A car came into the campsite around 5 AM before first light. Weird because the park closed last night at 10PM. No entry until 8AM the next morning. It circled a couple of times then stopped at the bathhouse. A fella got out and for a few minutes walked around in the immediate area, an immediate area that included us, snug as two bugs in a rug, happily tucked away in our little camper, at least until this guy got there. He went back to the car, opened the trunk, rummaged around for a few minutes, took out a bag and went into the bath house. Clearly, he was going in there to load up the AR-15 in that bag.
Didn’t take me long to conclude that he is going to come to our camper bent on theft and mayhem.
I thought about being at the mercy of a potentially armed and dangerous person, worked myself into a tizzy and started wishing I had a weapon other than Emily's electric toothbrush and a tire iron I could not get to. A 9-millimeter semi-automatic Glock with a 16-round chip would do it. Or a 40 caliber Smith & Wesson. Oh hell, why not just do it – get an AR15?
The interloper was in the bath house way too long to simply be loading his gun. Of course, he could have been taking a shower. That’s what bath houses are for, you know.
Soon he came out, walked around for another few minutes, stowed the bag in the trunk, got in the car and drove away. I didn’t have the presence of mind to get a tag number.
On the way out, we checked in the office and spoke to a ranger who told us that they had been trying to catch this guy. For the last month or so he had been sneaking in the park by a back channel, bathing, then leaving before the rangers got there in the morning. As delicately as I could, I suggested that the rangers ought to consider showing up a little earlier a few mornings a week or block those back channels.
A down on his luck guy cleaning up to go to work somewhere?
Who knows?
So, what do I do about owning a gun?
The drive from the Osage Indian Reservation to the Osage Hills State Park and further eastward to Bartlesville marks a dramatic transition in vegetation over a short distance. We are leaving the vast open Great Plains, exemplified by the Nature Conservancy’s Tall Grass Prairie Preserve and entering an area of higher annual precipitation that supports a xeric (dry) oak-dominated deciduous forest, with black jack and post oak trees the most prevalent, the western limit of the range for these species. We are seeing a hardwood deciduous forest for the first time in three months.
On a 400-hundred-mile day from Osage Hills we head out on route 62 to Bartlesville (population 36,600), home of Phillips Petroleum. Frank Phillips was born in 1873 in Nebraska. At 14 years old he became a barber's apprentice and within a year he owned all three barbershops in Creston Iowa. At the age of 25 he traveled to the Indian Territories, some of which would eventually become Oklahoma. He settled in Bartlesville and used his father-in-law's money to drill oil wells. After a few misses he finally hit a gusher. Subsequently, Frank and his brother Lee founded Phillips Petroleum which later merged with Conoco oil company to become Conoco Phillips. That got things going in this country.
From Bartlesville, we head east on route 60 to Vinita, OK (population 5,750), home of the world’s largest McDonald’s restaurant, which sit in a renovated complex built on its own bridge crossing Interstate 44. Now that is certainly something of which to be proud.
So, the largest McDonalds in the world is in Vinita serving a resident population of 5,750. That’s a lot of Big Macs per person. I made it out of town without buying one, a great victory for me.
From Vinita we travel through Wyandotte, OK (population 333) where we cross the Neosho River, in Osage meaning “clear waters”. Nothing clear about it today. Extensive, intensive agriculture and channelization have taken care of that niggling ‘clear water” moniker. Wonder what the Osage word for “dirty water” is?
We cross into Missouri and the towns of Seneca (population 2,336), Neosho (population 11,835), Boulder City (population 50), Stella (population 158) and Cassville (population 3,266), then into Arkansas and finally arrived at the Thorncrown Chapel, a bucket list destination just west of Eureka Springs.
The chapel soars skyward just like the tall white oak trees that surround it, its verticality creating a sense of much larger size.
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| The Thorncrown Chapel Reaching Skyward |
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| Thorncrown Chapel |
Some people have called it one of the most beautiful churches in America and others have said it is one of the 50 most extraordinary churches of the world.
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| Thorncrown Chapel. The Glass Enclosure |
Reed constructed it mostly of wood and other indigenous materials, nothing bigger than what two people could carry to the site. A monumental wooden frame carries glass, lots of glass, that allows one to appreciate the beautiful wooded setting.
Sitting quietly here moves even an old heathen like me.
Thorncrown Chapel is open to the public most of the year. Follow this link to learn more about this compelling place.
Thorncrown Chapel
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| Brilliantly Constructed Light Fixtures Add to the Upward Thrust of the Edifice |
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| Local Flagstone Floors |
In Eureka Springs we learned about another local religious erection. The Christ of the Ozarks, a sculpture of Jesus standing atop Magnetic Mountain just outside Eureka Springs. Christ is extending out-stretched hands in a gesture of gathering his flock.
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| Christ of the Ozarks |
The monolith, the largest Christ statue in North America, has 24 layers of white mortar on a steel frame, stands 67 feet tall and has a 65-foot arm span. The foundation required 340 tons of concrete interlaced with steel.
Christ's face is 15 feet tall and the whole thing weighs over two million pounds. In the words of a local ice cream store owner in Eureka Springs who directed us here, “You could hang four Lincoln Navigators from each arm. No problem”.
Christ's face is 15 feet tall and the whole thing weighs over two million pounds. In the words of a local ice cream store owner in Eureka Springs who directed us here, “You could hang four Lincoln Navigators from each arm. No problem”.
Would Christ be proud? You bet cha!
Nearby one can visit a 4,100-seat amphitheater, the site of seasonal outdoor performances of “The Great Passion Play”, performed four or five times a week from May through October every year since 1968, by 170 actors and dozens of live animals. Over 7.7 million people have seen the play, which makes it the largest-attended outdoor drama in America.
Also, on the grounds of The Great Passion Play is the New Holy Land Tour, a full-scale re-creation of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, a section of the Berlin Wall and a Bible Museum with over 6,000 Bibles (including an original 1611 King James Bible, a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible, and the only Bible signed by all the original founders of the Gideons.
Big parking lots surround the whole complex to contain the thousands of busses, recreational vehicles and Harley Davidson motorcycles that negotiate the crowded and narrow streets of Eureka Springs where vendors hawk every iconic religious symbol imaginable.
We skedaddled southeastward from Eureka Springs on route 14 into the heart of the Arkansas Ozarks, crossing the beautiful and exceptionally clean Buffalo River at Dillard’s Ferry. Winding our way through sparsely populated country along ridge tops, into valleys and across summits in this vast dissected terrain we finally enter the Ozark National Forest Gunner Pool Recreation Area, home of Camp Hedges, a Civilian Conservation Corps facility (CCC) where, from 1933 to 1942, two hundred, depression-idled young men from Company 743 of the Corps worked on various projects to protect, improve and develop the area’s natural resources, thanks to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal.
See these links for more info on this “infrastructure” initiative.
“Roosevelt’s Army” (also called the “Tree Troopers”, “Soil Soldiers” and “Three Cs Boys”) established camps in every state; 2,635 by September of 1935.
These “welfare recipients”, under the leadership of reserve army officers, completed thousands of conservation projects. They planted over three billion trees, build more than 800 parks and 47,000 bridges and developed 28,000 miles of hiking trails. They restored forty million acres of land severely eroded and damaged by indiscriminate forestry and agricultural practices. Over three million, seriously desperate men, with no jobs, no health care to speak of and no assets, except for families back home, flocked to the CCC.
They lived in forty-man barracks in remote compounds that included bathhouses, electric lighting plants, kitchens, storage, infirmaries, recreation halls, a softball or baseball diamond, and sometimes a football field. Cash allowances were $30 a month, and workers had to send mandatory $25 allotment checks back to their families each month. Of the $5 each man kept, $1 went into the company fund, and they could buy $1 worth of coupons (twenty at five cents each) for the canteen. Promising fellows became assistant leaders and leaders at $36 and $45 respectively. The workload was eight hours a day, five days a week. Evenings were free except for compulsory (on their own time) training in First Aid and reading classes for the illiterate.
One man, who enrolled in a camp at St. Charles (Arkansas County) summed up what many men echoed: “I learned more during those two years in the CCC than I learned in the next ten. I went in a boy, came out a man. Went in ragged, hungry, ashamed and defeated, came out filled with confidence and ready to challenge the world.”
Men in the CCC gained weight and enjoyed improved health and morale. They learned decent work habits, skills, and attitudes. Many rose through the ranks of business and industry. As the economy picked up, more men were able to find jobs in their local areas. As the war threatened, many enlisted. Enrollments dipped, and many camps disbanded.
You won’t find this wasteful shit happening under dunderheads Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke, appointed by President Bone Spurs to run the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior respectively. No sir. No more free lunch for teat suckers.
We camped on Sylamore Creek all by ourselves in an excellent oak canopy covered site with water, clean toilets and blessed solitude thanks to the Civilian Conservation Corps. After an excellent dinner we sat quietly on the patio of our CCC castle and listened to Eastern Screech, Barred and Great Horned owls talk to one another. No scorpions.
Good night all. Sweeet Dreams.
Good night all. Sweeet Dreams.
