Favorite Ozarks Books – 16

Tags

books, fiction, Jetta Carleton, Missouri, novels, Ozarks, prairie, The Moonflower Vine, writing

I shouldn’t really call The Moonflower Vine an Ozarks book, as it is set in the western Missouri prairie, in a fictionalized version of the town of Nevada, where Jetta Carleton grew up. (If you want to get a sense of this region, you should look at Leland Payton’s marvelous book of photographs, Ozark-Prairie Border.) But a couple of the major characters of the book spend considerable time in the Ozarks, and since it’s a border region I’ll expand my “Ozarks books” phrase a little to include this one.

The Moonflower Vine was first published in 1962 and was a big hit, making the bestseller list, some important book clubs, and the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books volume. Then, as books do, it faded from attention. It became one of those secret favorites, passed from enthusiast to enthusiast, until Harper Perennial brought out a new edition in 2009 with a robust introduction from Jane Smiley. That new edition helped return the book to some deserved prominence.

The novel is divided into six sections, one for each of the major characters. It begins in the more-or-less contemporary time period to its publication, then dips into the past with the next four sections, finally returning to the present at the end. So its structure is a bit challenging, but not overwhelmingly so.

But what makes The Moonflower Vine so memorable is its rich, surprising characterization. The novel’s six main characters are a rural couple and their four daughters, all of whom go through various troubles and all of whom are revealed, over time, to have secrets they are keeping from the rest of the family. The characters resist stereotyping, revealing ever-deepening layers of feeling, aspiration, frustration, and despair. It’s an immensely humane novel that refuses to excuse its characters even as it comprehends them. And for a book that made it into the Reader’s Digest condensations, it’s surprisingly frank about sexual desire. (I suspect they condensed that part right out and left the “local color” in.)

What I ultimately take away from The Moonflower Vine, though, is a deeply forgiving spirit. By one definition or another, all the characters fail. But they are never portrayed as failures. They are flawed creatures, like us all, who are doing their best with what has been handed to them. And sometimes their best is not very good. They do stupid things, they suppress their feelings, they misunderstand. And yet I found myself drawn to them, and drawn also to this landscape by Carleton’s vivid power of description. She sees this world in an intense and careful way. Some people might see this book as an exercise in nostalgia, but I think that misses its precise and comprehensive view of human nature.

Jetta Carleton

Words to Remember

Tags

autumn, beauty, children, education, nature

A friend of mine, retired teacher/principal/superintendent Terry Adams, recently wrote this:

“I think this is the most beautiful fall I have ever experienced. The colors are still beautiful if a bit muted, and leaves are falling everywhere. The cattle herd settled under a huge oak tree and the cows were covered with leaves (a sure sign that fall is coming to an end).

“It seems that everything is beautiful in its own time. The peach trees are bare now, but in the spring when they flower, just before the frost kills the buds, they are at their best. The autumn blaze maple trees were at their peak a couple of weeks ago but today they look a little sad and adjusting to the concept that winter is coming. The burning bushes just keep getting more attractive. All the plants have plenty to offer, they just give you their best at different times and in different ways.

“People, it seems to me, are much the same way. As a young school administrator, a very wise experienced special education teacher told me that the special children learn just as well, it just takes them longer. When you pop popcorn, the temperature is the same for all the kernels but they tend to pop at different times. We would do well to accept that and try our best to help all children learn as much as possible in their own time. Some are lucky and seem to be able to do everything well. Some have special gifts in music or sports, or can build works of art in wood working classes. It is our responsibility to help all children and appreciate what they have to offer. Just like the trees, they are all beautiful in their own way and in their own time.”

The Land of a Million Smiles

Tags

economic development, economics, inequality, Jared Phillips, Ozarks

This photo is from a terrific essay in Medium by Joy Ellsworth – recommended reading!

When you drive through the Ozarks these days, you see fairly quickly that there are actually two “Ozarks” (or more, depending on how you slice it). There are the prosperous, tech-savvy, rapidly growing urban centers like Springfield, Fayetteville, and Bentonville, and there are the decaying, aging, deep rural counties with their tattered “Trump/Pence” flags flying forlornly in the front yard a year after the election, as if reality could be altered by an act of defiant will. The fancy word for this phenomenon is “inequality,” and to some extent it’s always been the case. The fortunate areas get rich, the less fortunate areas get left behind.

Some parts of the region get the latte bars, other parts get part-time shift work at the Dollar General.An astute observer of the Ozarks economic and cultural scene is historian Jared Phillips, and he recently published a thought-provoking article on this trend, which he describes as “rural decay coupled with corporate extraction and an expansion of inequality.” If you’re at all interested in the competing visions for how to revive the rural economy, you need to read it.

Here’s the link.

At What Cost?

Where Misfits Fit

Tags

Arkansas, counterculture, Missouri, Ozarks, Ozarks Symposium, sociology, Tom Kersen

I’ve been reading a new book lately, Where Misfits Fit: Counterculture and Influence in the Ozarks by Thomas M. Kersen, who is a sociologist at Jackson State University in Mississippi. Tom grew up in a back-to-the-land community in the northern Arkansas hills, so he knows whereof he speaks regarding counterculture in the Ozarks.

The book, after a couple of chapters establishing its geographical and theoretical base, goes into a series of chapters about various groups that have existed on the cultural “edge” in the Ozarks: religious groups, music groups, alternative-living societies, and others. Although the book has an impressive scholarly apparatus, it’s clearly a work of love on Kersten’s part: he doesn’t shy away from the first person, describing his own experiences and his interactions with members of the various groups. This approach gives the book a more informal feel than many scholarly studies, which I welcomed.

Many of the chapters originated as talks given to the annual Ozarks Studies Conference, held in September in West Plains, so I had the privilege of hearing them in an earlier form as a member of the audience there. (Let me pause to give a plug to that conference, which is sponsored by Missouri State University – West Plains; if you’re at all interested in the Ozarks, it’s a great event to start attending!) But seeing them developed into book form gives me a better sense of the connecting threads.

What connects the chapters is their focus on groups and people who are at the edges of the social mainstream, what Kersen calls “liminal” regions. Inhabiting an edge region gives someone more freedom of behavior than a person or group possesses when firmly entrenched in a social structure. His theory is that the Ozarks themselves are a liminal region, and thus they attract liminal groups and individuals. It’s an intriguing argument.

Kersen covers a wide range of edge-dwellers, from music groups to religious groups to back-to-the-landers. It’s hard for me to pick out a favorite chapter, but I’d have to say the ones in which Kersen has personal experience were the most fun for me to read. He writes about well-known music groups such as the Ozark Mountain Daredevils and Black Oak Arkansas, but he also goes into great detail about more obscure groups such as “The Group” (known also as the Dan Blocker Singers) and Hot Mulch, the creators of the back-to-the-land anthem “Ozark Mountain Mother Earth News Freak.” A section on UFO-focused groups introduces us to the remarkable Buck Nelson of Mountain View, Missouri, whose booklet My Trip to Mars, the Moon, and Venus prompted a long string of spaceship conferences on his remote property.

It’s tempting to see these misfits as amusing eccentrics, but the book also touches upon groups that had a darker side, such as the Purple People, the Searcy County, Arkansas, group whose strange dress and religious beliefs were underlain by a repressive and sometimes violent set of behaviors. This direction is not the ultimate province of this book, though, but I’d like to see someone take it on. I find myself wondering: if the Ozarks has proven to be a welcoming home for communal groups and eccentric agriculturalists, so too has it been a comfortable place for fanatics, cultists, and plain old scary people. I’m old enough to remember The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, a violent Christian Identity group that set up a compound in northern Arkansas in the ’70s and ’80s. They were not the first, and certainly have not been the last, and even today there are extremist groups up some of those dirt roads. Being a liminal region poses threats as well as offering opportunities.

Floating

Tags

Alumni, canoeing, floating, kayaking, Missouri, Mizzou, Ozarks

I am currently floating (metaphorically) because the University of Missouri alumni magazine just published a long essay I wrote about floating (literally). I love taking float trips on Ozark streams and tried to convey some of the feeling of those experiences.

They also assigned a writer and photographer to do a profile of me to accompany the essay. Tony Rehagen and Nic Benner both did wonderful jobs.

Here’s the link.

Favorite Ozarks Places – 19

Tags

CCC, Missouri State Parks, Patterson, Sam A. Baker State Park, state parks, Wayne County

The dining lodge at Sam A. Baker State Park. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

When I was a kid, a trip to Sam A. Baker State Park, north of Patterson, was a real treat. I had no idea who Sam A. Baker was, or what he had to do with the park. All I knew was that there would be swimming and either a cookout or dinner in the lodge, which to my young eyes seemed like the most impossibly rustic place imaginable.

As the years went on, I grew to appreciate the park more. It’s one of the oldest parks in the state, dating back to the Fish and Game Department days of the 1920s. Its namesake was an educator from Patterson who went on to be elected state superintendent of schools and then governor, and who encouraged the development of the state park system during his term in office.

We are so rich in state parks and conservation areas nowadays that it’s hard to think back to what the state was like a century ago. A lot of people thought the state had no business developing a statewide park system; taxpayer dollars, you know. (Readers of this blog know that I regularly bemoan the reactionaries who hold power in Jefferson City, but it’s worth remembering that rule by reactionaries is pretty much a norm in Missouri. The era of the Danforths and Bonds, McCaskills and Eagletons, bipartisan, consensus-seeking moderates, is more the exception. But I digress.)

The geography of Sam A. Baker State Park is a wonderful encapsulation of the eastern Ozarks. Much of its 5,000-plus acres is taken up by Mudlick Mountain, a steep and rugged hill that stands out from its surrounding terrain. There’s a fire tower on top of Mudlick, one of the many CCC projects of the Depression that created the face of the park. I must admit that I’ve never climbed up to it, but I can only imagine the view from there. This photo from AllTrails.Com gives an idea:

The CCC also built a hiking and equestrian trail that circles the park, with some stone cabins for resting along the way. Big Creek runs along much of the eastern side of the park, through a pretty shut-in area first and then with some shallows and swimming holes along the campground area. At the southeastern corner of the park, Big Creek joins the St. Francis River, and although the river is nowhere near as clear and fresh-running as the streams farther west, it still has outfitters for float trips.

When I lived in the area in the ’70s, the park hosted an annual bluegrass festival. In the fall it permitted black-powder enthusiasts to hunt for deer in a special season. It had, in other words, something for just about everyone. Decisions made in the 1920s were benefiting citizens in an unimagined future. And that is still the case today.

If people wonder why I am so enthusiastic about our state system of parks and conservation areas, they should visit just about any other state and see what kind of system is offered there. Few states have such a robust network of places to experience the outdoors, the result of decisions made years ago by people we scarcely remember. When I think about “public servants,” that’s what I think about — people who thought about the well-being of future generations who would not know about them or remember them.

And if you’re looking for places to experience the outdoors, perhaps some place you’ve not heard of before, you should visit the Facebook page of a group called Rollahiking. Those folks are the most industrious hikers I’ve ever seen! They visit some of the most out-of-the way locations in Missouri and Arkansas, and they always post great pictures.

Same Old Same Old

Tags

Department of Natural Resources, economic development, EPA, Lake of the Ozarks, pollution, water

The Lake of the Ozarks, satellite view.

I’ve talked a lot about books on this blog, but one I haven’t mentioned yet is Traci Angel’s The Scars of Project 459: The Environmental Story of the Lake of the Ozarks. I’m not especially fond of the book; I think the title promises more than the book delivers, and it’s written in a choppy-sentence, newspaper-journalism style that wears me out after a while. (If you want a deeper, more comprehensive account of the lake’s origins, I recommend Damming the Osage, which I have written about before.) But whatever its perceived deficiencies, the book offers a great glimpse into one of the enduring truths of the lake: it’s all about the money.

The Lake of the Ozarks is above all else a developer’s lake, designed and built to extract as much possible money from all conceivable uses. For all their garish commercialism, even Table Rock, Beaver, and the other big Ozark lakes have an ostensible “flood control” justification, and once in a while that justification actually emerges. But the Lake of the Ozarks doesn’t even have that. It’s a commercial enterprise, start to finish.

One of the stories told in The Scars of Project 459 is the notorious “goose poop” incident of 2009, and the book is worth reading just for that. The sequence of events runs roughly like this: Department of Natural Resources routine testing reveals high E. coli levels near the public beaches of the park, right before a major holiday weekend. DNR sits on the report until the holiday weekend is over, then releases it. Howls from environmentalists and public health advocates over the suspicious timing of the report’s delay and release brings the governor at the time (Jay Nixon) down to the lake to announce a major cleanup campaign. Howls from local businesses lead to a new suspect in the E. coli reading: a flock of geese that had been loitering suspiciously in the area and a coincidental heavy rainfalll that had surely, surely, caused the spike in contamination. Heads roll at the DNR. Winter comes, the incident is more or less forgotten, and no comprehensive effort to manage the lake’s water quality takes place. A comprehensive effort, you see, would require two things that are anathema to the powers-that-be around the lake: the expenditure of money for a public good, and cooperation among the four counties that comprise its local government.

The lake watershed is indeed a complex system, and no single source of contamination can be blamed for all its environmental ills. A 2014 report from the U.S. Geological Survey and Missouri DNR about surveys conducted in later years didn’t exonerate the geese, but it also took notice of contamination from local sewage treatment facilities during the frequent times that rainfall causes overflows of those facilities, household septic systems that have outlived their effectiveness, and leaking septic pits from sources around the lake, including (ironically enough) one in the state park itself. If all those episodes teach us anything, it’s that understanding the lake’s water quality requires science, and lots of it.

Which is why it’s so dispiriting to read the news today and see the usual passel of Missouri congresspeople pressuring the EPA to take the Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir off its list of “impaired” waterways, where they were placed in November. The EPA’s list of impaired waterways included 481 bodies of water that both the state and the feds agreed were impaired, which is troubling enough. The state did not include the two big lakes and 38 other Missouri water bodies on its list, but the EPA disagreed with that decision, bringing the overall number up to 521. (On the semi-bright side, the two agencies agreed to remove 44 bodies of water from the list.)

So the state and the feds are in disagreement over the science on about eight percent of the total listings. So why are the congresspeople, none of them scientists or even remotely interested in science as far as I can tell, so worked up? A passage in the AP story gives the clue. “The letter said the impaired designations ‘would have significant impacts on families, landowners, small businesses,’ and on the state’s economy. . . . For example, the listing could force local governments to update wastewater facilities, potentially costing them millions of dollars, [Congressman Blaine] Luetkemeyer’s spokeswoman Georgeanna Sullivan said.”

Good heavens! Updating their wastewater facilities! What horrors. [Sorry for the sarcasm here.]

The congresspeople’s letter also says that fish kills at the lakes “were not verified by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources or the Missouri Department of Conservation.” Notice that it doesn’t deny that the fish kills occurred, which can easily be determined by looking at local news reports. Now again, the science behind fish kills is complicated; sometimes they occur simply through seasonal causes, and other times there are human-related causes. But the disingenuous phrasing of the letter reveals a desire to mislead, to cast doubt, where none needs to exist.

The more things change, as they say, the more they remain the same. Go to the lake and enjoy yourself, and if the water smells a little funny or looks a little green, don’t worry. It’ll wash on downstream eventually.

Teenie Dees from Turkey Creek

Tags

lost communities, memory, newspapers, Wayne County

When I was a young reporter, I worked for a weekly newspaper that had “community correspondents.” Country folk of a certain age will know what the term means. Every little community in the county had a correspondent, usually a longtime resident and almost always female, who would write up an account of the goings-on in the community for the week: church suppers, visitors in and out, illnesses, revivals, and occasionally items of greater news value. Their payment was typically a free subscription.

My job was to convert the correspondents’ reports into usable copy. This task varied from one person to another. Some correspondents sent neatly typed reports, correctly spelled and punctuated, leaving me little to do besides check for style issues and insert paragraphing where needed. Other columns arrived in wadded bundles of notebook paper, scribbled out in ancient handwriting, nearly indecipherable.

Such was the news from Turkey Creek. The Turkey Creek community lay in the east end of the county, far from any towns. It had lost its post office and school some years back. But it was still a voting precinct; on election night, Turkey Creek was usually the last to report, with its thirty votes. And it still had its community correspondent, whose name was Dees.

I never met Mrs. Dees, but she reported in from Turkey Creek faithfully, her handwritten message arriving every week. Things were slow on Turkey Creek most of the time, but she did her best to liven up her column with observations about the changing seasons and the condition of the roads. She always referred to herself in the third person, following some notion of proper style, and appeared to travel everywhere with a daughter, or perhaps a granddaughter, who went by Teenie. Perhaps that was her actual name. Mrs. Dees and Teenie traveled to Poplar Bluff and Greenville, and they visited neighbors. Teenie spent overnights with friends. And all was duly recorded in the News from Turkey Creek.

As a young college-educated smartass, I regarded Mrs. Dees’ news of Teenie with mockery, although I never let it show around the office. The owners knew the family and respected them. But at night, over beers with my friends, I would laugh at the tedious, inconsequential doings of Mrs. Dees and Teenie. The pinnacle of humor came with a three-week sequence of columns in which she took note (first week) that a dog had died just above the low-water bridge, and that the county road crew needed to come out and take care of it. Second week, the dog remained, and had become increasingly foul. Mrs. Dees expressed horror and again called upon the road department. By the third week’s column, Mrs. Dees had stopped the car and gone over to inspect, informing us that to her great disgust the dog had swelled to the point that a person could no longer tell if it was male or female. Fourth week, no report. Either the county or the scavengers took notice.

Only in later years did I reflect on Mrs. Dees’ column and its significance. Turkey Creek had been a logging community, building up after the turn of the century to decent size, with its own tram line to Greenville, where a person could connect to the larger world. After the log boom came to an end, Turkey Creek and its sister communities on the east side of the county began their slow slide to oblivion. After the post office and school were gone, what was left? The Baptist church, the polling place, and the weekly newspaper report.

What I thought of as silly nonsense was the last assertive echo: We are a place, we are people, we are still here, we mean something. Nowadays I don’t laugh about the travels of Teenie. I cherish them, and I wish Mrs. Dees had told us more.

Favorite Ozarks Places – 18

Tags

meditation, Missouri Conservation Department, nature, Osage, Osage River, Painted Rock Conservation Area, prehistory

Osage River from north overlook – Painted Rock Conservation Area

The “painted rock” of the Painted Rock Conservation Area isn’t much to look at, and I’ve never seen it. You shouldn’t try, either; an archaeologist who documented the painted rock (actually, a Native American pictograph) in 2006 noted that the site is closed to the public “because of the extreme risks of drowning, falling rocks, and poisonous snakes.” But that’s not why people visit Painted Rock anyway.

They go there because it has some of the most sweeping overlooks of anywhere in the Missouri Ozarks. The Osage River forms the western edge of the conservation area, nearly 1,500 acres owned by the Missouri Conservation Department, and a loop trail takes hikers to a couple of magnificent viewspots. The river sweeps in a large curve beneath the bluffs there, known as the “Osage Bend,” so visitors can see for miles in both directions and can have as a bonus a view across the river of some of the finest-looking farmland in the state.

Mountaintop meditation is some kind of basic human impulse, and the Conservation Department has placed benches at several locations to meet that need. I doubt if this use is officially approved, but you might well see some evidence of cremation scatterings. Frankly, for a local nature lover it’s hard to imagine a better place to have your crumbs spread out.

The use of this high location as a funereal spot, in fact, goes back perhaps more than a thousand years. Along the hiking trail is a Native American burial cairn, a reminder that this area was an important, perhaps even sacred, spot long before Europeans arrived. Sadly, the site bears signs of having been looted in years past.

Burial cairn at Painted Rock – from Wayfaring.com

The recent history of Painted Rock is less exalted. While researching this location, I came upon an excellent blog entry from Julianna Schroeder, who blogs under the name The Opulent Opossum. Here’s a link to her post, and I’ll try to link to her blog on my sidebar, if I can remember how to do that. For my purposes, though, I’ll quote from her entry:

“The Missouri Department of Conservation acquired the land in 1981, but it’s been used as a park and preserve since the last quarter of the 1800s. At that time, the land was leased and used by a group of affluent citizens of Jefferson City for hunting purposes. In 1907, when the land appeared to be in danger of being subdivided and sold, the group of hunters organized formally into the Painted Rock Country Club and purchased the property—1,086 acres.

“The country club, whose members included Governor Herbert Hadley, had a clubhouse on the land, gathered there on the weekends, and had fall and winter hunts for deer, turkey, squirrels, rabbits, quail . . . this at a time when game was becoming increasingly scarce in the state due to the lack of centrally organized conservation efforts.

“Again, these were prominent people; in 1909 the group’s annual banquet was held at the Governor’s Mansion, and it’s widely agreed that this club’s members were instrumental in developing and supporting Missouri’s first statewide hunting laws as well as creating (in 1936) the state’s department of Conservation.

“The club’s heyday was in the 1920s, but it declined somewhat during the Depression; the land was sold in the mid-1940s and then sold again in 1952 to Sam B. Cook, a prominent Jefferson City banker who was the son and grandson of men who had been members of the country club. In 1981 he sold the property to the Missouri Department of Conservation, which developed the trail overlooks, interpretive signs, and other information, and worked to improve the quality of the area’s oak-hickory forests.”

View from south overlook – Painted Rock Conservation Area

Painted Rock sits at the northern edge of the geographic Ozarks, and the area around it (Westphalia, Freeburg, Koeltztown, Meta) is not what is commonly considered the “cultural” Ozarks; it’s predominantly German and Catholic/Lutheran in its heritage. Geologically, though, it fits right in, with dolomite bluffs intermingled with chert and sandstone. And if there are lessons to be drawn from nature - and I think there are - perhaps the best lesson, sitting on a bench contemplating mortality, with ancient graves behind you and the mooing of a cow or clattering of a tractor floating up from the fields below, is that our notion of what is culturally “in” or “out” of the region probably needs continual expansion and reconsideration.

Favorite Ozarks Places – 17

Tags

caves, favorite_places, Ha Ha Tonka, history, karst topography, Lake of the Ozarks, springs

Ha Ha Tonka Spring

I generally avoid anything having to do with the Lake of the Ozarks, because it is so garish, messy, and utterly overcommercialized. But I have to admit that there are some beautiful scenic areas in that region, despite the overgrown forest of advertising signs that often obscures it.

One of those areas is Ha Ha Tonka, now a state park. Ha Ha Tonka was given its name by an early promoter who claimed that it was an Osage phrase that meant “laughing waters,” and if you believe that I’ve got a bridge to sell you. What it is, though, is a magnificent spring (pictured above) and a number of geologic features that are truly memorable.

It’s a wonderful place to see karst topography in its many forms. Water flowing through dolomite, with a sandstone overlay, has created a natural bridge (pictured below) and a deep chasm that connects the spring to the lake below. Before the lake, the spring fed the Niangua River, but nowadays that’s all beneath the surface. The remnants of a mill dam are still present, so one can easily imagine the community that existed there in the 19th and early 20th century.

The natural bridge at Ha Ha Tonka

The chasm is quite spectacular, similar to Grand Gulf farther south, and hiking trails wind through it in all directions. I wouldn’t recommend some of the trails for casual hikers; the rocky, rugged terrain makes for a tough clamber in some places. But there’s a paved path from the lake that nearly reaches the spring, until the rocks close in.

Most of the park’s visitors, though, visit the ruins of a big old house that overlooks the chasm from the north side. This mansion, optimistically referred to as a “castle” by the parks people, was begun in 1905 by a rich guy from Kansas City. He was killed in a car wreck the following year, but his sons continued with the construction of the house, which probably did have the best view in Missouri. It burned in 1942. I get the impression that the ruins, which the state parks people have stabilized, are preserved to maintain their current picturesque level of ruination. After all, it would lessen their attraction if they just went ahead and fell down.

Ha Ha Tonka spring, Castle in distance

As for myself, I’ve never been much interested in the opulent structures built by rich people, ruined or otherwise. The views from up there are excellent, though. Before the state obtained the property, Ha Ha Tonka was run as a private tourist attraction, with all kinds of fanciful names for the geographic features. The creation of the lake inundated some of those features, sparking a long legal battle between the owners and the electric company. The story of Ha Ha Tonka, both the geologic story and the story of the various humans fighting to profit from it, is told in excellent detail in Leland and Crystal Payton’s Damming the Osage.