| USA-from the Hudson to Oregon |
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| USA from the Hudson to Oregon William Least Heat-Moon- River-Horse & the Roads to Quoz , Secker and Warburg & Little Brown , July 24, 2012 |
“River-horse” is a colossal venture. To cross the United States by boat from the Hudson at New York City to an Oregon Estuary on the Pacific entails a huge act of compression. It is going to be inevitably comparable to the North-South journey in “Old Glory”. It has 506 pages and Heat-Moon does not go in for Jonathan Raban’s halts and digressions and general encountering of strangers. Its virtues are a relentless focus on the passage, the water, the obstacles, the sense of history. Chapters start with quotations from Lewis and Clark and other travellers who have gone before. It is enlivened by small human touches. When a man appears to guide the boat through a construction area he records “I did a little jig.” The language is distinctive. “The Oneida River in its brief sixteen miles manages to flow to almost as many points as there are on a compass rose.” “Across the river lay a thin miasma of brown that turned into a line of saplings as we approached, and once again we were into the willows.” “We passed a pother of cormorants in a cluster of dead trees.” The writing towards the end captures the grandeur of the West. The majesty of the Snake and Columbia rivers contrasts with the rage at the depletion of species and the subsidised preference given to mass cattle-grazing. Woody Guthrie once sang "Roll on, Columbia, roll on, roll on, Columbia, roll on / Your power is turning our darkness to dawn / Roll on, Columbia, roll on." Now the Columbia hosts, and cools, huge server farms. This review may well be hosted there which makes for a nice twist in the history of the West. In the “Roads to Quoz”, halfway through its 581 pages, William Least Heat-Moon quotes from “Tristram Shandy” It is one of the keys to appreciating a book which is subtitled “An American Mosey.” Where most books in the travel genre follow a course or seek out a destination “Roads to Quoz” is a meander. Heat-Moon goes exploring the Ouachita Valley in Arkansas, dips into an over-urbanised Florida, goes to New Hampshire’s White Mountains, sails the Intracoastal Waterway. “Mosey”, he tells us, derives from the Spanish “vamos”. The discursive narrative has snippets of autobiography. He has once been a doctoral student in English literature. He meditates on words like “absquatulate” and “shinplaster”, a term for worthless money. Moonshine is also known as white lightning, bottled-in-the-barn booze or Ozark nose paint. He himself is on a forty-eight month deacquisition plan. He wants to rid himself of one item, large or small, each and every day. The second key is the author’s age. He has reached that time in life where he is relaxed in himself, where he does not need to prove himself. “As travellers age” he writes “we carry along ever more journeys, especially when we cross through a remembered terrain where we become wayfarers in time as well as space, where physical landscapes get infused with temporal ones.” As in his previous books Heat-Moon knows his American history inside out. Audubon, Thoreau, Theodore Roosevelt, Eli Lilley all feature. It is a very different America from the high-pressure urban backdrop of film and news. Contemporary reference is scattered about but thinly. He sees a saloon with a sign “HIPPIES ENTER BY SIDE DOOR”. He makes reference to a Negro part of town. What he calls the Babylonian war is costing three billion a week; that could make good a lot of worn infrastructure. South of Charleston SC he encounters a water-land with names like Toogoodoo, Wadmalaw, Ashepoo and Coosaw. The anti-modernity of his prose leans at moments to the precious. In earlier life his livelihoods have included “delivering newspapers in the wee hours”. He addresses direct the “perdurable reader” or “nimble reader (who are so often ahead of me)”. “Roads to Quoz” is probably one for Heat-Moon familiars. If he is new sample “Blue Highways” or “River Horse” first. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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