Although life is a journey, mine has some structure and includes several strict routines. Music routine: Listening to Harry Chapin on rainy Saturdays, good loud bluegrass on Sunday mornings, followed by Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell in the afternoons – also with the volume up.
If you don’t know this music, hang on. Despite our differences in age, I am still awesome in many ways and I promise it will be worth your while to read this post. And, thank you for staying.
Reading routine : Devouring all books that William Heat-Moon will ever write. I’ve followed his back-roads journey (the blue ones on an old highway map), around the Lower 48 in his van, Ghost Dancing, (Blue Highways, 1982.)
Twenty years later, “River Horse: Across America by Boat“, his story of a 5,000 mile voyage on a boat dubbed Nikawa, an Indian name meaning river horse, was a wild ride from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the inland waterways in a single season.
His latest, “Roads to Quoz:,” an off-the-beaten path journey to places most of us would call “nowhere,” presents a perfect idea for your sabbatical. Head out to nowhere. Nowhere is a good – really good – destination and if you end up in the middle of nowhere – even better. (There’s a bit more to it.)
Okay. So the Quoz thing. It rhymes with Oz and it’s not a place. As defined by Mr. Heat-Moon quoz is a noun that refers to anything strange, incongruous or peculiar; at its heart is the unknown, the mysterious. You can’t go to the 7-11 for milk without finding Quoz.
Curiosity is at the heart of Heat-Moon’s compass and that’s something many of us have (or had.) We could shine it up if it’s rusty or get it into shape, perhaps. Serendipity is his watch word. Now, that’s going to be a little harder for some of us.
But what Heat-Moon does is just mosey over the course of three years and a total of 16,000 miles in a series of trips using just those two things: curiousity and serendipity. The trip starts out in Arkansas where he wants to follow the course of the Quachita River. There is no master plan. Other than Baltimore, he does not visit and barely mentions U.S. cities. His fascination is with the country’s geographical and historical nooks and crannies.
Site of The Great Mound, once the largest Indian-made earthworks in the US draws him to Jonesville, La. Tales of the legendary Quapaw Ghost Light draw him to Oklahoma where yes, he, too, sees the light – a glowing whitish orb. He’s drawn to the “Forgotten Expedition,” lead by explores Dunbar and Hunter who discoveries at the same time of Lewis and Clark’s expedition have been dwarfed.
Along the way, he talks to people and they catch his ear. In Florida he overhears a woman complain,”I got a livin’ room, but in my life I got no room to live in and that means I’m doin’ some wrong livin.’”
A visit to a woman in New Mexico with a woman he has been corresponding with for 10 years and discovers she has been living a simple, comfortable life on about $7,000 a year. “Her carbon footprint,” he notes “was that of a house cat.
Mr. Heat-Moon cannot drive by someone with a hand made sign advertising “Tupelo Honey and Mayhaw Jelly” without stopping…buying…then spending the half the afternoon talking to the folks selling it.
His message is that there is a fascinating country, complex and rich, beyond the fast-food joints, interstates and strip malls. It might not be your kind of road trip. It doesn’t have to be.
What he’s saying is that quoz is on a road close to you – some fascination, mystery, something very unique and special. It’s just beyond where you are now, not far at all.
Save yourself the trouble of airport hassles and be frugal if you have a sabbatical in this economy. You can have the time of your life, just moseying around this country trying to find in the middle of nowhere.
No Responses Yet…