Sunday, October 30, 2005
Rush
Last weekend we took a family trip, the first one in several months. We reserved a hotel room in Harrison, piled overnight bags in the van, and took off.
The primary goal of our trip was Rush, a ghost town near the Buffalo River, but we also hoped to see some nice fall colors across the Ozarks. Morgan and I both took our cameras; Morgan also intended to scout for more barns and rough buildings; some of them may appear in Morgan's next show.
The Trip
Quick summary: Saturday we drove to Harrison, checked into a very small suite in the Comfort Inn; then drove on to Rush for a quick tour with the last of the afternoon; and returned to Harrison after supper. Sunday morning, although it was much colder, we drove out to Rush again, spending more time on the trails and roads; then we headed home through Harrison, catching a late lunch at a Waffle House (smoke-free by city ordinance!); we arrived home in the late afternoon.
Bug is eight and wants to know everything. For much of Saturday morning I was pointing out trees to her, explaining how oaks look different from maples, talking about the types and colors of leaves, the way the branches grow, how sweetgum leaves are star-shaped, how hickory trees have compound leaves. How the limbs of most kinds of oaks grow sturdy but crooked and ungraceful, but pin oaks grow tall straight trunks with long straight branches, so that when a pin oak gets good color it looks like an exploding firework. How there are more different sorts of oak trees in Arkansas than of any other type of tree, and how I was taught in school that the "oak-hickory association" is the basis for forests across the Ozarks.
Later as we hiked around I pointed out leaves and branches to her, teaching her to recognize oak trees by the way the buds cluster at the ends of the twigs, explaining the difference between palmate and pinnate veining in leaves.
Button, on the other hand, is five, and while she was impressed with the pretty sugar maples we passed, she was just as happy to read or take a nap. Both girls were a little drowsy, since Morgan gave them Dramamine before we set out.
As it turns out, we were a week or two early for the best colors, although we saw enough to keep us happy. Maplewood Cemetery in Harrison is worth remembering; there we saw some of the prettiest maples we've found.
Morgan took a ton of pictures over the weekend and I took no few myself; I would have run out of space on my camera if we hadn't picked up another flash card for it at the Harrison Wal-Mart Sunday morning. (But that was partly because before we left I neglected to offload pictures of Button asleep at the supper table.)
We also lucked into a good (if out of the way) place to eat: the Gravel Bar Restaurant in Caney, between Yellville and Rush, where we had supper on Saturday evening. They have live music on Saturday nights, and we were lucky enough to hear a small band called Rio: a gal singer, two guitarists, and a percussionist, all middle-aged and skilled, playing light rock and folk. They started off with "Big Yellow Taxi", then ranged from early Beatles to Alison Krauss. I liked (and could sing along with) nearly everything they played, even though some of their choices were a little odd, like the old Loggins and Messina tune "House at Pooh Corner". When it was time to leave, Bug was eager to put a tip in their jar, but Button had an attack of the shies and Mama had to do it for her.
But the real prize was the traveling itself, on a beautiful weekend with nearly-perfect weather, chilly but very clear. Despite repeated offers from me, Morgan did all of the driving, partly because of a tendency to carsickness in the mountains (where the girls get it), but also just because it's Morgan's van. So I was left with nothing to do but relax and watch the landscape roll by.
We saw countless vultures, several hawks, about eight deer including one six-to-eight point buck, and one wild turkey that flew across the road as we were leaving Rush Sunday morning. We also discovered the Land of Green Scum, along Highway 412 between Harrison and Yellville, where most of the stock ponds were so heavily scummed over they looked like you could walk across them.
Rush
Rush lies about an hour eastward of Harrison, down small highways and county roads. If Rush Landing wasn't a popular access point for canoeists along the Buffalo River, Rush itself would probably be completely overlooked today. But at the end of the 19th century it was one of the largest towns in northern Arkansas, because of zinc mines: the Morning Star, the McIntosh, and more than two dozen others. At its peak during World War I the valley had about 5000 residents.
Rush had a telephone exchange, but no sewer system. Even in 1915, ore was carried out to the railroad terminals in wagons hauled by mules or oxen. A six-ton chunk of zinc carbonate ore from the Morning Star mine won a gold medal at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair; another, smaller chunk was exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
But the ore was difficult to find and expensive to extract, and after the Great War's end the town just evaporated. In 1958 somebody tried to open a new mill, but failed disastrously.
What can you see today? Eight or ten somewhat preserved wooden buildings: a few houses, a blacksmith shop, something that looks like an old store or other business.
A fair number of concrete foundations and chimneys and rock walls, a few mine openings with bars across them, and a crude stonework erection labeled "Smelter", possibly the original smelter built in 1886, just fifty years after Arkansas statehood, when prospectors thought they'd found silver.
The town is now maintained by the National Parks Service, as part of the Buffalo National River. The surviving buildings have fences around them, and signs that say, "Historic Building / Unsafe to Enter / Unlawful to Deface". Two of them have fresh boards visible, indications that somebody is trying to maintain them beyond simple preservation. But the largest of them, the supposed store, is already partly collapsed.
How do you deal with a "ghost town"? If you restore it, you've obviously destroyed the air of ruin and abandonment that makes it "ghostly." If you simply let it rot away naturally, then in a few more decades the entire place will simply be piles of rotted wood. How do you maintain an abandoned building with holes in the roof and entire walls missing, without making it look "preserved" like an exhibit in a museum? It's surely a philosophical puzzle for the National Parks people.
It took me a surprisingly long time to realize that someone was mowing around the buildings. Otherwise, the undergrowth would have quickly hidden them at least up to the middle of the walls. In fact, without at least that much maintenance the buildings would probably have forty-foot oak trees growing right through them by now.
Saturday afternoon we walked around the few buildings and the smelter, and drove down to the river landing. Morgan got a very good picture of Bug leaning against a fence rail; several prints have already been given out. I got a few decent pictures myself, although I'm not the photographer Morgan is.
Sunday morning we tried the trails around the valley, some of them rather steep and rocky. Bug wanted to go on and on, and Button wanted to go home, but each of them was a good sport in her way, as we went further and just a little further along the highest trail, but still stopped far short of walking all of it.
There are chunks of concrete and old bits of rusted pipe scattered all around, but other than such durable artifacts the trail seems to wind through much the same sort of woodland that you'd find elsewhere in the Ozarks: oak and hickory, sweetgum and maple, with scattered dogwood and spruce and pine, and sumac or poison ivy where the trails open out.
But walking along a dirt road a couple of miles from the remaining buildings we came across a curious shrub, with long vicious red-tipped thorns branching from glossy green stems, bearing bright yellow-orange fruits the size of ping-pong balls.
We couldn't identify it, so we took pictures. It took nearly an hour on the internet to find it after we got home: Poncirus trifoliata, also known as hardy orange or flying dragon, a native of China and Korea.
Ninety or a hundred years before, some housewife had imported this plant's ancestor to cheer up her gardens—or, in light of those thorns, to border her watermelon patch. Her homestead was long gone, even the foundations likely buried or crumbled, but this unlikely alien from the other side of the world still grows among the oaks and briars of the Ozarks.
 |
| Click any thumbnail for a larger image |
The Trip
Quick summary: Saturday we drove to Harrison, checked into a very small suite in the Comfort Inn; then drove on to Rush for a quick tour with the last of the afternoon; and returned to Harrison after supper. Sunday morning, although it was much colder, we drove out to Rush again, spending more time on the trails and roads; then we headed home through Harrison, catching a late lunch at a Waffle House (smoke-free by city ordinance!); we arrived home in the late afternoon.
Bug is eight and wants to know everything. For much of Saturday morning I was pointing out trees to her, explaining how oaks look different from maples, talking about the types and colors of leaves, the way the branches grow, how sweetgum leaves are star-shaped, how hickory trees have compound leaves. How the limbs of most kinds of oaks grow sturdy but crooked and ungraceful, but pin oaks grow tall straight trunks with long straight branches, so that when a pin oak gets good color it looks like an exploding firework. How there are more different sorts of oak trees in Arkansas than of any other type of tree, and how I was taught in school that the "oak-hickory association" is the basis for forests across the Ozarks.
Later as we hiked around I pointed out leaves and branches to her, teaching her to recognize oak trees by the way the buds cluster at the ends of the twigs, explaining the difference between palmate and pinnate veining in leaves.
Button, on the other hand, is five, and while she was impressed with the pretty sugar maples we passed, she was just as happy to read or take a nap. Both girls were a little drowsy, since Morgan gave them Dramamine before we set out.
As it turns out, we were a week or two early for the best colors, although we saw enough to keep us happy. Maplewood Cemetery in Harrison is worth remembering; there we saw some of the prettiest maples we've found.
Morgan took a ton of pictures over the weekend and I took no few myself; I would have run out of space on my camera if we hadn't picked up another flash card for it at the Harrison Wal-Mart Sunday morning. (But that was partly because before we left I neglected to offload pictures of Button asleep at the supper table.)We also lucked into a good (if out of the way) place to eat: the Gravel Bar Restaurant in Caney, between Yellville and Rush, where we had supper on Saturday evening. They have live music on Saturday nights, and we were lucky enough to hear a small band called Rio: a gal singer, two guitarists, and a percussionist, all middle-aged and skilled, playing light rock and folk. They started off with "Big Yellow Taxi", then ranged from early Beatles to Alison Krauss. I liked (and could sing along with) nearly everything they played, even though some of their choices were a little odd, like the old Loggins and Messina tune "House at Pooh Corner". When it was time to leave, Bug was eager to put a tip in their jar, but Button had an attack of the shies and Mama had to do it for her.
But the real prize was the traveling itself, on a beautiful weekend with nearly-perfect weather, chilly but very clear. Despite repeated offers from me, Morgan did all of the driving, partly because of a tendency to carsickness in the mountains (where the girls get it), but also just because it's Morgan's van. So I was left with nothing to do but relax and watch the landscape roll by.
We saw countless vultures, several hawks, about eight deer including one six-to-eight point buck, and one wild turkey that flew across the road as we were leaving Rush Sunday morning. We also discovered the Land of Green Scum, along Highway 412 between Harrison and Yellville, where most of the stock ponds were so heavily scummed over they looked like you could walk across them.
Rush
Rush lies about an hour eastward of Harrison, down small highways and county roads. If Rush Landing wasn't a popular access point for canoeists along the Buffalo River, Rush itself would probably be completely overlooked today. But at the end of the 19th century it was one of the largest towns in northern Arkansas, because of zinc mines: the Morning Star, the McIntosh, and more than two dozen others. At its peak during World War I the valley had about 5000 residents.
Rush had a telephone exchange, but no sewer system. Even in 1915, ore was carried out to the railroad terminals in wagons hauled by mules or oxen. A six-ton chunk of zinc carbonate ore from the Morning Star mine won a gold medal at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair; another, smaller chunk was exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
But the ore was difficult to find and expensive to extract, and after the Great War's end the town just evaporated. In 1958 somebody tried to open a new mill, but failed disastrously.
What can you see today? Eight or ten somewhat preserved wooden buildings: a few houses, a blacksmith shop, something that looks like an old store or other business.
A fair number of concrete foundations and chimneys and rock walls, a few mine openings with bars across them, and a crude stonework erection labeled "Smelter", possibly the original smelter built in 1886, just fifty years after Arkansas statehood, when prospectors thought they'd found silver.The town is now maintained by the National Parks Service, as part of the Buffalo National River. The surviving buildings have fences around them, and signs that say, "Historic Building / Unsafe to Enter / Unlawful to Deface". Two of them have fresh boards visible, indications that somebody is trying to maintain them beyond simple preservation. But the largest of them, the supposed store, is already partly collapsed.
How do you deal with a "ghost town"? If you restore it, you've obviously destroyed the air of ruin and abandonment that makes it "ghostly." If you simply let it rot away naturally, then in a few more decades the entire place will simply be piles of rotted wood. How do you maintain an abandoned building with holes in the roof and entire walls missing, without making it look "preserved" like an exhibit in a museum? It's surely a philosophical puzzle for the National Parks people.It took me a surprisingly long time to realize that someone was mowing around the buildings. Otherwise, the undergrowth would have quickly hidden them at least up to the middle of the walls. In fact, without at least that much maintenance the buildings would probably have forty-foot oak trees growing right through them by now.
Saturday afternoon we walked around the few buildings and the smelter, and drove down to the river landing. Morgan got a very good picture of Bug leaning against a fence rail; several prints have already been given out. I got a few decent pictures myself, although I'm not the photographer Morgan is.
Sunday morning we tried the trails around the valley, some of them rather steep and rocky. Bug wanted to go on and on, and Button wanted to go home, but each of them was a good sport in her way, as we went further and just a little further along the highest trail, but still stopped far short of walking all of it.
There are chunks of concrete and old bits of rusted pipe scattered all around, but other than such durable artifacts the trail seems to wind through much the same sort of woodland that you'd find elsewhere in the Ozarks: oak and hickory, sweetgum and maple, with scattered dogwood and spruce and pine, and sumac or poison ivy where the trails open out.
But walking along a dirt road a couple of miles from the remaining buildings we came across a curious shrub, with long vicious red-tipped thorns branching from glossy green stems, bearing bright yellow-orange fruits the size of ping-pong balls.
We couldn't identify it, so we took pictures. It took nearly an hour on the internet to find it after we got home: Poncirus trifoliata, also known as hardy orange or flying dragon, a native of China and Korea.Ninety or a hundred years before, some housewife had imported this plant's ancestor to cheer up her gardens—or, in light of those thorns, to border her watermelon patch. Her homestead was long gone, even the foundations likely buried or crumbled, but this unlikely alien from the other side of the world still grows among the oaks and briars of the Ozarks.
# posted by Dru @ 08:09 
