Beat The Heat With A Trip To Arkansas
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Hill Country Living
By Coulter Fussell
If the weather gets too hot in Yalobusha this week then I suggest we all just leave town. I’m currently writing this column from Fayetteville, Ark., where it’s about 10 degrees cooler. Despite their annoying high-pitched screaming at football games and oddly indescribable red when it comes to a collegiate color choice, I decided that visiting another college town might be a fun extra-stop on an Arkansas mountain-canoe trip.
Fayetteville is cute. It has no Sunday sales or grits so I feel like these people might border on being no fun at all, but I must say that their mascot is an entertaining rabid looking little character. Seeing sculptures of murderous wild hogs around every turn in a quaint mountain town is a dramatic juxtaposition and I wonder if these psycho pigs ever haunt these people’s dreams.
My family and I were tag-alongs for a canoe trip down the Buffalo River in the Ozarks of Northern Arkansas. I learned this weekend that some people who go canoeing or kayaking call the activity “a float” instead of “canoeing” or “kayaking.” There were no floats involved except for one lucky third grader with an innertube, so don’t be misled if you ever get asked to go on “a float.” You will be handed a paddle and expected to fully participate.
We happened to float on this river during the highpoint of what must have been the busiest float day of the year. Interstate I-40 through Little Rock was less crowded with moving humans than the waterways of the Buffalo River. Without exaggeration, there were thousands of canoes and kayaks on the river. Atop each canoe and kayak were one to three rednecks of varying shapes, sizes and states of sobriety. I saw more tattoos on the Buffalo River than I saw fish, turtles or leaves. Sometimes the tattoos were actually of fish, turtles or leaves so that evened things out a bit, I guess.
The river was like a crowded game of bumper boats and, mystifyingly, the people with their dogs and tiny children were also swimming in the busy river channel. They were constantly being run over by slow-moving but out-of-control canoes and kayaks. No one seemed to mind, care or be the slightest bit fazed. I was impressed with these people’s ability to just casually get completely run over by a boat in the company of their loved-ones and not be affected at all.
There was a whole sub-set of people who bungee-corded giant radios to their kayaks and blasted their favorite new-country or, even worse, 1990s hot-hits down the mountain valley for the entirety of the five-hour float. And, as they very wrongly presumed, for the pleasure of others. It was like dueling banjos when one loud radio guy came upon another loud radio guy and it was absolute audial pandemonium when there were three or more radio guys in any given area.
All in all, it was a funny cultural experience. And while we don’t have beautiful mountains here in Yalobusha, I’m glad that we also don’t have people. I look forward to a human-free float down the Yocona River where it’s just us and the turtles. The real ones.
