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undulated rocks remember their oceanic days and wish to prove it with a gift of motion sickness.
    There is certainly a cause and result in the presence of the Ouachitas and the subsequent absence in them of the deleterious domestication of lands lying east, west, and south. Despite some logging and mining, their roughness has kept humanity thinned to a sensible — that is, sustainable — number, and it has been more difficult here for predatory American economics, with its watchword not of thrift or care or prudence but of avarice, to dislodge the natives from their links with the land.
    The trucker-archaeologist in the Rich Mountain store knew where the Ouachita rose, and he understood how the domino table rested at the top of a watershed, even if he knew not the other end of the river six-hundred miles distant. I said as much to Q, and she mentioned a young waitress we’d met at lunch several months earlier near Norfolk, Virginia. The café sat with its backside nearly hanging over the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, yet our waitress knew neither the name of the channel nor its purpose and certainly not its long history; worse, she had no notion of the ways, however obvious or subtle, the canal shaped her life even though a year previous she’d been “stung” there by a mosquito and required testing for West Nile virus. (It proved negative.)
    When we’re on the road, it’s always a risk for Q, in whatever context, to mention lunch — or breakfast or supper — because roads exist for me, claims she, mainly to furnish reasonably direct connections between cafés and chili parlors, taco wagons and beaneries, eat shacks and confectioneries, burger joints and frozen-custard stands, barbecue sheds and fish camps. In other words, roads are there to tie one reason for living to another.
    Such places are not bountiful in the Ouachitas, and the best I could do then at her mention of food was to pull out dessert. One of the joys of age is watching the young and inexperienced get introduced to life, life in this instance being a MoonPie, of which no true Southerner (Q is a Yankee) can live long without forming an opinion. In Dixie, to be ignorant of a MoonPie is akin to being ignorant of Stonewall Jackson or a boll weevil or a boiled peanut. As evidence of such a claim, I offer exhibit A:
The Great American MoonPie Handbook.
If you’ve not happened upon the cookie, originally an Appalachian snack for deep-shaft coal miners, it’s a pair of circular wafers sandwiching a marshmallow filling, the whole coated with chocolate or vanilla.
    I unwrapped the little confection and watched her nip into it. Never have I seen her twist her face around when trying a new food, even after that sushi of raw sea-urchin, nor did she just then with her MoonPie. After a second bite for confirmation, she said, “The best part of it is the name.” Some people, I said, consider it a veritable artifact of Southern life. “It tasted like a veritable artifact.” I read aloud the ingredients on the label to reveal the compounded miracle of corn syrups a MoonPie is. “It sounds” — she nodded — “as if it were made by a chemist instead of a chef.” Indeed, such products of our time come not from recipes but from formulas; they are concoctions of crucible and test tube, with nary a sifter or rolling pin near; they smack not of a baking oven but of a Bunsen burner. My longtime friend Gus Kubitzki, whose pronouncements over the years have been companions on my travels, believed ingredient labels on packaged foods should begin WARNING: IF YOU WISH TO ENJOY THIS PRODUCT, READ NO FURTHER. But then, comfortable in his old-school notions, Gus believed that between harvesting and cooking there should be only seasoning — anything else was adulterating.

6
    Inscribing the Land
    A RKANSAS TOPONYMS HAVE SOME NATIONAL RECOGNITION  — preeminently Hope, Flippin, Yellville, and Smackover — but outsiders have not been especially heedful of