Roads to Quoz

by William Least Heat-Moon

  When Q and I began walking Jonesville, all we could see of the vanished prehistoric settlement lay at the foot of Front Street above the Black River; there, a grassy mound with a height on its western edge that failed to rise above my eyebrows had been shaved and half-squared by two streets. The evening view eastward over the slope and across the flood wall, and on to the river, and on beyond the flatlands, was pleasing, but from eighty feet higher, what must it have been like to see first light of day? Archaeologist Gibson believes the early inhabitants considered “unblocked vistas provided an entry portal for good spirits, which originated in the beneficent east, and an exit portal for disharmonious spirits which built up inside enclosed spaces.”

  Atop the remaining, mutilated mound was an Anglo cemetery of about forty broken tombstones and two big, concrete vaults like septic tanks, half-sunken boxes built to slow some future power shovel from dislodging their contents. Standing in the middle of the cemetery, Q said, “The message here is that it’s okay to desecrate the grave of a heathen savage, but curst be he that moves my sacred white bones.” Indeed, Cyrus Thomas, another of the great names in American earthworks archaeology, wrote that in the digging of modern graves at Jonesville, “skeletons and pottery are frequently thrown out.” But then, those Anglo bones kept that small mound from being entirely obliterated.

  Under the lowering sky in an eerie dusk, I walked the grassy hump to read the markers — one name was Hobgood — and Q stared for some time at crypts under a big dead tree well on its way toward stumpdom. She said, “This place is out of Edgar Allan Poe.” Looking at the disgraced ancient mound, I said I wished I could quote the raven.

  We walked on two blocks west to where the Great Mound had stood for a millennium. I imagined the view without the five houses and a Catholic chapel sitting on a corner of the site. At the same scale as the other drawings and with modern structures removed, here’s what I saw:

  The site of the Great Mound (without current structures) as it was in 2004.

  The sequence of these mound diagrams reminds me of the image on a cardiac monitor progressing from the electronic pyramids of a healthy heartbeat to that direful flattened line of the dead.

  19

  Extracting Sunbeams from Cucumbers

  JONESVILLE SITS on the low second terrace of the Black River, only about twenty feet above it, and not always elevated enough to keep the rivers away, although high waters never topped the Great Mound, even in its reduced state. During the Flood of 1882, a New Orleans newspaper, which Mark Twain quotes in Life on the Mississippi, reported on the area: “On the inside of the houses the inmates had built on boxes a scaffold on which they placed the furniture. The bedposts were sawed off on top, as the ceiling was not more than four feet from the improvised floor. The building looked very insecure, and threatened every moment to float off.”

  The earliest image of Troyville — by the African-American illustrator Henry Jackson Lewis whose work preserves so many nineteenth-century scenes in the Mississippi Valley — is a picture of that flood made only a decade after the founding of the settlement; Lewis shows a couple of dozen inundated buildings in front of several mounds raising their tops above the water.

  [DIGRESSION ALERT: Not only here but across the South and Middle West, aboriginal mounds became prime homesites, perhaps an admission of which people truly understood how to live in concert with the land. I leave it to you, percipient reader, to decide whether this final extract from Reverend Flint’s 1835 journal of the Ouachita territory draws a merited contrast:

  Our ferryman, living on a high Indian mound, had a small field above the overflow. We found him and his habitation among the real curiosities of the country. He was a little old Hollander, dressed about half in Robinson Crusoe costume, with his house and garden on the summit of a mound, rearing its solitary elevation above the vast swamp, and at some miles’ distance from any other dwelling. Flourishing peach and plum trees and a little garden covered this summit. The cabin had two stories, the under one a sort of lumber room, dug in the side of the mound. We ascended the upper one by a ladder, to his parlour and dormitory. Himself, a dog and cat, were the sole tenants. The man, the habitation, everything in and around it, were such as Walter Scott would have assigned to a wizard. His family utensils were horns of strange forms and dimensions; his vessels cypress knees; his bellows a long reed with which he blew up the fire, blowpipe fashion. His dog and cat, his barn and buildings, were all in perfect keeping. The strange looking old being was himself, I judged, a fancied adept in astrology; for he showed me a Dutch book, which as well as I could make out his explanation of it, taught the occult science of the stars. . . . This lone old man, a century ago, would have been in danger from superstition. At present he will occupy his solitary swamp unmolested, and some morning of no distant day, will be found stiff in his dormitory, resting just above the bones of the unknown dwellers of the former generations; as he seemed feeble and suffering, and complained of having experienced a fit during the thunderstorm of the preceding night.

  Of other past events at the mouth of the Ouachita, I should mention the possibility that Hernando de Soto passed through the Indian settlement at the foot of the Great Mound. If that village was Anilco, as some historians believe, then those people saw the fatally ill conquistador in his last days before being sent by his men on a final voyage to the bottom of the Mississippi River.]

  Searching for a view of the terminus of the Ouachita, the place where it loses its name, Q and I walked down one afternoon through a gate in the flood-wall linked with a low levee, so we could reach the sandy edge of the Black River to behold the juncture of waters, but it wasn’t visible from there either. I asked a young fisherman in hunter’s-orange camouflage (Q: “Is he hiding from catfish?”) where we could find a viewpoint. We needed to cross the Catahoula to Trinity, he said, only a couple of hundred yards distant, but getting there required directions and a vehicle.

  To the south we could see the 1935 bridge and its mundane ramp built from a priceless past. On beyond it, standing in the middle of the river, were three concrete columns connected on top by lateral beams. The assemblage looked like a temple gateway, a Japanese sacred torii with an extra leg: TTT. Could it possibly be once-blasé Jonesvillians (I came within an ace of writing Jonesvillains) were trying to atone for the (okay, I’ll use it) villainy here a generation ago? Such a junction of waters was undoubtedly a sacred place to the indigenous peoples, and that means destruction of the pyramid and its collateral mounds was desecration. But was there now hope that a wise and generous enlightenment, however belated, had come to the hamlet? I asked the fisherman what the thing was. “Piers for the new bridge,” he said. “The old one’s coming down — at least it’s supposed to when the politicians quit arguing over who gets paid what for the right-of-way, so we can finish the bridge.”

  “You mean,” asked Q, “a thousand-year-old marvel got turned into road fill that lasted all of sixty-some years?” He was taken aback. Thinking her words sounded harsh, she added, “Maybe in nineteen thirty-one they didn’t know what they were doing.”

  “You’ve heard about the mound?” he said in surprise, and then, cautious with his words, “Oh, they knew what they were doing all right.” While he helped his five-year-old son rebait a hook, he said, “You can’t tell it by these clothes, but I work in a bank, and I see every day how economically depressed Catahoula Parish is. People here don’t like to admit it, but it’s obvious to outsiders. The local catfish farms are about gone because of Asian imports, and cotton is way down. Okay, soybeans are up this year, and a few people make money raising pet turtles, those little green ones. Cooters. Most of them go to Asia. But trading cooters for catfish doesn’t make a real broad economic base. All you have to do is look at the town up there. Those buildings show how hard-hit we are.”

  His line jerked around, then went taut, and he wrestled in a fourteen-inch blue catfish he would grill that night. When he had reset his line, he said, “They knew back t
hen what they were doing to the big mound, but I doubt they figured they were shoveling our economic future into road fill. For a town this size, a good tourist attraction could be the base of a nice economy.” I mentioned Poverty Point, eighty miles north, a sprawling archaeological site almost four-thousand years old, which had not long ago become a National Historic Landmark even though nothing there was quite so dramatic as the Troyville pyramid had been. “No question,” he said. “If the big mound was still here, we’d have some tourist business.”

  I asked whether he knew about Cahokia, how the State of Illinois, over the years and without the use of eminent domain, bought up a ’50s and ’60s housing development — including a drive-in theater — at the foot of the giant mound and gradually removed structures and streets to re-create in increments a landscape fitting to a prehistoric cultural center without equal in the United States. A balloon-frame house can be moved anywhere if need be, but an earthen structure like Monk’s Mound, a thousand feet long and covering sixteen acres (a base larger than that of the Cheops pyramid), is going nowhere except where unchecked erosion might take it. The changes at Cahokia, including a new museum, materially assisted its designation as a World Heritage Site, and the last I’d heard, two-hundred-thousand people a year came to see it.

  He was still listening, so I went on. Why not create for depressed Jonesville an economic-assistance plan, one to be developed over time through fund-raising and finding willing sellers? Buy the half-dozen intrusive houses (as they come up for sale) and the chapel on the block where the Great Mound once stood, remove them, conduct full archaeological research. Restore the embankment and small mounds, then culminate the project with a reconstruction of the Great Mound by delineating it with so-called ghost architecture, perhaps an open steel frame bearing the outline. Maybe include metal ramps — similar in design to the conjectured originals — that visitors could take to the top. There would be nothing else in America quite like it.

  “That’s pretty radical for us,” he said. Radical? Hell, people here — like everywhere else — are heading for the outskirts anyway. Why not let the American urge to sprawl away from town central work economically for Jonesville?

  Either out of interest or in disbelief at such notions, he seemed still open, so I kept going although I knew my words sounded like, as Lemuel Gulliver has it, “a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers.” How about, in one of the derelict buildings on Mound Street, a visitor center to display the discoveries and interpretations of the archaeologists? A museum that, among other things, might explore the mystery of who the aboriginal people were and why they settled there and why they later deserted the place, an inquiry that could shed light on how a later people are using it.

  And I would have added to my blatant quodlibetic — had I then thought of it — any eradication of knowledge of a place is as deleterious to a community as the destruction of the place itself. Such a new undertaking might help citizens see some connections between their Addictive Disorder Clinic and their disassociation from their past and the economic consequences. It was too late for true preservation and restoration of the earthworks but not for further investigation and interpretation and some edifying reconstructions. To rebuild a place wisely is to rebuild lives. An attuned economic engine can also be a spiritual engine.

  “Like a theme park?” he said. Not at all. It wouldn’t be drive-by history but a center with national ramifications to educate and — given the losses — help a town do what it could to reclaim a great inheritance a previous generation had squandered. A way to undo the rapacity of an economy based upon principles that ultimately impoverish a community. (This last sentence I didn’t say, but only because the words then failed me.)

  But I did say, since I was talking to a bank employee, too often we all live in ways guaranteed to divest our inheritance. We’ve become, at least nationally, great violators of the old Quaker apothegm Thee shall never touch the principal. Weren’t reactionary politicians in Washington wanting to sell off Department of the Interior lands to pay for a deficit brought on by corporate handouts and a disastrous Mesopotamian war?

  He’d stopped looking at me, and I realized I might have gone too far for him. He was watching his little boy, whose interest in fishing was exhausted, pile up small mounds of river sand as if he’d been illustrating the conversation; after he had six or seven piles, he swept his hand across them, leveling them as though they never were.

  20

  A Cannonball Clean Through the Parlor

  GUIDED BY THE FISHERMAN’S DIRECTIONS, Q and I drove back through Jonesville and on around to the north side of the Catahoula River, following it a short way to its terminus at Trinity, across the water and less than a quarter mile from where the great pyramid once had been. We stopped and walked a lightly wooded area to the edge of a thirty-foot bluff overlooking a wide expanse of water, and Q asked, “Is that the mouth of the Ouachita?” Without a more detailed map, I couldn’t be certain. She said, “I wish somebody would come along.” The words were still in the air when I saw a squarely built man coming toward us, probably to run us off. Hoping I was wrong, I met him to give our reason for trespassing. Before I could say anything, he introduced himself: Tuffy Parish. I said we were hunting the end of the Ouachita River, and he said, “You’re looking at it.”

  Q came up to explain our descent from the headwaters, which she now could relate with polish, and he motioned to follow him back to the edge of the bluff, several yards beyond where we’d been. He nodded to a small sign, blue letters on white, each side painted so both river and road travelers could read it: OUACHITA RIVER. Tuffy, whose given name was James, pointed northeast. “That’s the Tensaw.” Then pointing northwest, “That’s the Ouachita.” Motioning south, he said, “On down’s the Black.” He started walking again. “This way,” he said. “The view you’re looking for is best over here.” Over here was a platform on long and slender steel piers allowing the high deck a gentle sway above the last mile of the Ouachita. “We call it Parish’s Peaceful Point.”

  He kept a barbecue grill there and had made benches on top of watertight boxes holding picnic supplies and a few books. “It’s a good place to read and watch,” he said.

  Q looked at me. “I never thought we’d find treasure boxes of books at the end of the river.” That pleased him.

  The woodland beauty of the last lap of the Ouachita was fittingly modest but not inconsequential, especially if one imagined afloat on the wide waters some dugouts of the builders of the Great Mound, pirogues of French trappers, Dunbar and Hunter’s clumsy barge, Union ironclads, Clarence Moore’s Gopher; perhaps even Hernando de Soto, about to give up his ghost, his bodily voyage almost done, and he so far from home, his conquest incomplete but nevertheless deadly, and maybe one way or another the cause of the abandonment of the settlement around the grand pyramid.

  We watched the Ouachita until it began to disappear in the dusk, then Parish said, “Let me show you something else,” and led us off the deck and into a wooden cabin he’d saved from destruction and rebuilt as a guest cottage, turning the interior into a little gallery for his inventive opuscules: curtain rods made from tree branches, an American flag with stripes fashioned from old fence pickets and the union from a four-paned window with a half-dozen Gulf Coast starfish glued to the glass. He said, “Come back sometime and stay here.”

  Parish was sixty-seven and retired from a local company that manufactured twine and rope products. He was smiling. “I used to have good connections.” He believed living along a river entailed responsibility, but his words for it were “Whatever we do here can keep on going downstream.” Seeing me pull out my little notebook to write that down, he added, “You put in how we take care of the end of the river.” Here was a man, were he a generation older and owner of the Great Mound, who might have made the history — the well-being — of Jonesville sweepingly different.

  He went to the door. “Come on over to the house. I want you to see something in the
garage, and you tell me if it’s not the only thing like it along the river.” Tuffy built his house in 1973 by incorporating where he could portions of an 1830s home originally on the site. Although the place was more than thirty feet above the usual river level, a couple of forty-foot rises had twice put water up to the windowsills. His wife, Ginger, a retired teacher of third graders, joined us in the garage while he went to a cooler to find four bottles of beer. I stood looking around for the curiosity he wanted us to spot.

  When I was nine or ten and traveling the highways as my father’s navigator, I would imagine going up to selected front doors across the country and knocking and introducing myself and my assignment: a researcher with the Committee for American Curiosities whose task it was to discover all the peculiarly worthy things people squirrel away in their homes. I would show my credentials signed by Harry Truman and the Secretary of the Interior (interiors were our special domain), papers that would make a person eager to share treasures pulled from attic trunks, cartons at the backs of closets, even from a secret compartment in the chiffonier: the Mister’s cloth napkin Jackson Pollock spilled spaghetti red on, the Missus’s diary of Great-Grandmother Lavinia’s trip across the plains in 1848, Sister’s collection of roller-skate keys, Junior’s cigar box of subway tokens, Granny’s shelf of player-piano rolls. After full examination, I’d give the family a booklet of instructions on the best ways to pass along one day their troves to posterity. We would then all sit down at the kitchen table for a slice of apricot upside-down cake and a glass of apple cider. (You, astute reader, now see how so long ago this business of quests for quoz got started.)