The Lure of the Ozarks

Tags

Conflict in the Ozarks, David Benac, Elder Mountain, fishing, literature, lumber, mining, Ozarks, Ozarks Symposium, Phil Howerton, tourism, West Plains

In 2016, I was honored to be asked to give the keynote at the annual Ozarks Studies Conference in West Plains. The theme of the conference that year was “The Lure of the Ozarks,” so I decided to play on that theme for my talk. My title was “The Lure of the Ozarks: What’s the Bait and Who’s the Fish?”

The good folks at Elder Mountain took my talk, tweaked it a little, and published it in their most recent issue. As editor Phil Howerton aptly describes the issue, it’s a whopper . . . a double issue of 290 pages.

I’m reprinting a passage from near the opening of my talk below. Literary journals need all the help they can get, so if you’d like to read the whole thing, I encourage you to take a look at the issue’s impressive table of contents here and then use the purchase link here. You won’t regret it!

To speak of the lure of the Ozarks, appropriately enough, is to use the language of the fisherman, and prompts the metaphorical question of who is the fisher and who is the caught. Nowadays our talk about the lure of the Ozarks typically involves tourism, and rightly so, as it has become a mainstay of the Ozarks economy. Certainly tourism is a pretty benign sort of catchery . . . I suppose we could extend the metaphor and call tourism the “catch and release” version of the Ozarks’ lure.

But from the earliest times, people have come to the Ozarks to take away something more tangible. From Pierre Renaud down to the Doe Run Lead Company, the Ozarks have been a source of minerals and ore. The Missouri Lumber and Mining Company and its fellow timber harvesting enterprises did the same thing from the 1880s through the early twentieth century. In a general way, I think you’d have to describe the Ozarks as a kind of internal colony of the United States, a place from which to extract value at the lowest possible cost while returning as little as possible. As David Benac observes in his book Conflict in the Ozarks, a significant component of the Ozarks timber boom consisted of companies seeking to “tame” their workers, to bring them into compliance with the needs of an industrial-age enterprise concerning punctuality, sobriety, and adherence to the concept of “working hours” instead of living their lives by the clock of the seasons. What drew these entrepreneurs and companies to the Ozarks was what they could extract from it, and that’s a facet of this landscape that will never go away. I recall during the years of my childhood that every town in the area had its factory – shoe factories, shirt factories, hat factories, that sort of thing – each one staffed mainly by women paid on a piecework basis, overseen by men. It wasn’t until the advent of the global marketplace that these companies discovered they could find workers elsewhere who were even more impoverished and who had even fewer options than the Ozarkers, and relocated their factories elsewhere. For an industry that needed unskilled workers to perform repetitious tasks, the Ozarks must have seemed like a little slice of heaven for a time.

And then there’s escape, that time-honored lure of the Ozarks. Dad Howitt, the Shepherd of the Hills, came to the Ozarks to escape the noise of the city and the memories of his past, and ever since then one of the dominant themes of Ozarks culture has been that of the mountains as a place of refuge. Trappist monks came here, and the Harmonial Vegetarian Society, and so did Bonnie and Clyde. The hollows overflow with people who have come to the Ozarks for one sort of escape or another, whether it’s from the traffic jams of the city or the long arm of the law. My own experience with these transplants has been overwhelmingly positive. People drawn to the Ozarks from elsewhere bring energy, new ideas, and often a fresh infusion of money to communities that need all three. Unfortunately, the Ozarks’ mind-our-own-business reputation also draws the occasional Frazier Glenn Miller among the retired ad executives seeking a quiet place to meditate beside a stream.

Advertisement

A Good Year in Ozarks Writing – Already

Tags

books, Brooks Blevins, history, literature, Ozarks, Phil Howerton, University of Arkansas Press, University of Illinois Press

2019 has barely begun, and I can already tell that it’s going to be a banner year for writing about the Ozarks.

I’ve been working my way through the first volume of Brooks Blevins’ A History of the Ozarks, entitled The Old Ozarks, and it’s a grand piece of work. Richly sourced, comprehensive, and adroitly written, it is the history we’ve all been waiting for. I’m eagerly waiting for the second and third volumes to appear so I can snatch them up, too. If you are interested in the Ozarks, or interested in history, you must get this book – or at least make sure your library has a copy.

And then next month, another landmark book will hit the shelves: The Literature of the Ozarks, a comprehensive anthology edited by Phil Howerton of Missouri State – West Plains. It’s been a long time since anyone attempted an Ozarks literary anthology, and I can’t remember if anyone has ever put together one of this magnitude, stretching from the early 19th century to the present day. It’s being published by the University of Arkansas Press, and although I haven’t seen a physical copy yet, I’ve seen the table of contents, and it’s magnificent. I say this with a blush, since a selection from one of my books is included. I’m thrilled to be among the company.

Two days into the new year, and already a memorable one. I’m eager to see what other reading treats await.

The History of Tree Roots

Tags

Dallas County, farming, Missouri State University, observation, Ozarks, Phil Howerton, poetry, reviews

I bought The History of Tree Roots, Phil Howerton’s new book of poetry, a couple of weeks ago and have been leafing through it ever since. Like most books of poetry, it’s better read a few pages at a time.

Howerton’s specialty is the brief observational lyric, and his subject is the rural Ozarks. A native of Dallas County who now teaches at Missouri State University-West Plains, Howerton has an intimate knowledge of the artifacts of rural life and teases meaning out of them with understated patience: the rock-lined well, the sprouting fencerow, and as in the title poem, the exposed roots of a tree, “holding in place what little remains / of a soil that once held me secure.”

As that pair of lines indicates, the dominant mood in this book is one of loss. Not nostalgia for what is lost, but simple recognition of the loss and meditation on what is now missing. Howerton’s poems are not sentimental in the conventional sense, but they convey strong feelings by their insistence on attending to what is disappearing from Ozark life and what has – and has not – appeared instead.

The physical objects that are the subjects of many of these poems represent values that we associate with earlier generations of Ozarkers: stoicism, simplicity, family loyalty, and skill in the art of ‘making do.’ The poem “Abandoned Barn” recounts these values in the sad light of the barn’s abandonment. “Store against tomorrow / reap within reason, / return to the soil / more than what was taken. / A sheet of tin / roofing rises and falls / in the wind.”

But the Ozark way of life is not portrayed as a thing of unalloyed virtue; that tight-lipped stoicism can conceal provinciality and loathing of the nonconformist. Several poems meditate on old photographs. What is plumbed in these photographs is often the one who is looking away, the one whose expression reveals hidden longing, or the one who is never in the picture to begin with.

The newspaper where I used to work used to publish occasional poems sent in by subscribers, and the common thread in those verses was always the celebration of Ozark scenes and characters, hound dogs and porch-sitters, broomsedge and bloodroot. Phil Howerton takes these cliché-prone subjects and retrieves them by refocusing, changing the angle of view, and noticing the less-noticed.

“Not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself,” Wallace Stevens famously wrote, and Howerton’s poems follow that dictum by paying attention to the ordinary things and people around him. And from his noticing, we discover that even ordinary things have un-ordinary depth.

The book is available from amazon.com, among others.

– Phil Howerton