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You don't hear much about manufacturing in the south and maybe that's axiomatic, but Ft. Smith Arkansas is and was an exception, suffering the same rust belt obsolescences as say Lowell, Mass or Bethlehem, PA. Stout six or seven story brick buildings with broken windows, a tired empty Main Street, shuttered bars.
The Arkansas river separates it from Oklahoma which on the one hand made it a launch for traveling and trading westward, but psychologically made it a frontier town, on the safe side of Indian Territory. So while cotton, peanuts and light manufacturing kept it busy, settlers and outlaws wandering to and from Oklahoma apparently made it so rambunctious that it is now famous for its hanging judge Isaac Parker, who made good on his name by hanging roughly 80 men during his terms and as many as six in one day. And as a military fort, it was a way station for the Seminoles, Choctaw, and Cherokee on their forced march into OK. Karma can really catch up to you, even 100 years later.
***
I'm headed southeast from there, through pretty, apathetic-looking farmland. The baking wind of the prairie lifts a little as the sun starts going down and I get into some hills. The map promised a couple of campsites in the Ouachita Mountains, close enough to Hot Springs that I can finally camp out and still get into town in the morning. But the campsite was not easy to find and I may not be in the one promised by the map. There are no National Park signs, even though I'm in one, I think. I only happened to find this by driving on small curvy county roads and passing an old chipped-paint sign for a private campgrounds and boat launching. The pavement gave way quickly to yellow dirt and only an innocuous brown government recreation sign put me here, a small site on the bank of the lazier than lazy Ouachita River.There's only one other guy here at the camp and we haven't even acknowledged each other. He seems nice enough - he was reading the paper, pale and shirtless, on his fold out camping chair. But I have a dog and therefore outnumber him, if it gets to that.
***
I'm not particularly hungry and neither is the pooper, though I don't know if it's the stress of traveling, or the less than top shelf kibble I brought, a family-sized bag no less. Instead I set up a chair and pull some beer next to me, overlooking this slothful, country river. It is so slow moving I thought it was a pond at first, but only when I stood on it's old bank, higher up and further from where it is now did I figure anything that was long rather than round had to be a river.It doesn't take long for the sun to slip far away, leaving us in a roiling moonless southern night, humid and alive. Bugs and insects big and small, flying and crawling come out. The river surface breaks occasionally on the lips of a hungry fish. Frogs, cicadas, crickets and creatures I don't even have a name for croak and scream over each other, hidden in grass that grows tall on the river's edges. I can hear them all in my chair under the rim of trees above the river, the dog is laying in the sand nearby, ears up, alert to everything. Lightning bugs arrive, one or two at first, but after awhile, long enough to forget about them, I realize the air all around me is busy with them, milling and drifting close to me and high up among the leaves, looking for love.
And then dogs start in. They seem right across the river, deep in the woods, out of site. One starts to whine and then others chime in, exasperated. At first I picture the backyard of some trailer landscaped with auto parts keeping hunting dogs in a wire pen. And maybe that's the case, but the howling and mewling picks up again somewhere off to my left. And behind me, also in the woods, also unseen. The lightning bugs are so numerous they seem like they're trying to cast this faerie dreamspell with little yellow glows that breathe on and off, making anyone who's careless dimwitted and liable to get naked and dance.
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