Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey

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By William Least-Heat Moon

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Little, Brown, 2008

There is a special magic to be found in the writing of William Least-Heat Moon – or not to be found, since its peculiar wavelengths don’t guarantee universal visibility. He is, of course, the author of Blue Highways, the seminal American travel book instantly adopted by thousands of quasi-hippies desperate to find the “real” America, the small-town soul of a country rapidly becoming too big and too loud. The magic of which this author is capable is nowhere more easily seen than in that weird, self-indulgent masterpiece, and as in all such cases, readers wanted desperately to recapture that magic in the author’s subsequent books.

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This is a common urge, but it’s grossly unfair. Half the magic we find in the few books that provide it comes from timing, from specific and irreproducible circumstances in our lives when we happened to find them. The author, poor well-intentioned soul that he is, has no control over such variables, but suddenly there his evil publisher is, urging him to recreate lightning in a bottle. Some author’s try, inevitably adulterating their legacy. Others just keep doing what they do, hoping audiences will follow.

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That latter is William Least-Heat Moon, our modern-day Thoreau, our loafing, wandering prose Whitman, although those things are spoken by a long-time appreciator, not only of Least-Heat Moon’s writing, but of the leafy, quiet-at-night country lanes and by-streets that are his best and surest subject. If you grant that he is capable of writing masterpieces (again, opinions vary), Least-Heat Moon has written a solid number of them: there’s Blue Highways, and PrairyErth, and River-Horse The Ten video , and now his latest, Roads to Quoz

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, which has something less than the epic confidence of those earlier books but is still a thing of strange wonders and effortless yarns. All of them are presented with his customary winning voice:

As I calculated a different route northward to get us into as much territory as possible without retracing miles of it, I came up with a course generally following the Allagash River, but I couldn’t shake my disappointment, at least not until the breeze slackened enough to let black flies find me. I continued figuring, slapping, measuring, slapping, marking, slapping, cursing, slapping, slapping, and finally going back into the cramped office. If those little botherations can drive a half ton of moose to near frenzy, why should a man feel unmanly by retreating behind screen windows? “Got to you, did they?” the gatekeeper said. “Now you’ll scratch for a week.”

Least-Heat Moon defines “quoz” as anything worth finding on the journey, anyplace worthy of idiosyncratic interest. His own books are perfect illustrations of the term.

                                                                                                                               –Steve Donoghue