopal pastor explaining sin by telling his congregation about drinking so thirstily at a spring he nearly swallowed a tadpole. A year later, a Methodist deacon in the next county over mentioned how Catholic Father So-and-So, getting senile, swallowed a tadpole that changed to a frog in his gut. And sometime thereafter, a fulminating Baptist told of a Pentecostal preacher going to a spring to get a salamander he could swallow and cough up before his stunned audience to prove the Devil lies within everybody. At the Episcopal pastor’s death, several people two counties away knew for certain a Mormon in the grip of Satan had died from eating one too many serpents.

  But, above all, what about the “fact” always trotted out to disprove the headlamps solution — those anecdotal reports allegedly as old as the first Quapaw into the territory — that the Ghost Light existed before the automobile? Even accepting such unsupported assertions, I suspect people in 1880 did not spend all their hours after sunset in darkness. A lantern, a bonfire, an eastbound locomotive, would offer illumination enough to create Spooky, especially if refraction proves to be involved. And, I should add, any piece of country over the years may w
ell exhibit occasional luminescent appearances of several kinds from natural causes, particularly a place with wetlands and old mines. There likely has been more than one Ghost Light.

  A few days ago I gave this explication to a friend who had long wanted to see the small marvel, and he said, “Now you’ve gone and ruined it for me!” I asked whether knowing a rainbow is a spectral display of refracted light kept him from enjoying one. I proposed that in the three million miles of American roadways, the physical factors necessary for the creation of the Quapaw Light are, if not unique, then at least rare and remarkable enough to make it worth encountering. In the long view, doesn’t satisfaction from enlightenment surpass the tenebrifics of mystery? Isn’t, in the end, a humble schoolmaster greater than the slickest magician?

  And keep in mind (I should have added), the Quapaw Light exists on the fringe of the Ozarks where fable, fundamental faith, fabrication, and fallacy have long had their way with fact, where superstition suppresses science, where belief in evolution can defeat a politician or get a preacher drummed out of a church, where it will be a long time before a spectrometer can hold against a ghost-o-meter.

  11

  Last Train Out of Land’s End

  YOU HAVE, PERHAPS, seen the old photographs or films of horse-drawn vehicles — wagons, buggies, traps — and men afoot lined up on a vast treeless stretch of the southeastern Great Plains, as white people (“boomers”) took position to take possession: they were ready for one of the races (“runs”) into native lands to grab a few acres of what was soon to be given away to anybody who could drive a stake into a piece of unclaimed soil. The Indian Territory was about to be remade into Oklahoma. In Choctaw, the name means “red people,” but today, it’s somewhat of an irony of American nomenclature.

  Oh yes, tribal America is still there in numbers, but many a Pawnee or Ponca will give you a howdy and a blue-eyed wink. I don’t know whether the Choctaw have a word for amalgamated, but as time steps along, a new name for the state could prove usefully accurate, if not popular. Across the country, when I meet a person with some Indian ancestry (even if in Vermont or California), the native strain is most often Cherokee; in fact, years ago, I was wed to one, and before that spent much time with two other women of that noble line. A Choctaw woman (she’s another story) once said to me, “What is it with Anglos wanting to be part Cherokee? I think it must be the name — it sounds, well, cheery. Choctaw sounds serious. And Creek or Kaw? Forget it.”

  Those huge late-nineteenth-century land runs, repeated several times across the territory, might look benign compared to the immense giveaways of America to railroads, mining consortiums, and cattle barons. At least, as some Oklahomans point out, the people making the runs were predominantly landless and impoverished, although that meant once “landed,” they still lacked resources to turn their newly got soil into successful farms. “The ground is free,” somebody should have said, “but the plow will cost you sixty dollars. And then you gotta buy a mule. Don’t forget seed.” And so forth until you reach the tax man.

  The aboriginal lands not “opened” by runs came onto the market in another, more furtive manner called allotment, whereby individual Indians were granted title to a parcel of their own tribal realty either to farm or dispose of as they wished. Growing up in a culture believing soil cannot rightly be owned by an individual, and having little knowledge of or interest in farming, many economically distressed Indians let go of their allotment, selling it to whites, so that four generations later a number of tribes began trying to reconstitute themselves by reassembling land once theirs by treaty.

  A large segment of the people making the runs came out of the southern Appalachians and the Ozarks. Those citizens (Indians were not then citizens) brought along a fierce laissez-faire outlook that, to my eyes and ears, is still evident along the Oklahoma byways. There you can find both Mountain and Southern tinctures in the speech of residents who mix a penchant for the friendly conversation of Dixie with the openness of the West, their discourse touched by the relaxed attitude toward existence not uncommon among tribal Americans. A visitor who can smile, speak, and listen is not long a stranger in Oklahoma, a happy aspect of traveling the state.

  But there’s another aspect, one I believe also related to the early history of the runs and the people who made them; it’s an attitude of disconnection, a notion that land is expendable, almost disposable, a thing you can use and walk away from. In such dislocation and displacement, I see ancient nomadic peoples intermixed with some make-a-quick-buck settlers. Washington Irving, in an unusual accommodation for an author, accompanied an 1832 military expedition sent into Indian Territory to cool a little native unrest. As he and the mounted rangers neared the end of their long journey, Irving, in his A Tour on the Prairies, wrote about breaking an overnight bivouac west of Fort Gibson:

  I always felt disposed to linger until the last straggler disappeared among the trees and the distant note of the bugle died upon the ear, that I might behold the wilderness relapsing into silence and solitude. In the present instance, the deserted scene of our late bustling encampment had a forlorn and desolate appearance. The surrounding forest had been in many places trampled into a quagmire. Trees felled and partly hewn in pieces and scattered in huge fragments; tent-poles stripped of their covering; smoldering fires with great morsels of roasted venison and buffalo meat standing on wooden spits before them, hacked and slashed by the knives of hungry hunters; while around were strewed the hides, the horns, the antlers and bones of buffaloes and deer, with uncooked joints and unplucked turkeys left behind with that reckless improvidence and wastefulness which young hunters are apt to indulge when in a neighborhood where game abounds. In the meantime a score or two of turkey-buzzards, or vultures, were already on the wing, wheeling their magnificent flight high in the air, and preparing for a descent upon the camp as soon as it should be abandoned.

  Lest an idealistic reader think the nomadic tribes conducted their stopovers with a greater prudence, here’s an 1840 description by Victor Tixier from Travels on the Osage Prairies, his superb account of Plains Indian life at the coming of the Euro-Americans. The hunting camp he describes was not far from the place Irving spoke of:

  Day by day our encampment became more disagreeable. A dead horse lay only a few steps beyond the camp, and not far distant another had perished after a rattlesnake bite. An insufferable stink rose from the two carcasses and from the drying skin and the discarded meat. The Osages throw out meat the second day after butchering an animal; in our plenteous living, you can reckon how much we wasted. The grass had become quite scant thereabouts, and the camp was full of manure the horses left around their pickets. Our long sojourn allowed a frightening number of dreadful insects to multiply, and several dogs became rabid. The great heat dried up many of the springs, and the horses and boys turned the few remaining into flowing mud. It became imperative to carry our lodgings to another place.

  The itinerary Q and I took across Oklahoma was through a land of conspicuous improvidence, despite the many and various exhortations to residents to place their lives into the hands of a Providence upon whom no human eyes have yet been laid. Perhaps it’s an imperfection in me that along the way I found it difficult to look beyond the roadsides to the far hills made lovely by distance because of what I kept seeing between the churches, with their warnings of eternal perdition: miles of abandoned buildings, of decaying house-trailers steadily vanishing under glomerations of cast-off appliances, toys, rusted vehicles (autos, busses, riding mowers, tractors, trucks, a bulldozer, a crane, a forklift), and a plethora of cheap things (shopping bags to wading pools) made from petroleum which the state pumped from beneath all that spent material. For a connoisseur of piles, stacks, and heaps, there were aggregations of broken-up asphalt pavement, chainsawed trees, used tires, raw red earth, oil-field pipes, galvanized ductwork, broken concrete blocks, aluminum siding, and one remarkable stack of refrigerators topped by a ragged American flag flapping a conqueror’s tired g
lory over the rummage.

  Some of the scrap mounds, as if emblems of the hills the ancestors hailed from, were festively entwined with poison ivy, the Western answer to kudzu that has served to cover over derelictions in the South. More than one enterprising person had set up a sign near an accumulation of things and called it a flea market. Above the door to one shack were scythe blades crossed in a heraldic manner as if sabers from Shiloh. Those folk knew the American method of getting rid of what a thrifty Scot might call clamjamfry was not to try to give it away but to attach a price of eye-catching cheapness. Anybody can pass up a rusted scythe or a chromed hubcap if it’s free, but ask a dime for it, and it becomes irresistible.

  One merchant had brought scatterings into an actual building called the Cheapo Depot, and indeed, the route looked like an open-air depot or an abandoned siding where the last train out of Land’s End had passed through to empty hopper cars hauling the dregs and dross, the clinkers and sinters of our time. From the gigantic mounts of tailings dug out of the exhausted mines near Picher and for miles on beyond were long stretches where the roadsides seemed worn out, used up, and depleted beyond recovery. Any home or farm pleasantly in order only made the surround of rubble and decay stand forth as does a gold tooth next to a rotten one ready for extraction.

  Amidst it all were New Hope or New Life or New Hereafter “worship centers” built with the architectural lines of an auto-body shop, many of them topped by undersized, tacked-on, cheapo-depot steeples far too small; they had the appearance of a father at his kid’s fourth birthday party: befuddled dad under one of those little, shiny, conical hats with an elastic strap, he looking not so much a dunce in the corner as a fool on a stool.