Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (14 page)

Over the next quarter of a century, the ivory-bill range — once covering portions of a dozen southern and midsouthern states — contracted ever more, largely the result of loosened timber laws allowing unconstrained logging. Ornithologists began to suspect the bird was nearing extinction, with only a few still remaining somewhere on the continent, perhaps in the wetland forests between the Ouachita and the Mississippi in the northeast corner of Louisiana. In 1932, a lawyer–cum–state legislator from Tallulah set out into the deep woods of Madison Parish to prove to state wildlife officials that at least one ivory-bill was still living in the bottomlands of the Tensas River. He spotted it, shot it, and brought in the dead bird. That was an attorney who understood a writ of habeas corpus.

Nine years later, a national campaign to create a refuge for a creature on the edge of extinction began. By that time, though, one ornithologist estimated only a couple of dozen ivory-bills survived, perhaps all of them near the upper Tensas in the most extensive primeval forest then remaining in the South. The best habitat was on land owned by the Singer Sewing Machine Company. A paper published by Cornell University, the acknowledged authority in ivory-bill research, says:

The logging rights to the Singer Tract had been sold to the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company. The National Audubon Society mounted a campaign to save the Singer Tract, but it only accelerated the rate of cutting. [The lumber company] had no interest in saving the forest or compromising with John Baker, the president of the . . . Society. Baker wanted to buy the rights to the trees and obtained a pledge of $200,000 from the governor of Louisiana for that purpose. The lumber company refused the offer, and the Singer Sewing Machine Company, which still owned the land, refused to intercede.

The Society sent a researcher into the tract two years later to look for any surviving ivory-bills, those vigorous eaters of injurious beetles. In a small and isolated stand of unlogged trees, he found a single bird. Until recent reports of sightings in east-central Arkansas can be generally confirmed, that lone female will remain the last proven ivory-bill in the United States. The Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge finally opened in the 1980s — forty years too late. As for the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company directors who collected the profit from deforestation, they are also extinct, but we must give them their due: they did their dead-level best to take with them a creature whose residence thereabouts was at least a hundred-thousand years longer than theirs.

In the 1970s, the original six navigational locks and dams on the Ouachita were replaced by four larger ones, each backing up about a hundred miles of river. That’s a lot of water, but on the spring afternoon we watched the beaver, the difference in water level from one side of the dam to the other was only six inches, although in summer it can be fifteen feet. Fluctuation that great explains how early steamboats, unaided by locks and slack-water pools, sometimes could ascend the river into Arkansas to almost within view of the Ouachita Mountains. Even today, in a wet season, by taking a high-water passage, towboats move past Felsenthal Dam without using the locks.

Over the miles, engineers have widened the channel to a hundred feet and deepened it to nine, and they have cut through numerous tight bends that would otherwise challenge a string of barges; but the convoluted Ouachita still forces tows to be much shorter and narrower than those just a few miles east on the Mississippi.

During the time we talked with the lock operator — and long after the beaver had paddled off — not a single tow or even a bass boat approached. The timber mill just yonder of the dam didn’t use barge transport, nor did many other industries near the Ouachita. The operator said, “Up here at this season we’ll get only three or four tows a week, almost all of them carrying petroleum from the Gulf on toward Smackover for refining.” I said to rebuild more than three hundred miles of a natural river for three or four tows a week seemed like a boondoggle in the boondocks. “Things change in the summer,” he said. “Then, every month we’ll lock through almost four-hundred wreck boats.” Wreck boats? “You know — recreation boats.”

Because taxpayer subsidies to get crude oil from the Gulf to Smackover — or a bass boat to a fishing hole — are not insignificant, I asked why the oil wasn’t refined closer to the wellheads and sent north by pipelines. “Hey!” he said. “You’re talking about my job!” And Q, in all civility, said, “I’d think we’re talking economic common sense.”

14

When Eyeballs Develop Taste Buds

T
HREE THINGS REVEALED
we’d left Arkansas and crossed into Louisiana: a small signboard of welcome, a few trees strung with Spanish moss, and an observably less-littered roadside. But Union Parish was cutover country, so thoroughly cut down that a
R£PENT
painted on the lid of an old fifty-gallon oil drum and hung from a scraggly surviving pine may have had environmental import. Gus Kubitzki, remembering former years when such arboreal urgings were more numerous along Southern and Midwestern roads in scripturally overdosed counties, called them Jesus Trees. In this era of slick electronic-lures to redemption, I confess to missing those earlier notifications of the necessity for immediate contrition (
THE END IS NIGH
) and improved conduct (
DONT NEVER DO NOTHING GOD DONT WANT YOU TO
). I realize my attitude is a simple nostalgia in the same category as a preference for little Burma-Shave signs instead of monstrously massive and wattaged monopole-billboards. But what the hell? Once upon a time, even a shaving cream could wax eschatological with happy doggerel that for miles could stick in your head — or, worse, a ceaselessly chanting child’s:

THE MIDNIGHT RIDE
OF PAUL
FOR BEER
LED TO A
WARMER HEMISPHERE.
BURMA-SHAVE

The old Jesus Tree tidings, homemade as they were, invited participation, although some responses edged toward blasphemous sarcasm. In Alabama in the ’50s I was on a piece of scraggled, scrambled blacktop through exhausted and eroded fields, a place relieved only by a series of spiritual dispatches hanging from or leaning against Jesus Trees. Here was postwar recycling, for that painter of penitence had used household appliances otherwise headed for the nearest gully: a refrigerator door, the side of an oven, the lid of a washing machine. When he’d exhausted those, he turned to dismembered pieces of automobiles: doors, hoods, trunk lids, tires, and twice an entire vehicle.

Painted across two wringer washers and a barrel was
ARE YOU ON THE PATH TO HELL?
to which a second hand had added
WHERE ELS£ COULD THIS ROAD GO?
To
WHERE WILL YOU SPEND £TURNITY?
the same second brush had appended
PLEASE NOT IN THIS COUNTY.
On the side of a defunct Hudson, a single word had been painted over to read:
PREPARE TO MEET THY MECHANIC.
The last sign, on a vintage school bus carcass, was
VENGENCE IS MINE SAYETH TH£ LORD
with a phone number added by the telltale, ministering, editorial hand; when I called it, a woman answered, “County Road Department.” A traveler in that day found more community along the highways because there was something personal in those expressions; as an Alabamian told me then, “You know, don’t you, neighbor, every dang one of them little peckerwood signs was all hand-did?”

The highway turned east to cross the river for the first time in a hundred miles, and it entered Ouachita Parish, dropped south again, and led us to a stretch of multilane in sore need of either repentance or vengeance. It wasn’t so much the local
P
industries (paper, plastics, phones) escaping control as it was a congested franchiseland shot through with billboards: here was the veritable face of Anywherica, a hub of Nightmarerica under the control of the Lord of Misrule, this one subclassified as the Outskirts of Monroe, Louisiana. We were complicit with the Abbot of Unreason in taking a room along the Strip (our only choice, as far as we then could determine), but we sought atonement by heading to the river flowing past the old heart of the city. I had found in the phone directory a listing for a restaurant with three qualities to commend it: its name (Mohawk Tavern), its longevity (since 1952), and its downtown address.

The Mohawk existed somewhere between historic and weary-worn, neither fully one nor the other, a place Q described as history-worn. You probably know the Mohawks are as Southern as any Upstate New York native can be; my guess is the number of full-blood Mohawks who have ever set foot within a mile of Louisville Avenue in Monroe, Louisiana, is about proportionate to Apaches on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on Tuesday last. For that reason I liked the name as much as the wall-mounted turkey-on-the-wing and the cast-concrete pelican perched on the bar, a bird big enough to serve as a bollard to tie one’s dinghy to. If you’ll discount dust on a stuffed sailfish and on the racks of antlers and Jack Dempsey’s sparring gloves hanging from on high, the tavern was like a well-groomed dowager who manifests her age not by trying to hide it but rather by keeping herself brushed and sponged and knowing the secret of flattering lighting: turn the lamps down, boys. The dark wood-paneled walls absorbed so much of what the fluorescents cast from the high ceiling, the light seemed to wear out before reaching us, bathing Q in a foggy dusk.

It wasn’t until we took a seat at the long bar where a man was shucking oysters that I noticed what would prove to be the best feature of the Mohawk beyond honest food: the waiters wore dark trousers and pressed white-linen jackets giving off more brightness than the overheads. All the waiters were men, each was Negro, and every one of an age to have just missed service in World War II. They were, perhaps, selected for their distinctive physiognomies. Should I ever actually pursue my long-dreamed book of photographic portraits, titled something like
Faces in America,
I think I’ll begin with the staff of the Mohawk.

I’ll mention here that African-American settlement along the length of the Ouachita, for a Southern river, is far less than you might imagine, especially compared with the Mississippi or even with the rich flatlands immediately east of the lower Ouachita. It was to this latter country that a free-Negro New Yorker, Solomon Northrup, was taken in 1841 after being abducted and sold into slavery to work the cotton fields. A dozen years later, having regained his freedom, he wrote in his poignant
Twelve Years a Slave
about his labor near Bayou Boeuf, a tributary to the Ouachita:

When a new hand, one unaccustomed to the business, is sent for the first time into the field, he is whipped up smartly, and made for that day to pick as fast as he can possibly. At night it is weighed, so that his capability in cotton picking is known. He must bring in the same weight each night following. If it falls short, it is considered evidence that he has been laggard, and a greater or less number of lashes is the penalty.

These days in America, when a black and a white unknown to each other meet, they both do well to consider — even yet — where such history lies, and if the two are to become friends or colleagues, sooner or later that question must be acknowledged and answered. When the meeting is brief and purely transactional, it can be glossed over, although I assume everyone longs for the day when such history, while not forgotten, won’t impinge on the potential for humane relations.

The white-jacketed men enhanced their distinction of countenance by a comportment rarely seen these days outside of a restaurant in Italy. They neither introduced themselves nor stated the obvious (“I’ll be your server tonight,” as if to clarify they were not standing beside your table to repair a transmission); nor did they violate privacy (“How’s that plate of jambalaya taste?” Didn’t know a plate could taste); and certainly they didn’t refer to eating as labor (“Are you still working on that rice?” Are we seated in a construction zone?).
And
they were content to allow the artifacts of a good meal — bowls, cutlery, crumbs — a long-enough presence to justify the preparation: there was no untimely sweeping the table clear in hopes we’d pay up and get out.

Like experienced court reporters, the waiters took down our words precisely and remained virtually invisible until called upon, at which sign they came forward with a deliberateness not to be altered by a choleric chef or a cranky customer. Movement so lentissimo, a perfection of age, is a lovely thing (if it’s not in the left lane, in front of you). The men, attired and choreographed so smartly, made fine theater. Q said, “I think the decline of service demeanor in restaurants coincides with the demise of waiters in white jackets.” I said, Isn’t that about the same time restaurant patrons — including church ladies in Sunday bonnets — became “guys,” as in, “You guys want nonsmoking?” (I should acknowledge here the South is still largely and blessedly free of that gender-corrupted phrase, the ubiquitous “you all” continuing to hold at bay the loathsome “you guys.”)

My tip, the
pour boire
(this
was
La Louisiane), amounted to a quarter of the bill, which the waiter accepted with a simple nod as if expecting no less for capital service he knew to be more lost than practiced in America.

“The food!” you cry. “What about the food?”

Very well, anticipant reader, food at Mohawk Tavern: the menu made it clear we were in the northeastern corner of bayou country and not all that far from the Gulf. We each took a bowl of gumbo with rice to lead us to a plate of boiled Gulf shrimp atop a bed of chopped iceberg lettuce encircled by slices of hard-boiled eggs. It was simply served. There were no dishes overwrought with froufrou flourishes worked by a graduate of a culinary institute. The emphasis was on palate, not presentation. While I understand what I’m about to quote edges toward boorishness, I believe it has merit: Gus Kubitzki once said when faced with an overpriced, pretentious restaurant entrée (his description I can scarcely believe, but he claimed the dish was “Abyssinian nicket-goat” stuffed with curried truffles simmered in ewe’s milk), “If the evolutionary process wanted me to like this, my eyeballs would have taste buds.”