18 years ago my uncle decided to move from Indiana to Arkansas to try his hand in chicken farming. He has always loved farming and being in the country, having no neighbors to speak of and escaping the standard life we 'city slickers' live. He now has hundreds of acres of some of the prettiest land up in the Ozarks in multiple places, a lake house in the town, a country house with a big barn, 4 chicken houses and a few dozen head of cattle. The chicken houses are not the standard small operation style with a few measly birds pecking in the dust until Farmer John decides it is time to have Sunday dinner, instead they are full-scale operations with 30,000 baby chicks and another 30,000 older chickens that will be sent off to another farm once full grown to lay eggs that will be sent off to our wonderful grocery stores for our consumption.
This weekend my baby cousin graduated high school, so my father and i went to Arkansas for the graduation. My mother, who spends 3 months at home and then another 3 months back and forth taking care of my grandmother in Indiana, was to come down with said Grandma and a few other family members so we could bring her back to Dallas for a few months. So 8.5 hours driving and we're so far up a gravel 'County road' that I couldn't find my way back without instructions,and we are there for the weekend.
I'm not terribly close to my non-immediate family. My oldest sister has a very special connection with my grandmother and makes it a point to see her every year, along with the closest in age cousin on that side of the family. I have never had that closeness nor worked for it. I'm not sure if it was the geographic distance from that side of the family growing up or the age gaps, but I never had a huge connection to anyone. But, duty and familial guilt had me go on this trip, and in the end I am rather grateful for it. I saw a lot of people that I haven't for years, was surrounded by some of the most gorgeous country I would never care to live in, and saw so many example of exactly why I could not be around the type of people that live in these types of areas.
The poverty is overwhelming. There are houses you wonder how they are still standing, and what's more, how someone lives in them. Some of the people you meet are only concerned with a leaky roof, not a paycheck. The amount of people living on Welfare in this area is beyond amazing. It almost seems like everyone is on it. I know that when my family moved out here, they had almost nothing but a will to make it and a bank loan that if they defaulted, the next 3 generations wouldn't be able to pay off. My aunt and uncle each worked full time jobs for years in towns over 60 miles away from home, besides having to take care of 60,000 chickens as well as drive another 50 miles everyday to feed the cattle they had on another farm. When they had time to sleep is beyond me. The neighbors originally hated them for being outsides, Yankees, and having money to live on. They had to raise 2 small kids as well as grow into a community that did not understand a woman who would have a conversation with a man they did not know, a child that had leukemia, a very strong Baptist base community when they are Lutheran, along with the everyday life struggles that are too much for most people to handle. I am always amazed when I see this family, especially when I can understand as an adult now what they all went through.
I know the stereotypes that follow Arkansas, and I can see first-hand how they could form. Remote location, very little education, etc. I spent 3 weeks here after I graduated high school almost a decade ago, and I took back a completely different perspective this time. It is 20 miles one way to the nearest town, which is actually an area comprised of 4 towns all incorporated into 1 for schools and the like. In the last year alone they have undergone flooding and 2 tornadoes that took out large sections of town, leaving all of the small business in dire need of rebuilding. Yes, there is the requisite Walmart, but it does not take the place of all of the other shops in this type of location. They are cutoff from most major towns, if you even want to call any town in Arkansas "major".
This, however, did not lead me to make some amazingly obvious observations, most of which were done during the graduation commencement itself.
1. Any race outside of white is basically unheard of in this area. There was a few blacks, and a few mixed of unknown origin, but really, white is the only color in town.
2. This is the most politically incorrect place on Earth. One of the biggest of the 4 towns is called Cherokee Village, so named, as the Trail of Tears was walked through this area. We spent some time looking for arrowheads on some of my uncles property as they used to camp alongside the river and threw the extras into a large pile that eventually washed into other areas. In Cherokee Village there is the Choctaw Center, Iroquois Rd, Delaware Dr., Omaha Center, Thunderbird Lake, etc. Basically every Indian nation was named in the street signs and landmarks.
3. The mascot of the high school is the Rebels, complete with Confederate flag and caricature of Robert E. Lee.
4. While my family was dressed in slacks, dresses, etc. for the graduation, about half the crowd wore such wonderful assemblage as a Tinkerbell t-shirt, camo hats, overalls, mud boots. Outside of Tinkerbell, this was both men and women.
5. Teeth are optional. As are mullets. And molestaches.
6.
Meth is rampant, as is alcoholism. I find it interesting how in the 70's/80's it was white people giving crack to the poor blacks and getting them hooked, and now we have the Mexicans giving poor white people meth and getting them hooked, The cycle circles around. The counties they live in are dry. The counties around them are dry. Fro where they live it is easier to go out of their way to drive to Missouri to buy beer than it is to buy from a wet county. As my uncle put it, these people are not like Yankees where they can have a few beers in the middle of the day and then go about finishing their work. They drink to excess and then don't get back around to the work. Domestic violence across the region is high, though not to say that every person who drinks beats their wife, far from it.
7. Out of 105 graduates, almost all of them received some sort of scholarship to college, in varying denominations. Try seeing those odds in Dallas.
8. Of those, 2 kids graduated from
Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts, similar to the program in our area called
TAMS. One of the girls who getting a diploma from ASMSA received over $350,000 in scholarships to multiple schools and is pretty well set for life.
9. There was an open-house for my cousin the day after graduation, a tradition evidently not well known in those parts. A few years ago when my other cousin graduated, invitations were sent out to neighbors and lots of them dropped by to find out exactly what that even entailed. The same people this time showed up as well, and from what my mother said, quite thoroughly enjoyed themselves even more than the last. The groups did not mix well between the city-folk and country, but at least the bridge was gapped and the attempt made.
10. I have never been so happy to come back to Dallas. I might want to escape here and move someplace different, but I already know that due to my upbringing the country is not for more. Nice to vist, very beautiful country without pollution, not the kind of lifestyle I would be comfortable living. Can almost say that while I do not want to go to work tomorrow, I am very grateful that the type of job I have does not involve chickens or farming or something of the like.
11. Congrats to anyone who actually read this whole entry. I just had a lot to think about on the drive home, and somehow this all came pouring on out. Pictures should be up on Flickr sometime in the next week or 2.
