home from the hills
I got a little job to do recently in Arkansas. West Arkansas, in the hills of the Ouchita Range which is sort of the Ozarks but is cut off from it by Arkansas River. I rented a little hunting cabin halfway between the town of Hatfield (pop. 402) and the Oklahoma border a few miles from here. You ever want to get away from the Rat Race, this works. Just the coyotes and the deer and an occasional armadillo. My cabin had a porch with a rocking chair and I had a banjo I’d made awhile back. If I’d had a corncob pipe and a jug of razorback moonshine, I might never have left.
I damn near didn’t. I blew a tire right off getting up to my place and so I put on the little baby tire the rental company calls a spare, drove it to the nearest town up the road from Hatfield and ordered a real tire since the old one was beyond repair. Couple of screw-ups later, I’m still waiting and so I hunkered down at the cabin here, hiked the hills, waded the creek, watched vultures in the thermals and sort of drifted myself back into a boyhood long lost in the Appalachians of my youth.
My job was to install some of my stained glass windows in a national chapel for the Christian Motorcycle Association before their international rally of world leadership descended on tiny Hatfield. I’d given myself a week but we were finished in a couple of 90 degree days. The conference was rolling in by the hundreds at first, then by the thousands. My people wanted me to stay an extra day so they could put me on their Jumbotrons on the big stage they have in a meeting hall that’s over an acre under one roof, no posts, just huge girders carrying the load to the outside walls far from each other. And have me stand there while they said thanks, maybe have me say a word or three about, oh, my inspiration for the designs, hopefully something religious, at least something spiritual.
Right now, writing this, a good wind is rippling the pond down below the cabin, the trees are rustling leaves starting to catch autumnal fire and the sun is setting so long shadows touch my bare feet. No other human is anywhere near. Would you stand up in front of thousands of pilgrims yearning for some reassurance my inspiration came from On High and tell them I hear Cripple Creek, not Jesus Christ; I feel the warmth of the wind, not the Lord, and I know the light that plays through this valley, an October light moving south, is the self-same spirit that animates their chapel glass? Would you?
Not me. The light will have to do all the talking for me this time. And by then I’ll be long gone from this paradise.
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