Ouachita to Stuttgart

Let's just say you have been spending the last few days by a gigantic Ozark Lake. It is lovely there, you've been sunning, swimming and hiking. You might decide that you've had enough of that and it's time to move on. But where, where, where would you go? The woods of the Arkansas Ozarks are calling you to just lay back and rest a while, a little bit more, the same way the Appalachian Mountains called to Rip van Winkle to close his eyes and take a nap. But you resist. There are more things to see further along the road and they are calling to you too. Pack up the car, roll down the windows and begin the parade anew.

I too felt the beckoning and though the air and the water suited me fine it was time to move on and see more. I placed Lake Ouachita and the village of Mountain Valley in my rear view mirror and headed forward. East again, winding the back roads of the Arkansas Ozarks to new adventures ahead. The good map showed me a plethora of alternative routes along my way and I drove some of the thinnest lines on the map to enter into the city of Hot Springs, Arkansas from a point so strange that I was surprise to find myself so suddenly in a developed place. One moment I was on a tiny road surrounded by green and the next bend found me on a street with storied buildings on either side. When the buildings continued around the next bend I realized that I was in more than just a miniscule crossroads town. I was in Hot Springs.

The tourist must love Hot Springs, Arkansas because Hot Springs, Arkansas clearly loves them. The town has been attracting visitors from all over for more than a hundred years and has gotten good at it. Filled with cafes, hotels and places to shop the stage themselves as a Mecca for people looking for the quaint and lovely ambiance this historic vacation spot has to offer. Hot Springs, Arkansas is well worth a google if you want to read more about them. I won't repeat all of that here.

My particular agenda isn't about the tourist thing. I was back in civilization again. The thing to do was to grab my email and move on. I found a wireless hot spot across from one of the municipal buildings. (Madeline's G-Spot was the name of the WAP I never figured out who Madeline was) There was four days worth of spam queued up for me, o-boy. With my Email current, I headed across the state. I had targeted a state camping ground on the eastern edge of Arkansas, it would be about a 200 mile drive.

Two-hundred miles, not including pulling over for interesting shots and whatever as I moseyed along. Sundays in Arkansas seems to be one of the days where the state has lawbreakers sentenced to public service paying penance by picking up trash. Every county had a different way of drawing attention to these bad-deed-doers. From the demure bright orange construction vests to jump suits in international orange or lime green… one county even dressed these fellows in the traditional, horizontal striped pajamas that are the familiar attire of Carl Barks' Beagle Boys. There was no mistaking these fellows were not out for a casual Sunday stroll. Whatever their offense, the gents took their work seriously and did a good job. The roadsides of Arkansas are trash-free.

The highways became straighter, the roads flatter. I passed through managed pine woods. Miles and miles of trees, all of matching height. First there would be a mile or so of full-grown trees followed by a section of five year old trees and then a mile that had recently been harvested. An area of recently harvested trees always looks a wreck and like a wasteful destruction of a natural area, but if you live in a house built of wood, these are the killing fields from which the materials are drawn. Part of our economic cycle. They are managed now. Some acreage in it's third and fourth plantings. A much better idea than simply cutting and moving on, doncha think?

The woods abruptly stopped and the agriculture changed from forest management to the production of food. Corn for a few dozen miles flattening out further into rice. Mile after mile of perfectly flat fields of rice. I suspected I was getting closer to the Mississippi, it was only logical. I was still driving the way-backroads. The tiny villages I passed through were shanty-towns with no visible economics. There was evidence of a past economy, abandoned, half-roofed warehouses standing mute as the Sphinx. Nowhere near as grand as the Acropolis, these are discarded and left behind, no value, not even as scrap metal.

The scale of farming has changed enough over the past decades that much of the unskilled manual labor is no longer needed. The two or three brick buildings that comprised their downtown were in horrible states of repair and the only sign of commerce in one of these crossroad blips seemed to be a working ice machine that was parked in front of what was once the a liquor store. Yet these towns were not forgotten and left behind. One that I drove around in had at least 70 to 100 families living there. How and on what I have no idea, but they do not have enough money to make painting and repairing their homes a high priority. I imagine food and fuel are the items that take up 90% of their budget.

I was getting tired of driving. I decided to stop at the first town large enough to have a hotel. One of the drawbacks to driving the path less beaten is that towns with hotels are not at every crossing. And the towns I had been passing through seemed to have enough work just sheltering their own. I checked out the map, it looked like Stuttgart, Arkansas would be a likely place for a hotel. So I found the lines that would take me from where I was to Stuttgart and found my way there.