Review Roads to Quoz by William Least Heat-Moon
An American Mosey Down the Backroads Again
Apr 6, 2009
Best known for his very popular 1982 road book Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon has also written deep explorations of both America’s tallgrass prairies (PrairyErth, 1991) and riverways (River Horse, 1999). His latest book, Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (2008), returns him to the backroads of this country he loves exploring.
The simplest way to say it is, if you loved Blue Highways (and millions did, it remains one of the top selling travel books of all time), you’ll love Roads to Quoz. There are differences, however.
Comparisons to Blue Highways
Perhaps the biggest difference between Heat-Moon’s road memoirs is that, while Blue Highways documented a single, three-month solo road trip (unplanned and freeform at that), Roads to Quoz is the story of six relatively short, somewhat “planned” trips with his wife. These differences, and perhaps the author's maturity, do make for a slightly changed tone to his stories.
Early on in this "Q"-centric book, Heat-Moon necessarily explains to the reader the term “quoz:” “referring to anything strange, incongruous, or peculiar; at its heart is the unknown, the mysterious…” In other words, a reason to hit the road. “Q” is also the author’s wife, a nickname pertaining to her love of the Mexican name “Quintana Roo.”
Author and Wife Travel to the Corners of America
Roads to Quoz covers six trips Heat-Moon and “Q” take into various regions of the country from 2004 to 2007, covering about 25 states, and appearing as spokes from a bike-wheel hub from his home in Columbia, Missouri in the center of the map. Besides excursions into the Northwest, Northeast, Southeast and Southwest, there are two that follow waterways, a seeming particular obsession with the author.
The first trip is also the strongest (and longest) section of the book, a retracing of the somewhat forgotten Dunbar/Hunter Expedition of 1804, exploring the Ouachita River from Arkansas, through Louisiana to Mississippi. It is the strongest section because the travelers are following a path (even if it is one of which they know little), one which forces them to make stops along it, to find out more about the river.
Excepting the final chapter/trip, also along a waterway, the other four trips into the corners of the country do not have as road-trippy a flavor, but rather a single destination (or two) like the Quapaw Ghost Light in Northeastern Oklahoma, or a drive through the Maine woods, “Because they’re there.”
Characters Along the Road a Strength
None of this is to say that Roads to Quoz is lacking in what Heat-Moon is best at: meeting quirky-cool characters and drawing out of them the stories only they could tell, followed by his own thoughtful conclusions. This, along with an ability to deeply describe where he’s been (that seems to derive from a love of just being there, wherever that is) is what makes William Least Heat-Moon a great chronicler of the road/writer.
Of those “characters,” the reader will meet and likely remember the artist Indigo Rocket and his living art backcountry cabin, and Mr. Dwightman, the widow’s man, whose prolonged story of unusual enterprise is inspiring in a number of ways. There is Jean Ingold, who lives happily on about $1700 a year, and the Coeur d”ALene dentist who rides abandoned rail lines on a rail cycle of his own making.
As the subtitle “An American Mosey” suggests, Heat-Moon’s excursions into the remaining authenticity "out there" is never sped-through, but rather ambled-across, and the tangents he sometimes goes off on --like the side roads—always lead to something interesting. Roads to Quoz is a book to be enjoyed little by little, savored, allowing some time for digestion.
Heat-Moon, William Least. Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey, 2008, Little Brown, 581 pages.
(isbn: 978-0-316-11025-9)
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