Samuel Johnson said it in five words: “Solitude is dangerous to reason.” Jefferson might have added that a democracy dependent upon mutual tolerance and shared concerns cannot long survive without open communication. I can think of no greater reason for taking to the American road.
The Ouachita River, following its mountains, makes an overall run due eastward until it nears Hot Springs where it jogs itself into three abrupt turns as if lost and uncertain which way to head next. The fall of the land decides things for it and sends the river off generally southeasterly, a course it holds until it gives itself (with a change of name near its mouth) over to the Red River a few miles above its juncture with the Mississippi. By the time it makes its last sharp bend below Hot Springs, the Ouachita has left the mountains and, soon enough, even any hills of consequence. In effect, the river, at this point, flows off what was, five-hundred-million years ago, the ancient continental edge of an emergent North America into the great Ouachita Embayment (today called by geologists the Mississippi Embayment of the Gulf Coastal Plain), a massive levelish landscape covering much of the lower South. I have no idea how many local residents realize they’re living on a former sea bottom, although I do know I’ve not yet come upon anyone there who knew, despite that detail being fundamental in shaping their lives.
Beyond the sprawled, multilane strip of franchise businesses at Malvern, the land was rolling pastures broken by pockets of woods; those pastures — having replaced mountain forest — meant the means of earning a living also changed with the landscape, a crucial factor in determining the origin of early settlers, since migrants like to settle in territory reminding them of home. The Ouachita Valley was no longer Ozarkian-Appalachian Arkansas but now rather more expressive of a deeper South where sin lurked in the pasturage and perdition loomed above a fallen land heavy with impending Apocalypse. The Baptists were almost unchallenged, and their church signs carried bold ipse dixits: REPENT, or WHEREVER DEATH FINDS YOU — ETERNITY KEEPS YOU, or one interrogative, R U REDDY?
I confessed to Q what I was reddy for was a “meat and three,” my preference being fried chicken, green beans, black-eyed peas, and greens, with a side of mashed potatoes and cream gravy. A bottle of pepper sauce at hand.
When we crossed to the west bank of the Ouachita, we entered a realm of convivially named communities forming on the map a truncated triangle anchored on the east by the river and centrally linked, perhaps to temper any excessive sociability, by a tributary called the Terre Noire. Within that trapezoid of congeniality were Friendship, Amity, Pleasant Hill, Delight, and Harmony Grove, but lying outside, as if excluded, were Ogemaw and Bodcaw, two pretty good names to keep in mind the next time you entertain a child with a tale of ogres and bogles from a dark land.
I discovered the trapezoid that night in Arkadelphia, a name coined to play not just upon the state but also upon a bit of Greek: an ark of brothers, an arc of friends. We felt the South full upon us.
9
Dunbar’s Spectacles
IF I TELL YOU OUR QUARTERS THAT NIGHT — the best we could come up with — were not far from where the Caddo River disembogues into the wooded Ouachita, and if I say on the next morning we walked across a two-lane road to a little cookhouse of evident longevity serving up a good and freshly prepared meal right down to the yams, you may have an image of rural quaintness to make you regret being, at the moment, an armchair traveler.
Well, those descriptions are true, as is this: the motel was near an exit on Interstate 30 and right next door to the drive-up window of a burger chain boasting its quality with the slogan “Billions and Billions Served.” (In American corporate logic, quantity is quality.) So: river juncture / interstate exit; historic café / franchise drive-up.
My thought that morning just north of Arkadelphia was, any eatery holding out against the omnipotence of the world’s largest burger chain across the road might be doing so because of quality based on taste rather than on billions of anything. Perhaps the owner of Bowen’s Restaurant had not yet become a purveyor of box food: grub, amalgamated in Hoboken or Fresno, some kitchen guy dumps from a carton, adds a little water to, gives it a couple of minutes of electronic zapping, and presto!, an entrée typically possessed of a single culinary characteristic — heat. Across a nation of speed-eaters, cooking has often come to mean heating. Even worse than the stuff being not very good is, you’re likely to get a lot of it (quantity is quality). Gus Kubitzki, whom you’re getting to know, threatened to open his own cookshack, the Munch & Crunch Lunch, and guarantee his quality with a mea culpa: “If our grub leaves you dissatisfied and yelping, please accept on the house a second helping.”
A traveler in America today must look longer and with less success than a generation ago to find genuine regional food, and its discovery requires cagier research, such as questioning the town pharmacist or librarian, or reading hand-lettered signs advertising church suppers that might get you nothing more than chicken potpie and green Jell-O, but at other times might furnish you with a plate of panfried chicken delivered up by the county’s last living-resident who still knows how to do it, a Presbyterian lady who measures out cream with half an eggshell and in all things culinarily Southern believes the lard will provide.
With such commentary in mind, I’ll now offer not an alternative but an expanded view, drawn from road miles enough to give Q the idea of painting a yellow-striped centerline down the middle of my tombstone. We all know franchising has reduced many a Bert and Betty from owners to employees by sundering their little eggs-over-easy café or their chalkboard-special luncheries, but we can forget that a few good chains (not always an oxymoron) have also helped purge the land of many — to use a term no longer common — greasy spoons. It’s easy to romanticize the food of yesteryear while forgetting Ptomaine Ptom’s Ptamale Wagon.
You see, though, this is faint praise. Your own experience may have revealed the even more insidious intrusion of box food into places that look for all the world like a genuine local lunchroom; and, indeed, you might observe Bert and Betty in the kitchen. But she is now skilled in the art of microwavery and he’s a peerless pourer who never saw a carton he couldn’t open. At the time I write this, the apotheosis of this trend is the prefried hamburger, but it’s only a question of time before you’ll sit down, if we don’t watch out, to a frozen-and-nuked BLT. I’m working to discover clues to identify such places failing to match up even to chain food, but I’ve come up with only obvious alerts like a door sign warning MICROWAVE IN USE. If the barbecue pit isn’t smoking or the grill sizzling, you might as well kiss the ring of the King of Burgers, kneel to the Queen of Dairies, or salute the Colonel of the Fried-Leghorn Regiment.
The Arkadelphia downtown near the courthouse was groomed almost to the point of sterility, as if the churchly folk wanted to cleanse its historic soul of all those trespasses they so often seek forgiveness for in themselves, but in the library of Ouachita Baptist University, Q spotted some escaped remnants from earlier days. There, before our eyes, were several things not just of William Dunbar’s time but once belonging to the man himself, including a few items from his excursion up the Ouachita, all of them unexpected: his compass, thick-lensed spectacles, ink-stained pen with metal nib, and, most remarkably, his logbook of the excursion, a journal that had come to light only months before. A video crew, under the direction of the leading historian of the Forgotten Expedition, Trey Berry, was making a documentary at the site of Dunbar’s Mississippi plantation when, without warning, a man whizzed up on an ATV while the cameras rolled; he dismounted and pulled from a knapsack a worn logbook which, until that moment, historians had thought perished years ago in the fire that destroyed Dunbar’s home. Cameras still running, Berry, then editing a new scholarly edition of the Ouachita journal, opened the book and laid eyes for the first time on William’s original on-the-river text. A weaker scholar might have succumbed right there before the camera.
In the library, as I looked at some of the very words that had drawn
Q and me into the valley, I felt I was seeing the tracks the man had left behind for us to follow, and his reality expanded from ghostly to an actual historic presence, physically perceivable: there were his neatly inked sentences set down perhaps by the pen now lying next to the logbook, words brought into focus by the spectacles. I could almost hear Dunbar’s nib scratching across a page:
At 10 h. a.m. our people returned from the hot springs, each giving his own account of the wonderful things he had seen: they were unable to keep the finger a moment in the Water as it issued from the rock; they drank of it after cooling a little and found it very agreeable; some of them thinking that it tasted like Spicewood tea.
Where is the American who has not had the urge to touch the sandal of the Statue of Liberty or buy a wooden seat when the old ballpark got torn down? Isn’t there within us a basic urge to verify the past by tactilely connecting with it?
Q and I went again to the valley road and followed Arkansas 7 through tilled bottomlands that soon disappeared into pinelands, but the Ouachita was visible only from graveled side roads crossing it. Nondescript little houses of the ’60s and ’70s interrupted the forest, and in the opolis of Sparkman, oblivion was being held off for the moment by a new bank and its electronic-sign scrolling out mortgage rates and biblical citations. No moneylender there was going to be driven from the temple.
The road twisted its way on southward to another salvation-and-shekel sign, this one with rhyme seeming to trump reason: SAVE THE LOST AT ANY COST. Q eyed me, and I said, although I couldn’t prove it, I had never intended to bankrupt anybody.
Beyond the few houses and trailers clinging to a couple of well-built churches that were Ouachita, Arkansas, the highway entered a broad clear-cut of broken snags and bent saplings. Come see, come saw. The detimbered place was so disabled and wasted it looked like a Mathew Brady photograph of the aftermath of Pickett’s Charge. But, where the forest still remained, small lots opened for homes looked vacuumed rather than mowed, although the tidiness did not get neighborly and extend past one’s own turf to the littered waysides farther along. It was as if the sawed-down forest had taken the hearts out of the residents and turned them inward.
Camden, Arkansas, has that rare topographical feature along the river, a natural landing. Sitting at the head of navigation, it calls itself “The Queen City of the Ouachita,” but it was another sign at the edge of town that brought us to a halt: HOT BOILED CRAWFISH. I tried the door. The place was shut up tight, I told a disappointed Q, and probably it was just as well because we were still too far north for good mudbugs. It was too soon.
The best arrivals in a region are those a traveler accomplishes gradually enough to see hints of change — topographic, cultural, culinary — slowly grow from promise to fulfillment, because nothing prepares you for a regional meal any better than a leisurely earned progress, where there’s time for anticipation to whet imagination and appetite. Airplanes allow us to arrive before we’re ready. Do you prefer quick bread or a leavened loaf? Bashed expectations, however small, require distance to play their part in the crescendo leading to a memorable repast: a crawdad shack with a locked door; a barbecue pit with dead embers; a whiff of roasting chiles and a sign: WON’T BE READY TILL TOMORROW. Still, the steadfast traveler abides, continues along, and then one evening the door’s not locked, the crab pot’s at boil, and the table’s set. The most grateful eaters, like the most appreciative lovers, have known a heartbreak or two.
We walked the town center near the courthouse. The usual architectural uglifications following World War II had swept in and pillaged the historic facades of almost every building older than a seventeen-year cicada, and that left the place looking neither soundly established nor progressively prosperous; instead, the heart of Camden, as with so many other towns across America, looked exhausted here and mummified there.
But on a corner of the central intersection — instead of a parking lot — was a small park built atop the sepulcher of a former nineteenth-century bank, and on the east, like a giant garden wall, the two-storey side of a commercial building was covered with a large mural. Painted by an artist unafraid of colors mixed into hues just short of shocking, it was an impudence among moribund facades, and, although a somewhat standard compendium of local history from a Ouachita steamboat to a 1957 Dodge, it had excellent proportions and depth. Pictured at its heart, seemingly life-size, was the towered Ouachita Valley Bank once standing on the site, and around it were some forty human figures integrated spatially and racially, many sartorially snazzy. Better than any aluminized facade, the muraled brick wall suggested Camden was open for commerce. The intersection had changed from eyesore to eye-stopper.
A few blocks away, on Jefferson Street, we came upon a second mural, this one with another Ouachita stern-wheeler but dominated by a gowned vamp, the work clearly from the same hand. In fact, in one corner, the artist had effectively signed the mural by painting in himself painting the mural. Clever, we said. Then the artist’s hand moved, sweeping a brush of red acrylic across the bricks. The painter was not painted in — he was still painting, pausing long between strokes to evaluate his work. If the man wasn’t painted on the wall, that doesn’t mean the wall hadn’t painted him, for he wore evidence of his vivid palette from head bandanna to boots. I’m always reluctant to interrupt an artist working alfresco, but I was a moth drawn to his highlights. He, a wizard of quoz, was about to change the next twenty-four hours and the way I saw the Ouachita Valley.
10
A Fifty-Foot Femme Fatale
THE NUMBER OF AMERICANS who profess to have been taken aboard craft from beyond this planet is not innumerable but neither is it inconsiderable. Although I lack the figures, my guess is those who have merely dreamed of being taken aboard are far fewer. That very rarity could account for the transformative power in such dreams. In fact, had it not been for his doze on a Ouachita River sandbar in 1954, Indigo Rocket would have a life — right down to his name — surely different from the one he was about to show us in and around Camden, Arkansas. Oh, the painting of murals would still be there, but his cabin out at Mustin Lake, an ancient oxbow of the Ouachita, that would be something else.
As Q and I stood a discreet distance to watch the muralist’s careful brushings, I eventually called up to him my admiration. To step inside a plein air painter’s circle of awareness and observe the work for a spell and then slip away without a brief word strikes me as either rude or ungrateful for demonstrated artistry. If it’s worth watching, it’s worth commendation. A simple “well done” is enough.
To those words the painter descended the scaffold and began cleaning a brush rather than brushing us off. “I’m always glad to get down from up there,” he said. In the unsequestered creation of exterior murals, an artist becomes used to everyone-a-commentator, especially so when a large portion of his painting is occupied by a languorous fifty-foot seductress. Other than her, the subjects in the mural were more traditional ones of local topography and history. Many citizens — of both genders — had not yet noticed a twenty-foot stern-wheeler steaming directly toward the vamp’s (to keep the nauticals) well-trimmed stern.
The artist, Indigo Rocket, didn’t really much like heights, in part because he’d recently fallen out of a tree. As he wiped the brush, he said, “For meeting people, I’ve never had a medium like street murals. But you can’t talk from a scaffold.”
He spoke of Camden seeing a small renaissance after some years of hard times brought on by changes in agriculture and the closures of the Camark Pottery factory and the kraft-paper mill, and there was even talk about remaking the town as a kind of creative colony where an artist could live cheaply. “Lots of new blood here,” he said. “Artists and young people who want to approach things in new ways. That’s how this mural happened.” He was to do one a year until he covered all unseemly exposed exterior walls. “It’s a way to paint the town and earn a little money from the fun.” He mentioned how communities across the country were answering
the megalomaniacal supercenters rising on their fringes by giving new reasons to come downtown, and murals were part of the rebirth, a change assisted by the development of inexpensive acrylic paint. A few years ago, who’d have thought an emulsion of thermoplastic globules could be a weapon to use against behemoth sprawl*marts?
“I grew up here,” he said, “but I’d been gone for fifty years until I came back not long ago to be with my parents in their last days. Once I started that first mural, I was so exposed up on the scaffold, old friends began finding me. Now the murals help keep me here.”
He was born Terrell Mashaw, but at the turn of the millennium he decided his art required a name more fitted to its new directions. Trim and angular but not tall, with strong hands, he was youthful despite a certain facial erosion reminiscent of a carved limestone visage long exposed to weather; his profile — a nose with an almost imperceptible arc like a slightly drawn bow — might have been taken from a courthouse-lawn statue. His hair was dark and straight. He had tried engineering at Louisiana Polytechnic Institute in Ruston before changing to art and design, studies he continued at the old Art Center School in Los Angeles. Like most American males of that generation, he’d served the required military stint, his with the Army. He was sixty-six years old.
Rocket’s education — both engineering and art — led him to Detroit where he designed tire treads, unfulfilling work leading him to take up a sequence of jobs and a life as peripatetic as that of a nineteenth-century itinerant sign-painter, work he’d also done. In Dallas he illustrated annual reports but soon burned out on advertising, so he sold most of his belongings to continue hithering and yonning: San Diego, Port Townsend, Sonoma, Boston, Providence, Woods Hole, San Antonio.