Breaking Down In Arkansas

I stuck my thumb up for the umpteenth time. The umpteenth car swooshed past me, giving a berth wide enough that I could have lied down on the road. It was four o'clock on a Friday, and I was not in the best mood.

I'd hitchhiked my way into the small town of Harrison, Arkansas to grab lunch after dropping my car off at the mechanic's. I was only expecting a minor repair on my brakes. And then I'd received the call. You know, the call from the mechanic -the one that makes you open your eyes real wide and say: “wait, how much?” The call where it turns out your main cylinder is toast, and it's Friday, and they can't get to your car today, and they don't have the parts on site anyway. The call that means you're not going anywhere for a while.

So here I was, thumb in the breeze, walking three miles to pick up my crippled car for the weekend. When I finally did get a ride, it was from a white-haired man who told me: “I don't usually pick up hitchhikers, but the lord spoke to me today.” I assured him that I loved Jesus as much as the next guy, and he drove me all the way to the building's front door.

The mechanic, Thomas, shook his head when I walked in, as if to say “she didn't make it, son.” He sniffled into his gray mustache and handed me a piece of paper: a seventy-five dollar invoice for their inspection and diagnostic. Nothing like paying for terrible news.


“So, you live in this thing, huh?” he asked me,

“Yup,” I said. “That's why there's a bed back there.”

It wasn't his fault, but I really resented poor Thomas for the eight hundred dollars I was going to have to fork over on Monday to have my car fixed.

“So where are you gonna go for the weekend?”

“I don't know,” I said, handing him my debit card.

I really didn't. I'd called the local Walmart while trying to hitch a ride, and they categorically forbade parking and sleeping in their lot.

“You shouldn't drive too far in that thing,” said Thomas.

“I know. You told me on the phone.”

“Cause the brake could go at any time.”

“Right. Are you gonna swipe my card?”

“Oh,” he sniffled again, handing it back to me. “You have to swipe it. The machine's right there.”

I paid quietly.

“Say, you got a tent in there?”

“I do...”

Five minutes later, my Highlander was trotting along a winding county road. Every time I pressed the pedal, the brakes groaned like an old man on the toilet -I wondered if I would even make the ten miles to the campground Thomas had suggested. The road narrowed and climbed along a lush hillside, and soon I could see the Buffalo River curving around cliffs and woods. Eventually, I turned onto a gravel road that plummeted back down to the valley floor. This should be good, I thought, switching to a lower gear and putting the brake pedal to the metal. The car made a noise like a pterodactyl's death squawk and inched its way down the slope. I kept the pedal on the floor -there was almost nothing pushing back. A mile later, my poor Toyota limped back onto the flat terrain of the campground.

It was a lovely place -the gravel gave way to a white dust road that followed the curve of the the river, bordered by dozens of campsites. They were all empty. I drove a quick lap and picked the best-looking one: a grassy patch shaded by thick trees, with a short path to the beach and a view of the water from the fire-pit. I pitched my tent and organized my camp quickly, eager to go dunk my head in the river. Before heading down to the beach, I checked my phone: no service. Guess it's just a very expensive alarm clock for the weekend, I thought while tossing it into the tent along with my sleeping bag.

The water was a deep, dark green, and frigid. I spent a long time dipping my toes, chickening out, skipping rocks, and doing it all over again before finally taking the plunge. It was so cold it hurt, but I swam across the river to a tall cliff. I heaved myself onto the rocks and watched the sun go down, then realized it had been too long and I had to re-acclimate to the water temperature. There were no rocks to skip on this side, so I sucked it up and cannon-balled back into the water.

The rest of the evening was uneventful. The eight hundred dollar tab coming up was still stuck in my throat. I made some food, wrestled with the crappy firewood I'd bought from a farmer down the road, and crawled into my sleeping bag for the night.

I slept ten hours and got up around noon. Bright tents had bloomed here and there around the campground, but my nearest neighbors were still a good hundred feet away. Two big marshmallow clouds surfed a perfect blue sky, and the sun already felt heavy on my shoulders. I had an early lunch and decided to go on a hike in the welcome shade of the forest. I packed up my rucksack and headed toward Camp Erbie, six miles up the Buffalo River.

The forest was downright Jurassic. The rocky trail, criss-crossed by huge roots, vanished into glowing green grass. Vines crept out of the earth and wrapped themselves around trees, following their tortured branches hanging over the water. I'd read on a sign that the banks of the river housed some eight hundred species of plants, but I hadn't expected to see so many right away. I passed too many wildflowers to count -bright orange, purple, red, and all peppering the same radioactively green grass. I stopped every ten seconds to look at oddly-shaped ferns or at trees growing right out of the river. I had to force myself to put my camera away, or I wouldn't have made it a quarter-mile down the path. As I looked up, a shimmering flicker caught my eye. It was a blooming tree loaded with little white flowers swinging in the breeze; they looked like a flock of white hummingbirds.

I crossed several creeks, all running over smooth sandstone. The water was so shallow that when I stood in it, it barely reached halfway up the soles of my thick hiking boots. The creeks all ran over white or black plates of sandstone, and the thin sheet of water had carved them all into perfect little staircases. It was wild to think about how many millions of years it might have taken for these trickles of water to wear down rock into smoothly cut square steps.

Near the river, the air was pleasant and humid, but I eventually climbed high up the flank of the valley. Through the thick scrawl of branches, I could still see the deep Heineken green of the river. I wondered what types of sediments or other geological deposits had turned it that color, and cursed myself for sleeping through “Into to Geology” in college. Soon, I made my way higher so that the river was only a thick piece of green yarn threaded through sandy beaches. Valley slopes gave way to canyons in places, and cliffs of white sandstone towered above the water, marred by deep black pockmarks.

The trail wandered in and out of the shade on the clifftops, and I started sweating. The lush grass persisted beneath the cover of the trees, but where the path meandered into the mid-day Arkansas sun, only dry, yellow grass grew up to my waist. I drank some water and ate a power bar, only then realizing that I was standing in front of a trail sign. Lost in all the sights, I had already walked half the distance to Camp Erbie.


During the second three miles of the hike, my eyes struggled to settle on anything -there was simply too much to take in. My thoughts refused to stay fixated as well, and I thought a thousand boring and strange things on the rest of the hike: how excited I was to climb in Yosemite this summer, a stupid but funny scene from “Scrubs” (a TV show I used to watch in high school), a girl I used to have a crush on in college that I'd never worked up the guts to talk to, what I'd do for work once my trip ended, a different set-up I would try to get my crappy firewood to catch later that night, all the friends I'd left in Boston and all the ones I was hoping to make in Seattle, turning back three thousand feet below the summit of Mount Rainier because of a bad storm, climbing in New Hampshire on blazing summer days, my childhood in the San Francisco Bay Area, my little brother's upcoming graduation, and way too many more to list them all.

It kept going on and on, thought bleeding into thought, and all the while I walked down this amazing, beautiful trail, unable to keep up with the unfurling, discombobulated memories and dreams.

When I reached Camp Erbie, an old man was dragging his canoe onto the beach.

“How was it?” I called out to him.

“Perfect,” he replied with a smile.


He was right. Unwilling to break the spell by retracing my steps, I hiked up to the county road and thumbed a ride back to camp.