Roads to Quoz

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Poor retrorse Miss Woodmiller. She surely would have raised the question whether an electronically driven virtual-world can ever create the same response as an imagined realm. Presuming to speak for her, I think she would argue that imagination — the supreme requisite for reading good books — can allow transforming ideas to arise. With voltage-powered entertainments, imagination is taken care of for you. On a screen, your Long John Silver looks precisely like mine, and my Alice wears the same pinafore as yours because it is the same one.

  The Illinois van had added a conversational dimension to a few miles of Montana for Q and me, but for that to happen, of course, we first had to see the family in the van. Q said, “Those plugged-in kids remind me of little P.C. and your scheme to rewire him and cure his videosis.” P.C. — his actual initials and the name he went by — had come to spend time with me a few years earlier. He was nine years old, skinny, small for his age but mentally quick, of sweet disposition, possessed of the gift of gab, and still uneasy in the dark, especially in a strange house surrounded by woods. At that time he was engaged in writing a novel about a sleight-of-hand magician — not a wizard but just an ordinary boy much like himself for whom a thick woods held unknowns better left to themselves. He’d gotten his manuscript to page three.

  P.C. was largely schooled in his home by his grandmother who thought a few days in a distant place with his “uncle” in Missouri would be of benefit. My plan was to take him on the road, open territory new to him, walk him through my woods, show him the dark sinkhole and tell him a tale of the man trapped down in it; I would lay before him my hand-drawn, 1950 map of two Kansas City blocks centered around 74th and Flora Avenue, illustrating every fruit tree and grape arbor planted by an earlier generation and ignored by postwar supermarketing neighbors. I’d try to demonstrate how cherries or a pear picked and eaten while perched like a bird in the tree was fruit sweeter than any from a grocery. I’d give a recounting of Hellcats and Messerschmitts and Zeros built of balsa and tissue paper that, sooner or later, would be taken up to an attic window, a match put to them, and set off on a flaming glide to earth. World War II redux. I, a Svengali, would open worlds young P.C. hadn’t found on any screen and therefore couldn’t imagine.

  On our road trip, as I pointed out quoz of the territory, he dutifully would raise his head from his handheld electronic-game to look out the window and say “Oh,” and then return to his screen to vaporize into a digital ether various fell creatures — some furry, others well-muscled, and still others deranged machinery, but all intent on mayhem. To travel his world, he didn’t need two legs — a pair of agile thumbs would do. So we gave up the road to try another approach: hands-on construction.

  I bought a 176-piece Erector Set with directions for eight possible models of “Super Flyers.” P.C. chose the ultralight — a small, quirky, one-pilot aircraft a nine-year-old (or sixty-year-old) might wondrously fly in his sleep. A winged dream-machine. I set him up at a table. An hour later I returned to find two pieces bolted together and P.C. thumbing away at his video screen. The ultralight directions were entirely in pictures requiring close examination to interpret, so I sat beside him as counsel. After all, it was his first airplane. Three or four bolts later, he slipped away to the bathroom. When he didn’t soon return, I went to see about him; from behind the door I heard a tattoo of highly pitched beeps and blips and “Polly Wolly Doodle” played on what sounded like a tiny, tinny carousel.

  The solution (thought I) is to let him see a finished plane to inspire him. So I took up the bolts and nuts of a size a nine-year-old can see, and over the rest of the afternoon squintingly assembled the plane, down to its spinning propeller and cockpit where P.C. might imagine himself piloting safely above a perilous reach of dark woods and over deep sinkholes lying just beyond his bed. As he looked at it blankly, I, knowing the allure of dismantling to a nine-year-old male brain (especially one dedicated to amusements in which things must be etherized before they get you), suggested he take the ultralight apart to make another model, maybe the biplane or crop duster. He said, “That’s a lot of work.”

  During his visit, all I accomplished was a return to my own ninth year, and I altered not at all his progress toward his eventual study of computeristics leading to improved games he hoped to design. Q said, “Maybe a raft trip with a GPS would’ve made a less radical transition.” Erector Sets, I said, are now radical?

  The truth is, I should have minded my own business, but then, of course, I wouldn’t have that swell little ultralight sitting on a bookshelf and continually reminding me how I’d like to fly a bigger one treetop high across America to see how the surface fits together. Might be a book there. Maybe a transforming idea.

  To love children must also be to love their future, and any future that impoverishes connections to the grand dominion of the natural world is endangered even before it’s born. It may also prove to be a future impossible not to produce but to sustain. To tolerate separation from spiritual links to the imperium of nature is to hang on the edge and wait for cataclysm. Any religion or science — the two priestcrafts most often posing that ultimate question Why is there not nothing? — unwilling to embrace and enhance spiritual ties to the mysterious and miraculous existence of all Being can only hinder human fulfillment and its very continuance.

  I know a woman in Connecticut who served as navigator on her honeymoon. Her duty was to watch the dashboard GPS screen and to listen for the electronic voice and match its bidding with exit signs along I-95 all the way to Florida. Her groom was a man for whom the heart of navigation was not territory but time. The briefest travel was the best travel. Over their fourteen-hundred miles, she performed admirably, keeping them en route flawlessly, with never a sarcastic word from him about a missed turn, and they arrived in Fort Lauderdale almost on the dot of his ETA, their marriage well-begun. She said, “My image of South Carolina or North Carolina — oh hell, the whole way down — is a little glowing screen on the dashboard and a thousand, green exit signs. I told him, the next time, either we get on a jet or you watch the GPS.”

  I should say in defense of my implications here that I do recognize how new instruments have put the lie to millennia of intelligent but incorrect theories about things, from stars to staphylococci, and I do credit machines (like the telescope) which have exposed the bunk in much theosophy and philosophy. I also recognize the possibility that one day mechanisms might reveal dimensions of existence we can now only hypothesize. And certainly it’s evident new technologies require time to learn how to use them wisely. Maybe that’s it: the instance at hand is nothing more than not knowing how to let electronic navigation bring us into a new territory rather than merely directing us through it, because we’ve not yet sufficiently distinguished between being told where we are and comprehending where we are.

  Nonetheless, for me, twenty-five square-inches of pixels cannot ever deliver the same sense of location as can fifteen-hundred square-inches of paper road-map — a document capable of suggesting a traveler’s place in a greater landscape embracing heart and soul. Isn’t allowing whizz-bizzles to create geographic illiteracy — which is to say, a disconnect between mind and territory, body and sources, spirit and its longings — a misuse of technology? There is, of course, the possibility the entire vast and unstable, carbon-fueled infrastructure undergirding the creation of whizz-bizzles may of itself terminate such mechanistic botherations.

  Had I not so flatly failed young P.C., I might have been able to help him discover the difference between virtual and experiential travel, the latter that great and timeless metaphor of passage down through the corridor of one’s own days, the deepest journey we undertake. To him, most topographical places were just locales out there somewhere. They were nothing he saw any need to belong to.

  I failed to evoke within him the slightest recognition of querencia (from the Spanish querer, to love), a term vaqueros of old Texas used in referring to the location where a longhorn was born. For travelers, no matter the d
istance traveled, a querencia can be a place of recognition and recrudescence. They are not difficult to find: like connections, they lie over the land as if stardust. And, one way or another, we’ve been there before.

  5

  What the Chatternag Quarked

  EASILY ASTOUNDED — or at least readily perplexed — by the world as they are, children are small-scale specialists at turning up quoz as they go forth daily to expand their querencia, and some remarkable few of them retain their expertise for years long past childhood. Art, in its broadest meaning, is the oldest and perhaps most sublime human endeavor to represent the existence and promise of quoz that can reawaken any of us spiritually nodding off.

  Recent inquiry has shown humans are not the only creatures to make or use tools; we must look for our defining characteristic elsewhere, and one elsewhere is cavern walls painted with pigments thirty-five-thousand years old. Whatever else depictions of aurochs and ibex and mammoths may reveal, those beasts and the handprints often attendant manifest a Cro-Magnon sense of connection and belonging, memory and awareness. Who makes an artistic image lacking a name and an attached meaning? It’s in our nature to participate in a place and its events by rendering it into images and words, and thereby coming to belong not merely to it but within it.

  All wild creatures recognize their native querencia — knowing it as a child does its mother — because that’s where they can thrive; take them from it, and they are more likely to wither than adapt. For the past half century, I’ve spent much time in trying to extend my querencia to make it somewhat contiguous with the borders of America so that I might belong in a few ways to Maine and Arizona, Montana and Alabama (the path into some querencia is easier than others). You, foreseeing reader, may have already reckoned that it is quoz that comprise querencia, and to discover the one, a traveler must find the others.

  On occasion I wish I were Mark Twain, writing in a time when an author could dance around a faulty memory — or notebook — and slip past even a surveillant reader three short sentences like these about a smart Australian bird he claimed could outtalk a parrot. In Following the Equator, Twain says, “I cannot recall that bird’s name. I think it begins with M. I wish it began with G or something that a person can remember.” Comic genius, you see, lets a writer get away with — what’s the word? I think it begins with M.

  Bird names beginning with M bring me again to a quoz of the West sometimes called a magpie. If in crossing the Great Plains you’ve seen one, has it been nothing more than a long-tailed thing gliding gracefully and iridescently from fence post to sagebrush or maybe picking at a hare flattened to the asphalt? If so, reconsider the magpie and a few of its six-dozen names in English: mockapie, rudder-bird, Madge, pegpie, tellpie, maggotpie, hedge-mag, egg-lift, long-tailed Nan (its pied coloring suggests nun might be more descriptive, but then, it was once thought to carry a drop of the Devil’s blood). The name I like is chatternag. People have described some of its natterings as wheezes, whistles, screeches, squeaks, squawks, rasps, guttural quarks, and even ringing cell phones.

  North of the Yellowstone River, just beyond where Sunday Creek comes in, I saw two magpies (they often are in pairs), a good omen to anyone remembering certain versions of an old folk rhyme:

  One magpie for woe, two mags for joy,

  three for a wedding, and four for a boy;

  five for a pearl, but a flock to get a girl.

  A child’s bird-guide my father gave me when I was twelve allowed me to redefine “some old black bird” into Pica pica, the black-billed magpie, and the magic associated with names transformed a heretofore assumed commonplace into a High Country quoz. But one boy’s quoz can be an adult’s vexation. Western farmers and ranchers once set out poison for magpies, and maybe that still happens, even though later ornithological research has shown the birds contribute more than they take — except in animal traps from which the mags are adept at stealing bait, an event now not entirely unwelcome to some of us.

  During winter storms, their big domed nests — up to eight feet high, among the grandest built by North American birds, and far out of proportion to the nestlings within — provide shelter for other creatures. And there’s one more magpie gift: it will pick insects off of an ungulate, and it will clean out a mess of maggots as if they were, well, pie.

  If the issue is man versus magpie, we also might want to consider just who the hell it was that came into the territory first. The Euro-American taking of the West, as we know, has been an ingress leaving almost nothing as it was — rivers, prairies, deserts, forests, bison, native residents. The white man is a Noah riding in on the flood of his own numbers and technologies, and inside his ark of invasively destructive species is also a library of formularies and covenants to purge, like an angry god, all flesh that offends his economy so that it might be repopulated with species selected to offer quick monetary gain. The consequence there (to continue Old Testament locution) is the fear of man and the dread of him upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth. So on and so forth.

  Almost as old as the Genesis account is folklore saying magpies were the sole critters aboard Noah’s ark to refuse shelter under the roof during those forty days and nights of deluge. Instead, the hardy pair perched atop the roof to quark-quark about the iniquity of humanity that had brought on the Flood and to give a good round of cussing to the wicked cities as the water covered them. Considering the reason for the inundation, the magpies appear to speak the mind of God. (Let no animal showing it wants no truck with humanity be called dumb.) If global climate change does indeed produce rising coastal waters, one day there may be moguls, magnates, mugwumps, and muckety-mucks on Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue who will complain, “The goddamn magpies had it right all along.”

  A few years ago when I was sleeping out in a stretch of low hills in northern Utah, I was awakened every morning just past dawn by a dozen or so chatternags (such a congregation is called, appropriately, a tidings). Their incessant chattering nagged me awake, so I lay there listening. Meowing and purring, they tried out on me the language of the house cat; yipping and growling, they essayed the tongue of dog and coyote, then somebody’s budgie, then in desperation came what I can only describe as an imitation of a running lawn-mower. I called to them, Damnit! I am a man! And I do believe one answered with what sounded not like quark-quark but jerk-jerk! as if commenting even yet from Noah’s roof.

  For supporting evidence of that possibility, I offer to the skeptical reader the ancient eminence of Pliny the Elder who died observing the Vesuvius eruption that buried Pompeii. In his Natural History, he writes of magpies repeating favored words and then pondering their meaning; and, says he, should a mag fail to comprehend a particular word, it might die of disappointment. (He also offered that buzzards are impregnated by the wind.) If the ancient Roman encyclopedist is too credulous or too much of a fabulist for our view of nature, the truth remains that a fledgling magpie — when taken into our society of (to use Plato’s mocking definition) “the plumeless genus of bipeds” — can let loose fifteen different vocalizations, some of which mimic human cadences. A chatternag is no taciturn raven croaking nothing more than “Nevermore.”

  In our time, one ornithologist has demonstrated magpie intelligence (beyond its notable curiosity and its wise wariness of us) through a clever experiment proving they can recognize themselves in a mirror: when the scientist shined a dot of red light on a magpie, the bird discovered it by looking in the mirror but knew to try to pick the dot off itself rather than off its image. Run that experiment on the smartest puss you know.

  As they ascended the Missouri River through what is today the Dakotas, Lewis and Clark were the first to record formally the existence of the magpie in North America. Fascinated with the “parti-colored corvid,” they made cages of sticks and sent a living quartet of the birds (along with a few prairie dogs, another garrulous Western resident) downriver and on east to the President. One of t
he magpies — and a lone “barking squirrel” — survived the two-thousand-mile journey and the loss of their querencia to become the first creatures to bring a living voice of the far plains to Washington. I toy with history here as I imagine Clark wanting to communicate to the President advance spoken tidings of the great expedition: in his study, Jefferson leans close to examine the magpie, and like an avian recorder, it quarks what William taught it: “Hello, Tom!”

  6

  A Smart Bike

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1975, evidence was accumulating that my life as an academic was about to come down around my ears and leave no significant aspect standing. Between vain hopes and denials, I knew I should begin looking for an exit leading not merely to another room but to a different life. There was no place for me in the towers of ivory. Desperation steadily obviated any need to weigh risks against rewards, and futility left me looking for almost anything other than where my thirty-six years had ended up.

  One morning I sat on a deck I’d built out into a cluster of trees, a place of natural repose; before me was the Kansas City Times. In it I saw a photograph, a four-by-four-inch picture of a bicyclist riding through southwest Missouri, and he was doing it atop the tracks of a short-line railroad, his bike propelled by an old one-cylinder washing-machine motor. Putt-putt-putt he went across the counties in the company of a friend chugging along behind. Their contraptions were balanced upright by an outrigger with a wheel rolling atop the opposite rail. Putt-putt-putt. The sound of their washer motors awoke me.