Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon

now. “Do you have children?” No children. “How about when
you
were one? Were you a little artist?”
    “I liked toys that
worked,
” he said. “That
operated.
Things I could assemble and disassemble and reassemble in different ways — Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets. But those toys were all based on angles, and I wanted curves and circles. When I got older I built little flying things, but I always dreamed of machines that could be totally versatile to move in all the elements — land, water, and air. I guess I was more mechanical than artistic. A screwdriver instead of a crayon. Later, when I worked for the company that makes Transformers, I had to design instruction books, but I wanted to do the figures. I didn’t stay there long.”
    The waitress brought our supper, simple fare, nothing to distract the conversation. Indigo said, “When I was about sixteen, I saw in a
Popular Mechanics
plans for a small boat. Eight-feet long with a nineteen thirties–style racing hull. I made it out of spruce and marine plywood. At my mother’s suggestion, I covered the bottom with fiberglass cloth, a new material then. I got an old Mercury outboard racing motor and rebuilt it. It’d do about forty miles an hour on the water, which is a little fast for the Ouachita. You know, bends and barges, snags. But I was a kid. One evening I was going full-bore up the river and hit an out-of-control ski boat which didn’t survive. But the fiberglass hull saved me. My mother’s idea. What did she know about boat construction?” We toasted his survival, and he said, “Maybe I should never have named that little racer
Miss Fit.
But I heard it’s still out there somewhere, running the river.”
    Q said, “This afternoon you mentioned a dream you had about the Ouachita.”
    “Not
about
the river — 
on
the river,” he said. “It happened in August. I’d gone up the Ouachita alone. Stopped on a sandbar to get a little sun. I was a teenager. Nineteen fifty-four, a time of lots of talk and books about UFOs. I fell asleep, I guess. For how long, I don’t know, but I dreamed a spacecraft came in above the water and hovered over me and blocked the sun. I can’t remember it all now, but I do remember the ship spotted me, and three beings — willowy females — came down and took me aboard. I was helpless. All I could do was look back and see my body sleeping on the sand. The airship was like a chameleon — it kept changing colors, according to mood, it seemed. Inside, a huge vertical-axis gyro was turning. I don’t remember what happened on the ship, except I can see now certain ideas got planted in me that began sprouting years after. The three females might have been expressions of yin principles — art, grace, and beauty. Who knows? Then I got returned to the sandbar. When I woke up in the hot sun, I had no sunburn, and my skin was aromatic. It was like I’d been under a big shadow the whole time.”
    Did he ever dream of the ship again? “Once, about a year later, in a fever. That time the thing — or the dream — was scary, but I don’t know why. Something had changed.” He shook his head. “Now I don’t know whether the dreams were a blessing or curse.”
    Q asked whether he dreamed much about flying — body flying without mechanical support, that wonderful free-floating stuff. Indigo said, “Not enough.”

11
    Architect of Phantasmagoria
    S OON AFTER DUSK, we followed Indigo Rocket across the river
and into the low backcountry to the Fooks cabin where he lived on the woods-fringed oxbow fed by cold springs he could feel rising when at night he swam the dark water. His uncle built the retreat in 1946 on proceeds from Grapette and its sister drinks: Orangette, Lemonette, Limette. I felt a kind of proprietary interest in the place: my boyhood nickels must have bought a shingle here and a nail there.
    Benjamin Tyndle Fooks (rhymes illogically with Cokes), after many months of experimentation, created