Entering The World Of Stone County Arkansas
Astute readers will note that the narrative trail of this story that began in yesterday’s post, The Great Ozark Folk Festival Flood of 1973: Introduction, now degenerates into a pastiche of anecdotes, often linked by no more than their proximity on the page. While this was not a format I intentionally implemented, it turns out to be appropriate to the content.
The period between our crossing of the White River at Sylamore Ferry (at the end of yesterday’s post) until our departure from Mountain View was marked by a series of unanticipated, disjointed events which cumulatively produced, at least in me, a sense of being continuously off-kilter and somewhat disoriented. Be assured this post is not a derivative of those stories from the 1960s that attempted to emulate an hallucinogenic drug trip nor does it aspire to present the hillbilly equivalent of Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It’s just that many of our experiences were, as you’ll see, odd.
The Mountain View Encampment
The tone for our stay within the municipality of Mountain View was set when my friend, Neil Ellis (pictured in situ on the reader’s right), upon our entering the designated camping area, was guided across a dry creek bed 
into the imaginatively defined “city park” by a deputy policeman, whose rank was indicated by the battered badge pinned to his wifebeater tank top and whose authority was confirmed by the several pounds of Colt revolver holstered on his hip.
Admittedly, the camping itself may have been a factor in my general befuddlement that weekend. A Boy Scout dropout, I found the great outdoors a more reliable source of insect bites and ennui than, say, succor or emotional sustenance.
While I could contribute little in the way of the skills of the outdoorsman, I was able to supply our group with shelter, a hand-me-down tent my uncle’s family had formerly used for vacation bivouacking. Having never before seen the tent erected, I was, on viewing it fully pitched, surprised to thus learn that my uncle apparently spent his weekends running a circus or perhaps a tent revival meeting, those being the only reasons I could come up with for his ownership of a tent that could double as a hanger for a 747.
Shortly after completing work on our camp site, we settled in for our evening’s entertainment, an exhibition of land clearance presented by the two couples homesteading the acreage directly across the trail from us. To eradicate the foliage occupying their preferred sites for their two identical tents, they transformed their identical VW bugs into mini-bulldozers, merrily plowing into clumps of brush until the site met their approval. The two (non-identical) women in this group would achieve their own notoriety over the ensuring weekend by wearing, each time they emerged from their tents, a different, immaculately coordinated outfit.
In preparation for the weekend trip, we had, true to our hearty Midwestern heritage, stocked sufficient provisions (burgers, hot dogs, chips, beans, baked goods, etc) and charcoal (for the hibachi grill) to feed ourselves, our immediate families, and any of the smaller Central American countries through the weekend.
Our fellow campers, however, were apparently of a different mindset. Many people showed up with no camping gear, no food, and no money. Numerous of the folks we came to label Hungry Hungry Hippies approached our site as we grilled hamburgers, stopping to admire and savor our meals. None, it should be noted, actually asked us for food although clues of varying subtlety were provided. One of the several we fed, for example, casually reported he had hitchhiked to the festival from Texas, consuming no nourishment along the way other than a single can of corned beef hash.
And that was not even our most disconcerting food-related event.
That prizewinning episode came to pass the in the midst of the sunshine-filled afternoon of our second day in Mountain View. From our campsite, we heard what can only be described as wailing. Convinced that someone was in acute distress (the smart money was on “bad drug trip”), we hiked toward the apparent source of the moans, a portion of the woods that was a reasonable facsimile of the forest primeval and the likely home of spooks, goblins, witches, werewolves, and similar supernatural entities. Our search did not turn up anyone shrieking (or anything in the ghost/ogre category), and the noise had ceased by the time we entered the woods.
We did, however, find an object that was immediately enshrined in my mind as a prime symbol of human depravity, a position it has maintained unto this day.
In our search for the source of the wailing, we unexpectedly stumbled onto a stone amphitheater carved into a hillside in the woods, causing one member of our party to speculate on the likelihood that the sounds we had heard were occasioned by a human sacrifice completed during a pagan ceremony held on the stage of this secluded venue. Exploring the grounds, we found the thing.
At our feet lay a sandwich composed of two pieces of white bread – encasing a generous helping of what we determined by consensus to be Chef Boyardee canned spaghetti. It was not a pretty sight. But the nuance responsible for the object’s transcendence from the disgusting to the horrible was the single bite taken from the sandwich before it was discarded.
Perhaps, gentle reader, the impact of this emblematic sandwich cannot be conveyed by the written word. Perhaps, as the cliché has it, “you had to be there.” I can testify that when we came upon that scene we all immediately realized that one of the central existentialist questions of our time is
To what levels of despair and desperation must a human being sink to not only construct a sandwich from white bread and Chef Boyardee canned spaghetti but to actually take a bite of that sandwich before rejecting it?
I have no evidence that the wailing we heard was connected to that sandwich, but …
The Mountain View Courthouse Square
The Ozark Folk Festival activities, including a Saturday morning parade featuring the Governor Dale Bumpers, took place on or near the Courthouse square that is the political and social center of the Mountain View metroplex.
The above photo of the Stone County Courthouse was, unfortunately, taken too recently to provide a sense of our 1973 experience. The windows and grounds, for example, appear to have been modernized. It may be helpful in recreating the environment we entered 40+ years ago to know that the roads around the square were, we were told, the only paved routes in the county well into the 1960s. When we visited the Courthouse, its electrical wiring was conveniently located on the hallway walls. Portions of that wiring ran to the ceilings of those hallways and then dropped a short distance, suspending the naked, dangling bulbs that provided lighting for the area.
And, it was after a memorable visit to the Courthouse restroom that I embraced the conviction that, the tenets of medical science notwithstanding, one could, indeed, become infected with a venereal disease from a toilet seat. Indeed, I believed that transmission of disease might well take place without physical contact with the toilet seat.
One of the sights on the square early Saturday afternoon had been the hippie contingent openly quaffing wine. One of the sights on the square later that afternoon was the remainder of the hippie contingent begging for spare change to raise bail for their recently arrested comrades who were then residing in the local jail, an ancient stone blockhouse located behind the courthouse (see photo below), having been educated, though the didactic device of undergoing arrest, that Stone County Arkansas was, as it still is, a dry county.
The Bluegrass Music
Perhaps the only aspect of the weekend that turned out as we anticipated was the bluegrass music itself. While there was an official schedule of concerts by recognized groups, the more fascinating performances were those that seemed to occur spontaneously when a group would appear and start playing on the sidewalk, a corner of the square, or in a nearby park.
Frequently, other musicians, whether local folks or strangers who traveled to Mountain View for the Festival, would join in. Groups were casually formed and constantly shifting, containing local hill people, hippies, and combinations of the two,
The bluegrass was enchanting, even to my untrained ears. Neil & Irene, more discerning critics, were equally impressed.
Credit Due Department: Photo atop this post by Jasari – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia Commons. Photo of Main Street by Brandonrush – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikipedia Commons. Photo of Highway 9 By Brandonrush – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikipedia Commons. Photo of courthouse by Brandonrush – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikipedia Commons. Photo of jail by Jimmy Emerson, DVM. Photo of musicians at courthouse by Brandonrush – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikipedia Commons. Final photo of bluegrass musicians by Franklin B Thompson.
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Note: Originally posted Aug 9, 2007 at 1HeckOfAGuy.com, a predecessor of AllanShowalter.com