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Book Reviews
The Quintessential Quandary of Quoz
ROADS TO QUOZ:
An American Mosey
By William Least Heat-Moon
592 pp. Little, Brown and Company $27.99
Reviewed by Sarah Morgan
In the coastal community where I live, a sign at the entrance of a small hotel reads: A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arrival. It sums up the difference between travelers and tourists, and perhaps quantifies the spirit with which one ought to pick up William Least Heat-Moon’s latest book Roads To Quoz: An American Mosey.
This is not a book for the impatient—the freeway reader, if you will—but for those who like the out-of-the-way, the laid back, and prefer questions rather than answers. I think of it as a biblio-koan of sorts, something I’ll return to often, probing it for deeper understanding. As with all of Heat-Moon’s books, this one took time to write: three years, an astounding 16,000 miles traveled, and an untold amount of research.
He has done more than his share of traveling.
In 1978, after a dissolved marriage and a lost teaching job, he embarked on a journey across America, traveling the small two-lane highways marked in blue on his Rand McNally map. Blue Highways became a classic. Stemming from the same atlas, two other books would later emerge: PrairyErth: A Deep Map is an in-depth look at a single county on the tallgrass prairie of Kansas; and, later, River-Horse: Across America By Boat, a chronicle of his boat trip across 5000 miles of America. Heat-Moon has said the map was the best purchase of his life. He took seven years to complete PrairyErth, rewriting it 20 times, and in an interview revealed that after selling the idea to Houghton Mifflin it took him three years to work up the courage to attempt the trip that would lead to River-Horse’s ultimate publication.
For him, the act of writing a book is transformative. He says, “To go out not quite knowing why is the very best reason for going out at all, and to discover the why is the most promising and potentially fulfilling of outcomes. I’m speaking of the quest for quoz.”
And that brings us to the title of his latest work.
Quoz, an archaic noun, is both singular and plural. According to Heat-Moon, it refers “to anything strange, incongruous or peculiar, at its heart is the unknown, the mysterious. It rhymes with Oz.”
Roads To Quoz is split into six sections representing the six trips Heat-Moon took with his wife Jo Ann, whom he calls Q because of her love of all things beginning with that letter. In the spirit of personal essayists like Hazlitt or Lamb, he speaks directly to his reader, often in quite endearing terms. All of his books are quirky, with many digressions, and are marked by a curious mind. This one is no exception.
The book is full of innumerable characters and wonderful stories in these moseys around small-town America: The Goat Woman of Smackover Creek who, although barricaded from society by a jealous older husband for most of her life, once studied at Juilliard; Indigo Rocket, who created a fifty-foot tall femme fatale and lives in a phantasmagoria that makes one remember the ’60s with fondness; Mrs. Waterford, a widow who grew up with a father who made boot-leg whiskey (“Ozark nose paint”); and Gus Kubitzki. Gus offers up opinions on subjects ranging from soda pop—“He used to insist the term should be spelled sodaPOP! and be pronounced with a click of the tongue as if we were Hottentots”—to how churches should be organized. “Why not categorize by avocation? The First Church of Latter-Day Duck Hunters, The Reorganized Assembly of United Numismatists, The Full Gospel Guiding Fellowship of Gossips.”
Heat-Moon discusses American history, including history in the making—some is good news, some not. He journeys into the Florida Panhandle, where real estate has become a god and greed, the holy grail. Later, in a mosey into New Mexico, he visits an octogenarian woman who reads his books and has communicated with him for several decades. Jean Shirer Ingold, although she graduated magna cum laude from American University, lives the simplest of lives. Residing in a 20-foot trailer (one hundred and seventeen square feet) on someone else’s land, she describes herself best in this modest comment: “I’m poor at owning.” It was a lovely visit and, like Heat-Moon, I would have loved to linger longer.
Along the way, the road is littered with cafes, bars, and signs: ARE YOU ON THE PATH TO HELL? PREPARE TO MEET THY MECHANIC. BUSINESS SUCKS SALE. OYSTER EATERS ONLY. ENTRANCE FOR TODAY.
The book can be tedious in places. The introduction to the chapter titled “In the Light of Ghosts” is a rambling philosophical discourse on the nature of ghosts, but in the end the history was so revealing it made me pause. The book is often thought-provoking, and you may have to look up a few words, many beginning with the letter Q. Curious, I did, and was often delighted.
Quoz for me was Heat-Moon’s wonderfully deep conversation about travelers and place. I particularly enjoyed his discussion of a Texan term, querencia (from the Spanish, querer, to love). The vaqueros used it to refer to where the longhorns were born. Admitting to having become “an elder of the road,” he discusses how memory springs from previously known places. Like longhorn roaming the prairies, no matter how far one travels there is bound to be a place that is redolent of home. “They are not difficult to find: like connections they lie over the land like stardust. And, one way or another, we have been there before.” QED.
Sarah Morgan is a past contributor to The Internet Review of Books. She loves stories; she has all of her life. She grew up in Oregon and now lives on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica where there is a world of stories at her doorstep. Some of them are about nature and some about human nature, but if they are interesting she writes about them. Her work has appeared in Real Travel Adventures, Escape From America, and Notre Dame magazine.
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