The Other Bluegrass ✍🏻

December 2, 2024

Newport, Arkansas

    There’s a magical something in the air in Independence and Jackson counties of Arkansas; something that can’t quite be pinned down or put into words. Likely, it’s got something to do with the endless horizon of fertile farmland, corrupt local (and state) law enforcement, and a community that both rejects conformity but also bands tightly together in ways unprecedented (despite the miles between them each). Colored by the blending of a regional, unique history, peculiar societal circumstances, and other unforeseen factors, including the terrain, into a strange, hidden type of isolated, subtly camouflaged utopian bubble, so successfully detached from society that its own denizens have no idea they're even in a utopia.

    It’s also a riot. Absolutely a laugh. It’ll also break your heart. But I’ve never touched land, seen trees, felt rain, or met people, loved people, or been loved and healed so deeply as I have in this tiny uppermost corner of the American South. 

    The age-old stereotype that makes everyone roll their eyes- backwoods, ignorant, uneducated, blundering, incestuous, lazy, amount-to-nothing, bucktoothed, poor folk who live in dilapidated trailers and smoke meth- on one token, technically mostly true; You’d be hard up to argue too many of those- but it’s that which fills the spaces in between those things that changes the whole picture. It’s that which fills the spaces in between that the rest of the country grossly underestimates, grossly misunderstands, and continually scorns and misses out on. Who’s gonna survive an apocalypse?

Arkansasians. Who’s gonna be ready to defend themselves in the event of foreign invasion? Civil war? Arkansasians. Who’s gonna have the wherewithal to determine when society is drifting too far astray or being otherwise manipulated, and the moxie to take a step back and critically question the status quo? Arkansasians, time and time again. Fearlessly, and often without considering any other possibility. They rebuke American norms. We’ve pointed and laughed at their differences and nonparticipatory nature for decades, but have we ever stopped to ask maybe why? What’s the root of them? Maybe there’s a good reason. Maybe they know something we don’t know. Maybe they have something we don’t have.

    Here, particularly in this rural quadrant, lives a culture that stands out- more than just a little- from the rest of the country, even those directly nearby. And it’s staying that way. Staying alive. It’s something in the dirt, in the grass. Their grass is so much bluer. Something in the mud, in the leaves, in the tall, twisted tree limbs. Something inside the massive pecan trees, double the size of their tree trunk sisters just 120 miles north. I’ve never seen a tree so tall, or a horizon so vast and endless. The trees claw at the sky, at the sunrise. Their talons reach for the sunset, taller than a dinosaur, trunks wider than a Nissan Sentra. 

    The earth here churns up arrowheads by the hundred, as if there’d be no end, as if she were herself knapping them from her core. By the five gallon bucket, the very dirt here is alive. The chlorophyll here glimmers with god particles. Sound carries a little further. Emotions move a little slower, and with a little more clarity. Hearts heal, and the trees smile down at you. The leaves here are so much bluer.

Ellen Bohn