Crockett's Bluff: May Day '96

I've come 0n one of those rare Arkansas spring mornings that graces the landscape and the hearts of the farms and river here before the onset of an inevitable span of long mosquito-infested days -- devoted in my memory to serious toil -- before the arrival of a seemingly brief but welcomed autumn with its gradually brisker mornings and the inevitable first frost that will bring to their knees all those sources of sustenance that have flourished since the previous April or May.

I have returned once again to this spot to confront or perhaps embrace the spirits that inhabit this otherwise naturally pleasant spot above the White River and and into the woods surrounding the place where, for the record I suppose, my family begins.

Not far fron this spot rests the remains of the house, long abandoned, in which I was born one September afternoon sixty years ago and where my father died with all, except for me, of his family around him.

His wife, my mother, survives today in a nearby town in the care of those who are not her family.

The breeze is fresh and cool across the new grass and fledgling foliage near this spot where I first saw a pig butchered, its belly opened and its guts removed after having its hair scraped clean, fresh from the scalding water. Even now, the images of that scene, as well as the taste of the fresh sausage that it produced, remain etched, fresh in my memory.

The barns are gone, the grassy hills now trees, the out buildings vanished -- the sheds, the two-hole outhouse, the chicken coops. It is memory that is required now that change has worked its will, removing the clues to the past and altering the landscape with growth.

We are left to memory and the local spirits to transmit their meaning. Anxious and reluctant to let go of our pasts, we are left to their mercies.

Yet time and age and death's accounting dare not extinguish the life that persists in the cool currents of nature's cycle this morning on this rise above the White River where on one shining morning past I watched in awe the house boats along its banks bounce like buoys beneath the waves of the heroic paddle-wheeler Mary Woods No.2, the steam from its twin stacks streaming along its back downstream as it forged upriver its massive barge of freshly cut timber.