Just as life goes on, so too does the Coronavirus. After several weeks of aggressive self-isolation on the Gulf Coast, it was time for me to move on, but not yet time for me to rejoin society. I decided on the Arkansas Ozarks because it had the winning combination of “lots of outdoors activities” and “easy to continue self isolating.”
The first question that almost everyone asked me when they found out I was in the Ozarks was, “is it like that show?” I was asked so many times in fact, that I started watching it while I was there. For the unfamiliar, Ozark is a show on Netflix starring Jason Bateman as a financial planner who launders money for a Mexican drug cartel and who, after crossing that cartel, moves himself and his family to the Ozarks to run a money laundering scheme for them preying on the tourists in the area.
The show actually takes place in Lake of the Ozarks, which is in Missouri about four hours north of where I was staying, a town called Bull Shoals. Though, the town on the show looked a lot like the town where I stayed. Both are popular vacation destinations, and both are on man-made lakes with the same spiny snake shape lined by vacation homes and rental cabins.
I would say that the biggest difference between where I was staying and where the show takes place is that the show is in Missouri, and also I never violently murdered anybody.
Murder aside, I quite enjoyed my time in Arkansas, for the most part. I bought an inflatable kayak and spent a lot of time paddling around on Bull Shoals Lake. The kayak is so convenient that it fits in my car, so I look forward to taking it with me and getting to use it in the other places I visit on this trip.
I was also surprised at how much wildlife there was in and around the lake. I saw deer, turtles, groundhogs, muskrats, tons of fish, and lots of birds. My time in Arkansas was notable for, among other things, formalizing my latent love of birds into a firm bird watching hobby; I apologize in advance, but the level of bird content is about to go way up on this website. I saw lots of cardinals, lots of song birds, two types of woodpeckers, both blue and green (!) herons, and both turkey vultures and, especially, lots of black vultures. One thing that Ozark got right was the vultures. For some reason that I didn’t make it far enough into the show to get, vultures are a recurring motif, and true to that, I seemed to have vultures flying over me constantly.
I also enjoyed some hiking and outdoors-ing during my time in Arkansas, as was my primary intention in going there. The area has two notable parks: Ozarks-St. Francis National Forest and the Buffalo National River. The National Forest was open the whole time I was there (most of my reason for deciding to go in the first place) and I got to do some hiking and some scenic driving there. The Buffalo National River, being a part of the National Park system, was a little more conservative with the covid shutdown, but they opened the weekend before I left.
One of my most enduring impressions of the Ozarks is that they are so very green. It probably helped that I was there in May, but the whole place felt like it was very alive. I also don’t think I’ve ever been to a place with so many waterfalls so close together. Check out my photos page for some waterfall pictures.
The primary drawback about my time in Arkansas is that it rained – a LOT. All those waterfalls gotta come from somewhere, I guess. I went there expecting to go outside nearly every day, but I am not exaggerating when I say that probably at least half of my days in Arkansas the weather prevented it.
And when I say it rains in Arkansas, I mean it absolutely POURS. I have seen downpours in my life, but in Arkansas it’s like every single rainstorm is a deluge. It rained so hard that water came under the front door of my cottage. It cut deep channels into the dirt of the yard. It thundered so hard it shook the house. At one point there was grape-sized hail. It was really intense weather, and it was relentless.
Two things I wanted to do while I was in Arkansas was go camping in the Ozarks, and go on a river float down the Buffalo River. But it rained so frequently that most weekends I couldn’t (/didn’t want to) camp. And the Buffalo River didn’t open until just before I left. So on my last week in Arkansas I picked a couple of days that were supposed to be relatively dry and I took them off work so I could camp and float. And then, as has been the theme of this trip for myself, I wasn’t able to do either.
That first morning before I could even start getting my camping gear together, I was washing my breakfast dishes when I broke a glass and cut the ever living fuck out of my hand. I will spare the gory details, but I will say that it involved me hastily wrapping my hand and then driving myself to the ER – a drive that took me over half an hour, on windy Ozark back roads, shifting the gears of my manual transmission with my bleeding hand.
Long story short, I got 15 stitches in my hand and spent my two days off sitting in my cottage. Also it rained.
In the end, I liked Arkansas quite a lot, but it’s hard not to feel like I left a lot of important things undone (hence the title of my post – much like the Mexican drug cartel, I left the Ozarks with unfinished business, get it??). One of the ironies of my time in Arkansas is that at the beginning of my trip I actually had planned to stop there, but only briefly, and I mostly wanted to visit Hot Springs and possibly Fayetteville; in the end I spent a whole month there, and I couldn’t go to either Hot Springs or Fayetteville at all. I am haunted by what I said in my very first blog post: I don’t know if I see myself spending a bunch of time there, but maybe a quick stop or two…
I am very certain that I must go back to Arkansas at some point in my life. And when I do, I will go a spa in Hot Springs as I originally planned but couldn’t because of the virus, I will go backpacking in the Ozarks as I wanted but couldn’t because of the rain, and I will go on a goddamn Buffalo River Float as I wanted but couldn’t because I mangled my hand. And every single person that I meet I am going to show them the scar on my hand and say “Look at my souvenir from my last time in Arkansas!”
Alyson Gagne 