Roads to Quoz by William Least Heat-Moon

Author:William Least Heat-Moon [HEAT-MOON, WILLIAM LEAST]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRV025000
ISBN: 9780316040181
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2008-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

The Spook Light Roads in northeast Oklahoma.

I read again the investigations based on mensuration and found them making new sense. When reporter Graham asked an engineer, who claimed he solved the puzzle in 1930, why he’d not published his solution, the man said, “We thought it would be more fun just to let people go on believing the mystery.”

That brought to mind an old psychological experiment examining the effects of suggestion and expectation: Volunteers in a room illuminated by only a pinpoint of light were asked to “draw on paper the path of a moving beam.” Their pencils marked out arcs and angles and tangents and squiggles to create mazes of graphite. After the overhead lights came on again and the subjects learned the pinpoint had not moved even so much as a quintillionth of a millimeter, they expressed disbelief, disappointment, and more annoyance than surprise. Idols of the tribe are powerful.

Something else came to me: when I was in the Navy, at sea, smokers were prohibited from lighting up on deck because the flare of a match could be seen by enemy eyes a mile or more away.

And one final remembrance: that old story of the Episcopal pastor explaining sin by telling his congregation about drinking so thirstily at a spring he nearly swallowed a tadpole. A year later, a Methodist deacon in the next county over mentioned how Catholic Father So-and-So, getting senile, swallowed a tadpole that changed to a frog in his gut. And sometime thereafter, a fulminating Baptist told of a Pentecostal preacher going to a spring to get a salamander he could swallow and cough up before his stunned audience to prove the Devil lies within everybody. At the Episcopal pastor’s death, several people two counties away knew for certain a Mormon in the grip of Satan had died from eating one too many serpents.

But, above all, what about the “fact” always trotted out to disprove the headlamps solution — those anecdotal reports allegedly as old as the first Quapaw into the territory — that the Ghost Light existed before the automobile? Even accepting such unsupported assertions, I suspect people in 1880 did not spend all their hours after sunset in darkness. A lantern, a bonfire, an eastbound locomotive, would offer illumination enough to create Spooky, especially if refraction proves to be involved. And, I should add, any piece of country over the years may well exhibit occasional luminescent appearances of several kinds from natural causes, particularly a place with wetlands and old mines. There likely has been more than one Ghost Light.

A few days ago I gave this explication to a friend who had long wanted to see the small marvel, and he said, “Now you’ve gone and ruined it for me!” I asked whether knowing a rainbow is a spectral display of refracted light kept him from enjoying one. I proposed that in the three million miles of American roadways, the physical factors necessary for the creation of the Quapaw Light are, if not unique, then at least rare and remarkable enough to make it worth encountering.

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