Sunday, May 24th

Torrents

At around half past midnight, the phone went off with a terrifying sound. After remembering where I was and, more importantly, where the phone was, I discovered that the weather service had issued an emergency warning for flash floods. May had seen nearly constant rainfall in Oklahoma and Texas, some places were reporting twenty inches over the whole month, and another round of heavy rain was due.

Grove, the city I was staying in, was surrounded by water of the Grand Lake o’ the Cherokees. I figured, correctly it turned out, that it was yet another artificial lake and went back to bed.

At five thirty, the phone went off again.

I left town around nine to a dull grey sky. It was quite pleasantly warm, though, mid-sixties Fahrenheit. I headed south with the intention to leave Oklahoma again. I felt a little bad for ticking the state off so carelessly, but the rules (for those just joining us: ‘spend the night’) had been followed. Since I had treated Texas in a similar fashion two years ago, another trip might be in order, perhaps in a more calm season.

As I crossed the lake that marked the town’s boundary, it immediately started to rain again. The phone want off again, too, and kept doing so now every quarter hour. While I like the idea of having a system to send emergency messages out to people, overusing it in this way is a bad idea as it runs the risk of people starting to ignore it. I certainly did and switched the phone into flight mode.

I soon turned east onto a small country road. While the main highway had been in fairly good condition, this road was awash. There was plenty of water in the ditches on its sides, too. And the rain kept on falling.

I crossed into Arkansas, The Nature State. In Gentry, nothing much to report, I chickened out and turned south onto a bigger road towards a main eastbound highway. As I pondered whether I should stay on that or detour through something called the Boston Mountains on smaller roads, a heavy downpour started that made it hard to see anything even with wipers on high. Taking this as a sign, quite literally from above, I decided to stick to the main highway, boring or not.

It started out by with the lovingly named Tontitown and the less imaginative Springdale, both an endless array of traffic lights all red. Each had several drive-in restaurants that seemed a common feature of the south that had disappeared almost entirely elsewhere in the country.

Beyond, it kept on raining. I stopped at a Walmart north of Huntsville, partly to have a pee, partly to feel how heavy the rain really was. Soaking, as it turned out: the few steps from the parking lot to the store were enough for wet feet through my, admittedly not very waterproof, trainers.

Back on the road, I overtook a long distant cyclist. A surprisingly common sight, strangely mostly on main roads, this poor fellow had chosen the entirely wrong time for his adventure. As if to prove that point, the rain turned torrential again. It only stopped on the other side of a mountain range where, bewilderingly, the road wasn’t even wet.

Being on a bigger road, billboards finally revealed the name of the mountainous area I had been in since yesterday: the Ozarks. This highland region covered both northern Arkansas and the southern half of Missouri plus bits of eastern Oklahoma. The sign that convinced me ultimately promoted 102.9 The Z, a radio station claiming to play the best country of the Ozarks.

Another sign promised ‘Arkansas’ Largest’ if you turned off one mile ahead but it failed entirely to clarify Arkansas’ largest what and I wasn’t sure I dared to go and find out. Instead, I rolled through Alpena, a small, pleasant mountain town. It featured, Alpena Chainsaw Art. Sounded like a good excuse to play with chainsaws all day and, perhaps, even make a buck or two from it.

After the road had joined another main artery coming from the north, it ran past the Arkansas Welcome Centre, which was about time, before entering Harrison, population a bit over sixty thousand. A sign pointed to the National Historic District and I decided to follow it and have a look. What I found was the centre square which may or may not have been that district. I figured I could do with a little stroll and stopped anyway.

The square was rectangular, perhaps a hundred metres on each side. The county court house stood in its centre, surrounded by a little park with monuments scattered around. Brick buildings, most red but some yellow or grey, bordered the square. Only one or two of them were standing empty, but all of them had a somewhat forlorn look. There were book stores, gift and toy shops, even a theatre, and the offices of the local paper. There was also a church in a decidedly unchurchlike building. One block south was Crooked Creek with parks at its shores. Yet the concrete and dust of modern America didn’t make it all feel very inviting: Big noisy roads, more parking that grass. I was reminded once again that stopping in American cities was seldom worth it.

Onwards, the road kept crossing mountain ridges and eventually dove down to cross a river valley. This was Buffalo National River, offering the question how many National This and Thats there were in this country. Wikipedia, of course, knows the answer: twenty one, with the final category being ‘other.’ This only includes the areas managed by the National Park Service and hence doesn’t even include National Forests.

Why exactly this river was worth its national status was a bit unclear to me. I could probably have found out at the Tyler Bend Visitor Centre, but instead preferred to remain ignorant. The river shores surely were busy this Sunday afternoon, as was Silver Hill, the supply village that had sprung up besides the highway just after it had climbed out of the valley.

By now it hadn’t rained for quite some time and I felt save to return to smaller roads. I did so at Leslie, announced as Arkansas’ best kept secret. It turned out to be a small collection of weathered red brick by a creek. A cynic would probably have remarked that this secret deserves keeping.

The new road climbed out of the valley with many a bend and then wound along a plateau. It encountered several pretty mountain towns. The largest of the was Mountain View. It had a small centre buzzing with people. A large memorial with three or four rows of names engraved was being inspected by some bikers. Most parking sports were taken and people were hanging out at cafés or rummaging through arts and crafts stores.

I stopped at a local supermarket. An older gentleman didn’t quite believe me when I politely gestured him to cross in front of me. A lady stared at me angrily when I parked right behind her car. Maybe this wasn’t such a nice place after all. Despite proudly proclaiming to be employee owned, staff was as grumpy as in any other supermarket I had been to so far. People at my local market in Berlin surely were a nicer bunch (except for the lady who keeps insisting that I lay down bottles sideways). Plus, when I stepped out of the store, it poured down with rain again.

This downpour evolved into the heaviest rain yet. I crawled along slowly just so I could see anything at all. Who knew it could rain this hard. When it finally stopped, though, the forest the road ran through smelled wonderfully. A mile or so on, the road was dry and everything looked innocently as if nothing had ever happened.

Something else changed and it took me quite some time before I realized it: the mountains had stopped and I had arrived on the flat plains west of the Mississippi. The river was about eighty miles to the east. I encountered another wide river, White River, instead. Because the landscape was so ridiculously flat, it wound along lazily. It was soon joined by another river, Black River. Ah! for the imagination of the settlers.

At an intersection, I had the choice between Newark and Newport and chose the latter. I crossed White River on a tall blue girder bridge. But a new, more modern bridge was already being erected. Down below was Newport. It started with a large rail yard, never the most pretty of sights. The rest of town was much prettier either. In fact, it looked rather desolately poor. The houses were tiny and almost rotten. The streets were cracked and crumbling. Even the trees looked a little sad.

Hurriedly I left. The last half hour to Jonesboro, chosen overnight destination, finally was along straight roads. These plains really were end- and featurelessly flat.