Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Dwightman said, “A week later Mrs. Morgan’s lawyer called to tell me she’d left her entire estate to me. It wasn’t big, but it was big enough I could do what I’d wanted for a while. I turned in that goddamn blue coat and went out and bought a pickup and put a camper shell on it, and I took off. I needed to figure out two things — what I was good for and where I could live to be good for something and not be a no-count nobody.”

  For six months Dwightman roamed around the West — this town, that one, none of them ideal. When his money was about gone, he became less finicky and settled on a place in Arizona where he found a house trailer for rent to satisfy his second question. The first was more difficult, but he thought he might have the answer.

  “I love kids. I wanted to start a school, a day care. Early-education centers, they call them now. One for disadvantaged kids. It would focus on nature education, with several Indians as teachers. We would get the little ones outside and make the natural world a part of their lives. They’d learn the names of flowers and cacti — in fact, I wanted to call the center Kactus Kids, spelled with Ks shaped like saguaros. They’d learn about spiders and lizards. And in the classroom they’d learn how to use their hands to make things like an Indian drum and how to imitate birdcalls — things Indians would teach them. Then later, as the school developed, they’d learn Spanish — or English, as the case might be. But they’d never be allowed to forget the dirt under their feet. If you asked one of my kids where corn came from, he’d never say, like I heard a little boy one time, ‘Out of a can, you dummy.’ I wanted to reach city kids clueless about nature. I had a million ideas and about zero dollars.”

  To make friends, Dwightman joined a small, progressive church group with a weekly meeting led by any member willing to give a devotion or perhaps a talk without any particular religious focus. When it came his turn, he told them about his dream of Kactus Kids. By then, he’d found an empty lot for sale on the edge of the city, and he showed some snapshots of it: a weedy, rocky, ugly place but with open access to the desert behind. After the meeting, a woman came up to invite him for coffee the next morning.

  “We talked about our histories. Mine was just no-count stuff, but hers was pretty colorful until she lost her husband, and her life sort of turned drab. She was especially interested in how I’d come to think up the center. She knew a Zuni man who would be perfect to teach elementary weaving, including to the boys too. You know, Zuni men do the weaving. Or they used to, anyway.”

  Several days later Dwightman received in the mail papers indicating she’d put down in his name a payment on the lot. There was a note from her saying now he had something tangible to lend credibility to his fund-raising. “I was fired up and went out and after a couple of months of soliciting, I made the first payment against the principal. But then things got tougher. The easy contributions were gone.

  “The lady and I became friends. I helped her with chores, and she would bring me groceries. She said if I had to put on a blue coat again I’d never get the center built, so she’d make sure I had time to work on it. The next year, she had enough confidence in my plan to pay off the mortgage, not that it was all that much. And she paid for some dental work for me too.”

  That December she asked Dwightman to accompany her to a Christmas party. He liked the request because he had come to feel more comfortable with women his senior, and he enjoyed hearing about their lives. Most of them had stories. And for them, here was a handyman who could rewire a lamp or trim toenails or get a rattlesnake out of a garage.

  He said, “I guess it was inevitable, but she and I got involved in a way something like with Mrs. Morgan. And like Mrs. Morgan, she was as generous as she could afford to be. She even paid a local builder to draw up blueprints for the center so I’d have another means to attract contributions — small as they were. On my birthday she said she might pay to start the building, but she thought, despite our age difference, maybe we should be married. I asked for a little time to think about it. I had nothing but bad memories of marriage, and I told her so. She said to take my time, she’d leave the offer open. So things went on. Then at dinner one night she told me she’d had a bad diagnosis and a worse prognosis. Now, marriage wouldn’t be fair to me.”

  Dwightman paused again, collected himself. “Her treatments really flattened her, and the damn things didn’t do one goddamn thing to help. She was just very sick from them. Then I lost her.”

  Putting everything on hold in Arizona, he went off in his pickup again, but the second time, his question had sharp focus: how could he make Kactus Kids a reality? “I knew the answer all along,” he said. “I knew about oiling hinges to keep doors swinging open, but I didn’t really like the answer. I mean, would you?”

  I said I didn’t think I knew what the answer was, and he said, “I could offer something people wanted, and Arizona has quite a few childless widows with estates they’ll never use up. So why let bureaucrats and politicians get it? It’s called escheatment, but it ought to be cheatment. And if it’s not the bureaucrats, then it’s some evangelist who’s going to take the money and give not one damn thing in return except more requests for contributions, and that money will go to buy them a Cadillac. That dough’s not going to help a little kid whose mom is a crackhead or whose dad is beating the family up.”

  He looked directly at me, I think to ascertain my response. “Sure — by then I knew the answer, and I knew without doing what I could do so well, the center wasn’t ever going to get built.”

  Somewhere in California, Dwightman wheeled his truck around and returned to his trailer in Arizona and laid out his criteria as if they were part of a business plan: each widow would have to have some means but no children or at least no close contact with her children. “Everybody knows,” he said, “a widow’s kids watch her money like it’s theirs.” He would avoid anyone who no longer had concern for problems of this world, and there would be no spinsters because they had too little experience with men; romantic involvement would be verboten because each woman would have been told of his other “house calls.” He had learned both his “Korean dysfunction” and the resulting mastery at physical therapy were assets giving him the equivalent to professional qualifications, and a woman was safe with him, and transmission of disease was impossible.

  Dwightman had come to understand how loneliness can be deadly and how he could treat it. He developed a short list of clientele. He said, again intending no pun, “I never let there be more widows than I could handle. I knew their birthdays, favorite flowers, whether they liked to dance or play cards.” Dwightman could sing a heart-tugging tenor rendition of “Danny Boy,” but above all he knew what could make a woman smile. “For certain widows,” he said, “I don’t mind telling you, I was a dream come true.”

  He stared into the Wyoming night, and then, without a word, he pulled himself up slowly from his chair and walked off. I sat waiting. Then I figured, That’s that, and got up to leave, when I saw him coming back. Even before he sat down again, he said, “One time a client referred to me as her ‘escort,’ and I told her that an escort uses the money for himself — or herself — but mine was going for a school for kids who needed a leg up. Oh, sure, I had to take some of the money to support myself, but living in a trailer and driving a ten-year-old pickup pretty well showed I wasn’t spending much on me.

  “My hope, of course, was always for significant contributions for the school — money that went beyond any rendered services. And that happened sometimes. I’d show the ladies the architectural sketch and take them out to the site, but some of them only cared about self-gratification, and if I saw that, I’d move on. And if I heard somebody complain about ‘these damn kids today,’ I’d close the account, so to speak. Understand, not every situation was what you might call intimately personalized.

  “I believed there would come along somebody to step up big and build the school and endow it and let me put her name on it, and then I could give all my time to the real work. I had a co
uple of teachers lined up. I wrote up subject outlines. You should see the one I called ‘Thinking Like a Hopi.’ Everything in it was about balance, and nobody can teach that better than a Hopi, and I had the teacher for it too.”

  One September Dwightman met a woman, notably attractive and somewhat younger than usual but with the means to take the plan all the way. They got on well, oddly well because she was agreeable to everything, even to the point of immediately paying for a concrete understructure. The cement had hardly dried when she told him if her deceased husband’s name was on the building and hers on the mortgage, she might underwrite the cost of the entire school.

  At that point, Dwightman stopped once more. He motioned toward the sound of owl hoots, and he said, “Beautiful, but I don’t think they speak Shoshone. Magpies do, though. I’ve heard them dress me down in Shoshone — from a safe distance.”

  And then he continued. “If the land title wasn’t in my name, then I’d just be a blue coat employee again, so I had to question the offer. I mean, it looked like a little concrete got poured to hook me. Maybe I made the mistake of being too direct about my hesitation, because she got mad as hell. I’d never seen her like that. She walked out, accused me of manipulating her, and the next thing I know, she’s threatening me with a lawsuit. Accusing me of being a grifter.”

  It was the first time I saw Dwightman show bitterness, and he had to take a moment to settle himself down. “Hell,” he said, “even if I’d had the money to match her high-priced lawyer, my defense would be full of details no judge would accept. Who would understand my special line of work?” Here he repeated part of his story before finding his way back. “She sued me for the cost of the concrete, and I ended up having to hand over the lot. Six years of work — my whole dream — gone because I’d miscalculated one person’s character.

  “A month later I found out it had been a scheme all along, ever since plans for a new road that would go in down the hill got announced and suddenly gave that property real value. She was a front for a real-estate bunch. If only — if only I could have held on just a little longer, then I could have sold the land and somewhere else built the finest kids’ center in the Southwest. If you go past my old lot sometime, you won’t see any school. What you’ll see is a big condo and a bunch of fat-cat snowbirds living there for a few weeks every winter. Some of them are widows, and I’ll tell you, I’ve had ideas about starting again, but I’m too old. But I’ll tell you this too — that woman slammed a door with oiled hinges the hell in my face. She broke my dream, and I failed my dad. I mean, what’s the goddamn truth? I’ve never not been nothing but a no-count nobody, and now it’s too late.”

  He stopped. The coyotes were really at it, and we listened. Then, so quietly I had to lean forward to hear him over the yipping, he said, “There for a while, don’t you see, there for a while I came damn close to doing something.”

  Dwightman lifted his glass toward the sky and said, “Beware deceptive bastards out there,” and he drained his whiskey. “Knees getting stiff,” he said. “Time to walk,” and walk off stiffly he did.

  The next morning, under the rock doorstop was another message: “The story’s yours if you want it. Maybe it can help somehow. But wait till I’m gone.”

  Did he mean move on or die? I went to his cabin. He’d moved on. Over the next several years I found no place for his story, but sometime later I phoned the ranch to get a lead on him. A woman said, “He checked out not long ago.” I asked if he left an address. “I mean,” she said, “he checked out for good. Cashed in feet first. I heard he’s buried over west in the Bighorns.”

  4

  Querencia

  ON A FINE AUTUMNAL MORNING, Q and I left the Occidental Hotel to take up a wandering route into the Thunder Basin National Grasslands and on beyond. I was counting pronghorn as they appeared here and there, and she was turning in her mind legal aspects of Max Dwightman’s life. She said, “I admire his goal of wanting to educate children in ways so many of them are missing out on now, but, I’ll tell you, his method of raising money troubled me until I decided his means weren’t malum in se — like murder, robbery, rape, arson, you know. They were closer to malum prohibitum — jaywalking, an uncut lawn, an overdue library-book.” Raising her finger as if before a jury, she added, “By his testimony, he deceived nobody, and all activity was both consensual and mutually beneficial. So maybe it’s just the unorthodoxy that bothered me.”

  She interrupted herself to point out a pronghorn on her side of the road. “How many does that make?” she said. Seventy-seven. “Their bodies seem too heavy for those skinny legs.” They do indeed, but those bony gams, carved by generations of wolves’ teeth, under a three-day-old pronghorn, can outrun the fastest human on earth. I told her what I’d read in the Occidental library: prior to the arrival of whites, there may have been forty-five-million of them, but by 1924 there were about fourteen thousand. Today, the estimate is a half million.

  “I have a question about Max,” Q said. “What did he mean when he told you maybe his story might help in some way?” I said I didn’t know, but I was sure the answer had more to do with educating children than ministering to widows.

  Bill, Wyoming, despite its highly excellent name, could serve as a lexicographer’s illustrative definition of either windblown or godforsaken (the only “town” within four-thousand square-miles), although the lone store/tavern/café there did put together a good sandwich. North of Bill, Q asked, “What’s it like to be a classic Don’t-Blink-or-You’ll-Miss-It?” (Story of my life.)

  We entered the Thunder Basin and came upon gigantically awesome coal pits, one of them three-miles long and deep enough to bury a twenty-storey building without having to tip it over. We stopped alongside a railroad to watch two miles of coal hoppers roll past, trains so lengthy they frequently go uphill and downhill at the same time. One large power-generation plant in Georgia burned up two-thousand miles of coal every year, or to say it another way, that plant — five days distant — would consume ten-thousand linear-feet of sixty-million-year-old Wyoming in only eight hours. Over a year, that was thirty-four-thousand miles of Wyoming to be paid for not just in quick dollars but also in promissory notes for a warming climate generating violent weathers, rising oceans, and mass extinctions.

  Along the road, I often try to visualize a landscape as it appeared a century or an aeon or a cataclysm ago, but in watching the coal move past us in almost morsel-sized pieces (if they were chops, a couple on a plate would make supper), I just couldn’t imagine the ancient ferns and cycads and other Paleocene boscage they once were. I couldn’t see their past. What I did see rolling along was the end of a current era: not ancient carboniferous Wyoming but rather chances measured in expiring time to reconfigure an economy — a way of life — not foreordained by its own principles to collapse.

  [TO READER OF THE FUTURE — IF YOU’RE THERE: Let no one tell you otherwise — the word was out. We knew what we were doing, and as a society we went ahead and did it anyway. When it came to whistling past graveyards, we were talented.]

  Beyond the Thunder Basin coalfields, we came into the shallow valley of the Little Powder River rolling, as were we, toward Montana. At a distance, the grasslands were beautiful with the buffy colors of fall, but a closer look showed mile after mile of Wyoming chewed by cattle down to dust and broken rock. When the shoulder of a highway looks more naturally abundant than a thousand acres beyond, something is out of whack. Anyone who may have doubts that cattle-raising is an extractive industry — at least as it’s widely practiced in eastern Wyoming by corporations, some of them foreign — should consider a little tour along Route 59. A popular chamber-of-commerce slogan at that time was “Wyoming — Open for Business!” (The Administration of intellectually incapable George W. Bush and his Wyoming-raised Vice President had recently proposed selling public lands to underwrite “deficit reduction”: to pay for its corporation enrichments and its calamitously ill-conceived Mesopotamian war.) A more accurate slogan �
�� should I say epitaph? — might have been “Wyoming — For Sale!”

  Crossing into Montana changed things. There the land was less eaten up, and the state flat-out looked less molested than Wyoming, cursed with its rich basement of combustibles. Montana didn’t often need a soft-focus lens to make its high plains beautiful.

  A family van with an Illinois license plate overtook us at a good clip, the face of the driver scowlingly tense. “The GPS must have gone on the blink,” Q said. “Maybe that’s why Mom’s on her cell phone.” Two of the three children in the rear were attached to wires: a boy bobbed his head to some MP3 beat, a girl stared up at an overhead DVD screen, and the other child — of indeterminate gender — was bent over what I took for an electronic game. Clearly, there were enough virtual realities available in that vehicle to entertain a small ship’s crew for months.

  As all old travelers know, inventors of whizz-bizzles (Gus Kubitzki’s word for electronic parts — transistors, diodes, silicon chips) are not at fault for such disconnections. The blame for such youthful electronic translocations lies with farmers who, years ago, ceased putting colored-glass-ball lightning rods on their houses and barns for traveling children to tally; and it lies with Burma-Shave for giving up on roadside doggerel to keep tykes chanting for miles; and also with highway engineers for cutting down all those road humps called kiss-me-quicks that gave a child a chance to watch the roll of the land in order to urge a driver to take the next KMQ faster: “Come on, Pop! Get her airborne!” You geezers out there from the twentieth century can add to this list.

  Only the retro-minded side of my brain would venture to suggest that passing time — one’s days — in a place other than where one actually is at a particular moment can have disjunctive spiritual consequences reaching beyond the individual. For me to say so could also be hypocritical, given the hours (although not in an auto) I’ve spent reading literature and history and even some science, all of which require entering realms other than one of the moment. Such retro-notions remind me of Vivian Woodmiller — her mortal coil long ago shuffled off — a beloved librarian who once said to me, “When I see nine-year-olds, I envy them. Not for their youth but for their chance to read for the first time Treasure Island or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — maybe even old miser Silas Marner with his gold coins. I remember the first time sixty years ago I heard a teacher read aloud ‘The Raven.’ How beautiful a virgin mind in the world of books!”