Where is this Quoz you speak of?

William Least Heat-Moon, whose 1983 travel odyssey "Blue Highways" holds a special place on the bookshelf in my heart, spoke at last weekend's Texas Book Festival. I was there to write about the cookbook authors and food writers who were speaking, but I sneaked into Heat-Moon's Sunday morning session and was, as expected, inspired and rejuvenated.

He talked a lot about writing his newest book, "Roads to Quoz." Quoz, he said, is the fecundity, or richness, of the unexpected, which in itself creates more fecundity in your life. What Quoz is exactly in *this* book? Well, I want that for your own discovery, he said. Travel does not merely change us, he said, but it transforms, expands and connects us.

He laments that today generation (who me?) has a lack of connection with anything beyond themselves. "We are so far from first things," he said.


The letter Q is a thing for him. In the book, he refers to his wife as "Q," and in the lecture on Sunday, he talked on a word I hadn't heard: querencia, a special place where a human has a special connection, where when they return, they are a different person. Querencia comes from the Spanish for "to love" (ie, quieres taco bell. mi querido.) and has meant in Texas culture the place where a Longhorn steer was born. One of the reasons I feel connected to Heat-Moon is because we share una querencia. He lives near Columbia, Mo., where I went to school and he, too, spent his youth in the Ozarks.

He lives in his querencia; I don't, but the wisdom he gains by relishing in the old growth and surrounding himself with slow-changing sameness I found inexplicably touching and reassuring. That there will always be my querencia and there will always be the road.