Arkansas
June 2012
We have summited Mount Magazine, the high point in Arkansas, and we are on our way to Taum Sauk Mountain, the highest point in Missouri. We wind through the Uplands, the Ozark Plateau. Arkansas is nicknamed the “Natural State” because, before they began to build stuff, someone noticed that the area was quite fetching in a natural way. Or as the native Arkansans would say, “Rill perty.” Lots of wooded plain, clear lakes and oodles of happy animals: rabbit and squirrel, mink, armadillo, several of which we see sleeping, flat and motionless on the side of the road. In the many lakes and on the grills of every restaurant in this state are catfish. Although the legs of one frog landed on Lisa’s dinner plate one evening, most don’t.
We are on Arkansas Route 67, north of Little Rock. It’s hard to tell now, but there is melodic magic on this road. Born from poverty and a need to relieve themselves of the grind, locals built many little clubs along this thruway. Clubs: you know, juke joints, honky tonks, speakeasies. “Some [of these] establishments were small, rough country venues where farmers in bib overalls arrived on tractors, seeking evenings of excessive drinking, fighting, and flirtation,” says Don Jacobson in a 2009 article in the Beachwood Reporter…