Arkansas Is the New Taos
By: Jean Campbell
Tags: Humor, Culture, Americana, Arkansas, Art

AMERICAN LIFE

Photo by Matt Briney on Unsplash

The jokes started seconds after I confessed I was moving to central Arkansas so I could swim in non-chlorinated freshwater without a three-hour drive — always through Phoenix — followed by a two-hour hike into a slot canyon during that one month of the year when it wasn’t flooding or bone-dry.

“Don’t bother taking shoes…he he he,” they chortled. As if ruralites can’t take a trip to Sketchers these days where, just like the rest of us, they could hunt down a perfectly good pair with cushioning and day-glo laces for $14.99.

Well, who’s laughing now people? Arizona spent its summer vacation (spoiler) broiling and then most of Tucson burst into flames. Half my friends were waiting out evac orders while the other half were still needling me about using the word “fixin’” to describe — obviously — what COULD happen next.

Because if you’ve spent any time in the South you know that we know that no one knows what will ACTUALLY happen.

It’s mighta coulda happened, is all.

Y’all just wait, because the real estate here is about to burst into metaphorical flames.

Here’s a few things that have happened to me and I’m not ashamed to feel proud, yes that’s right vindicated like Steve Bannon does right now as he awaits getting his bloated ass pardoned so he can go back to embezzling like the (non)profiteering snake that he is. But I digress. I’m living in the woods and counting the chigger bites but here’s what’s up, Gentle Readers.

1. I know everyone here by their first name and most of them are named Becky or Debra (or Brenda). Also, if you open a business in Arkansas you will name it after yourself because unapologetically displaying cleverness or anything stinking of originality will make you hated immediately. Take for example our new fishing shop, Masterbaiters. A lot of folks are up in arms about the audacity to make fun of fishing and self-stimulation right out in the open. There are three Debra’s within a five-mile radius and two of them are restaurants.

2. A bear walked through my front yard last week. I know what you’re thinking — that means the neighborhood isn’t safe. Well, shows what you know about bears because my Trump-loving neighbors won’t leave their houses while I finally get a chance to use the pepper spray I purchased for my cross country motorcycle adventure that never happened due to — you guessed it — not being able to get out of Arizona without dying from heat stroke.

3. I just bought a second property and I’m not even rich. Holy Cow, there is some cheap ass real estate (with indoor plumbing) and a long line of renters queueing up to pay me $800 a month for the privilege of not one but one and a half bathrooms. I’m aspiring to start investing in the Light Blue Monopoly properties but am not ashamed to announce I have Dark Purple ones.

4. I’ve identified three different mushroom genus(es) and collected enough fresh chanterelles for several hearty meals. These ‘shrooms are eminently Instagrammable and Facebookable although I occasionally get comments like, “Don’t eat that.” Thanks, I will not scarf down a raw Amanita after discovering its common name is Destroying Angel.

5. I learned that despite what Yankees and Californicators say about Southerners the fact is that “y’all” is far superior to the crappy grammatical failure-of-a-second-person-plural “you.” Did y’all know that you can say, “y’all two” when referring to a couple or even (maybe) “y’all three” when gossiping about a love triangle?

6. It’s summer and that means vegetables, especially cucumbers, for FREE. Sure, they are nutritionally useless but I’ve so far received 14 from various neighbors (whose names I don’t know because, pandemic) and the other day I took Fox Pass Cutoff down into town, stopped at the local coffee roasters, and lo and behold there it was … a basket of curated cukes on the front porch and I could adopt as many as I could carry.

7. Speaking of free lunches, it’s a fact that I could call up my handyman the day hunting season starts and he’d come over and shoot one of these pesky deer from my back porch. Why? Well, because he said he would and also you only have to be a few feet off the ground (who knew?) to harvest deer with bow-and-arrow in my actual neck of the woods.

8. If you’ve gotten this far you’ll know that nothing I’ve written has any resemblance to Taos. But that’s all changing now because I’m revealing the big secret of AR and its thrift store bounty. Folk art is cheap here, and plentiful. A lot of bible scenes but don’t be an art snob: biblical scenes in acrylics are to hillbillies what bleached cow skulls atop psychedelic desert-scapes (in oils and pastels and watercolors) are to Western Art.

9. I used to have a high and mighty attitude that when Southerners acted nice but were seething underneath it meant I was not only deeply insightful and morally superior but justified to seethe out in the open. Obviously, the “ma’ams” and smiles are all insincere but, more importantly, they are knowing winks: life is brutal and people suck, so let’s all agree to pretend otherwise.

10. My car battery died and I found this out right after a delicious dinner at The Home Plate Café, back during Spring when it was rainy and cold. I asked the owner, “say — who should I call for a tow this time of night?” and he sent out a waiter to help. The waiter couldn’t find his jumper cables in the back of his pickup truck strewn with fast food cartons and the greasy remnants of broken down small appliances, but he went back in and got another waiter and the engine fired right up so with a sincere Thanks Guys I was on my way. Thanks Jim, and if I had the sense of any self-respecting Southerner, I mighta coulda learned the names of those two guys.

Taos was once a cultureless backwater, too, before the artists and the new-money non-conformists moved there and transformed it into coffee shops peppered with IRS-fleeing Libertarians. Y’all know I’m right.