Nothing had given a sense of beautiful passage as had the absence of
signboards; without them, long stretches of the country appeared to us,
if not pristine, then at least no worse the wear for half a millennium
of explorers, settlers, descendants. The bullboard boys and others who
see landscape only as a means to grab a fast buck without returning
anything but ugliness have so degraded the view from so many American
highways and so numbed us to the blight that we, especially the young,
often silently accept the unslightly as a requisite of our economic
lives and do nothing more than turn a blind eye to it.
-- William Least Heat-Moon. River-Horse: Across American by
Boat. New York: Penguin, 1999. p.240
That engineers could build such colossal dams credits their intellect;
that they actually built them discredits their foresightedness.
-- William Least Heat-Moon. River-Horse: Across American by
Boat. New York: Penguin, 1999. p.259
When I leaned over the side of
Nikawa that Saturday morning to
check the hull, a mural of cumulus sky lay across the slick river, and
from the clouds suddenly appeared a countenance smiling down on me, a
bearded one. If I'd believed the Engine of Creation had a human face,
I might have taken the visage for It, but It was only I, who soon
dipped my hands into the river and shattered the firmament and myself,
then held perfectly still to watch the fractured sky and a man's mug
slowly return as if the river knew precisely where each piece belonged,
and all was seemingly
just as it had been, but it was an
illusion of the reflection, another trick of the river, for in the
minute the water took to return to a mirror I was that much older, the
clouds had puffed noticeably into new shapes, world population
increased by 162, the planet sailed another eleven hundred miles
through the ether, the solar system traveled seventy-eight hundred
miles closer to the Northern Cross, and the tectonic plate the Missouri
flows across had crept microscopically closer to Siberia. A stilled
river is an illusion of the human situation where stasis is only a
concept, but a flowing river is a traditional metaphor for the way of
all things. Mountains suggest fixity, but rivers give continuance.
-- William Least Heat-Moon. River-Horse: Across American by
Boat. New York: Penguin, 1999. p.284