batesville part II, or two accidents in two days? really?

denise arrived in lisa's jeep and we headed into those same hills. as a local 'turr' guide denise was much more than passable. not for what she knew about batesville -- there wasn't much of a history review -- but for how she'd experienced it. in no particular order...ghosthunting is a popular pastime for arkansans. denise grew up with her grandfather's ghost, which not surprisingly inhabited her grandmother's house after his death. she saw him once as the vague profile of a man in the kitchen, but such sightings and affiliated sounds disappeared after grandma died. when not ghosthunting denise and crew tightroped along the top of a dam across the white river, fished from a sandbar the soft sand of which deterred meddling cops, and dreamed of careers as dallas cowboy cheerleaders. or playboy models. denise considered this a shrewd career move and had suggested the same to her daughters -- one centerfold spread and royalties set you up for life. not sure of the calculations involved. alas, denise's father is a very serious missionary baptist and frowned hard at this idea; denise in turn though pushing the playboy career was horrified that one daughter considered appearing on a girls gone wild party boat because the compensation wasn't sufficient. so with that in mind we discussed her theology/religion over chain steakhouse steaks without resolving much. she acknowledged that her beliefs were enforced mostly by guilt, but the existence of the supernatural and the fundamental truth of the bible were self-evident. that said, church didn't hold much allure, and there was a healthy dose of a much more general spiritualism (see ghosts above). after a second traffic-related incident on sunday night (see below), both denise and lisa were quite serious that I must burn a black candle to ward off whatever curse someone has placed on me. that commitment to the informal again...she saw no contradiction in dealing with (perceived) evil curses through conventional christian means and at the same time falling back on more voodoo-inflected strategies.

anyway, denise has also pursued more practical turns as bartender, bar owner, interior designer, housecleaner, hunting cabin builder/renter, and racecar crew member. batesville is the home of nascar semi-star mark martin, as just about everyone was keen to point out, but always with the qualifier that perhaps mr martin has grown too successful, derisively pointing out that he's built a turnaround in front of his house for photo-seekers to use. success and respect are tricky in the south...and so denise was proud that she really didn't have to work. she lived in her grandmother's house and had earned enough money bartending in indianapolis (while following an itinerant-welder husband) that she was set for life...and hence free to pursue the opportunities of the informal economy with abandon. she was proud of her soon-to-be anaesthesiologist daughter -- but more of the scholarship money she'd racked up -- and disappointed for her son who's sure to bounce around from tough manual job to the next, not because she's judging his ambition but because he'll have to work hard his whole life.

the highlight of this arkansas experience was of course the event that to denise suggested that I'm cursed. we had driven into the ozarks about as far as she wanted to venture...and I had suggested we could catch the batesville community acting troupe's performance of madagascar at the local college that evening. but she didn't choose a great place to turn around...from the right lane of a briefly-three-lane road left into a gravel lot. that took us right into the path of a beat-up cherokee passing us on the left. bam. the shocked-incredulous look on the other driver's face was unforgettable. his right headlight was busted and quarterpanel mangled, but miraculously lisa's jeep had only some scuff marks on the hubcap. slightly angry words were exchanged before the combatants retreated to their respective corners. and then it got interesting. lisa hadn't told her husband todd that she'd loaned out the jeep for this sightseeing expedition, so it had to stay on the downlow. that I understood. denise was furiously chainsmoking for another reason, though. when the cop sidled over to gather information, I was surprised to hear him calling denise 'lisa' and asking if I was 'todd.' mm-hm. denise was pretending not to have her license and that she was lisa. figured I'd roll with it but not too much -- I wandered off so I wouldn't have to participate actively in this ruse, especially since I had no idea why this misdirection was necessary. turns out denise had found out that her license was suspended -- er, expired -- a couple of weeks ago. a clerk had carded her at a liquor store and pointed out that the license was, oh, 10 months expired. (or suspended.) denise figured it was better to impersonate her friend (and implicate her in an at-fault accident) than take the driving-with-an-expired-license violation. I'm all about volunteering as little information as possible to a cop, but willful misrepresentation seems unlikely to end well. there was confusion over middle initials...but the trooper didn't catch on. and actually denise came off the more believable of the two drivers since the other guy was just a bit twigged out and was wearing a tshirt spoofing the eyeballs-on-money GEICO ad campaign in which the money-eyes were labeled 'the money you could be spending on weed.' in the end denise (lisa) was cited for an improper turn, and both drivers had serious problems with IN-surance documents. through all of this denise was in constant communication with lisa, but somehow the fact that denise was foisting her moving violation off on lisa didn't come up. even when we swung by the hospital for a damage inspection, lisa still didn't know that she'd picked up a ticket while sitting at the hospital admissions desk.

denise stands out, maybe because she conveniently illustrates my from-the-hip estimation of southerners...the informal economy, a don't get above yer raisin' mentality, satisfaction with what is, quirky independence on some things but docility in the face of authority on others. the collision meant we never did make the play. instead we went to the riverside park and watched water spill over the dam. there again southern (non-)contradictions. no bars in batesville, and a standard curfew for minors...but the park was apparently open at all hours. no fear-of-the-dark 'park closes at dusk' here. one place I did find a beer was josie's, a steakhouse on the river. locals have to sign up to join the drinking club, but visitors like me only had to sign the guestbook at the front. the moral fabric of the community is at stake, but what you do on your own time (esp if you're not staying long) is on you. get drunk and fall into the spillway? check. provide a place for unsupervised indulgence in vice? not okay.

batesville part I

I'll skip the emergency room tale, since that's inevitably boring. all emergency room stories are the same...not that this has kept me from repeating the previous emergency room story incessantly. but I'm moving on. I'll pick up the batesville thread on the way out of the white river hospital. I stiffly staggered out of the ER around 9pm, sore mostly from lying on a backboard for two hours, and wearing a ripped t-shirt and shredded leather pants and armored boots. wallet and phone in my possession but little else...all my luggage was with the wrecking company. so I tracked down mr baker the wrecker and negotiated a gear transfer. had to be right now because he was off to bed, and sunday was out of the question because of church and other commitments. his place was a fur piece (at least), so not immediately accessible. and I've packed efficiently for a six-week trip, but standard luggage plus hiking backpack plus helmet was a bit much to lug on a 5-mile walk around batesville. spending all day sunday in shredded leathers wasn't a great option, though. taxi? by that point my hapless/vulnerable and polite-for-a-yankee schtick had attracted some attention at the admissions desk. the woman who had taken my IN-surance information kindly offered to ferry me out to baker's and then back to the motel strip during her smoke break. there was much talk about southern hospitality and a long discussion about how best to arrive at 2105 n central ave. turn by wigguns'? or out past the western sizzlin' toward the fairgrounds. or even through the bayou? I was about to suggest they googlemap it, but it was resolved with bystanders' assistance. (that community spirit again.)

so I climb into lisa's wrangler and get the life story...she's a transplant from valparaiso, but was plenty dixie-transformed. we discussed the standards...what motorcycle accidents usually look like, her conviction that everything happens for a reason and that perhaps my stay in batesville would lead to great things (this was a hint), maybe god stopped me here so as to avoid a worse fate further down the road, and so on. we find mr baker, I rouse him from evening TV, he generously fetches the truck that's storing my gear, and we're headed back down the hill past the independence county fair. I settle on the super8 as the cheapest option, and as I grab the last of my gear out of the jeep, she hands me a napkin on which she's scribbled the phone number of her friend denise. denise will surely be happy to show me around batesville and vicinity, so I should give her a call. lisa also helpfully notes that denise is single, 'real cute,' and has blonde hair and blue eyes. and, most importantly, she's a 'real southern girl.'

I wake up sunday with a hip too sore to run on but in need of bandages and food with which to eat antibiotics, so I grab the camera and a book and head up the hill to town, completely unsure of what I'd find. everyone the night before had happily emphasized that there's nothing to do in batesville -- and that it's mostly dry except for josie's and a drinking club at the ramada that you can join for $5 -- but it's got a hospital and is the county seat, so I knew it couldn't be too small. a sign at the top of the hill announced that batesville was the 2nd oldest town in arkansas, founded in 1812. promising. wandered east along the ridge toward lyons college first through quiet shady neighborhoods. gave up on the college after a few blocks and almost stopped into a just-starting baptist church service. really should have pulled the trigger on that -- what better smalltown southern experience than the SBC? -- but methodist propriety stopped me since I was wearing shorts, tshirt, scruffy hiking boots. that and haphazardly wrapped bandages (not easy to wrap one arm with the other hand), a camera, and the inconvenient choice of vine deloria's god is red for the day's reading. really the outfit wasn't out of place in southern casual, and I'm sure nobody would have cared about the rest -- just my picky propriety. anyway, crossed over to the main street side of town and found grand victorian mansions identified by family name, including the house of one JW Barnett Barnett. authentically picturesque and a little bit run down, sprawling chicken processing plants by the river. finally found food back on the commercial strip at Kelley Wyatt's -- southern fried buffet by that point packed with the after church crowd.

I made the call to denise, unsure of whether lisa had informed her friend that she was passing her phone number out to stranded/possibly concussed bikers. we arranged to meet at 5 after she was done babysitting her new granddaughter and after the 45-minute drive into town (!) from the nowhere burg of strawberry somewheres out in the hills.

on rambling

better than expected stories from the time stranded in batesville (see next post), but first...parsing the frustration of this temporary stuck-ness. I don't think that I'm an inveterate rambler, but when I'm on the road I want to go. in this case the uncertainty was the annoying part -- not sure whether the trip would continue, how long repairs would take if the bike wasn't totaled, unsettling motel-on-the-concrete-outskirts-living. lots of alternative plans...hiking in the ouachita NF for a couple weeks, exploring little rock, switching to amtrak, but no reason to commit as long as I was still waiting on the IN-surance adjuster to assess the bike (I saw a scraped gas tank, snapped-off clutch pedal, and bent forks). without all that I imagine I could have settled in a bit more. despite that itchy urge to move, I did well to shift into stationary observation. well, more like pedestrian observation...I was the only person in batesville who walks anywhere, as far as I can tell. but on rambling...

for two years now I've crawled through PrairyErth (William Least-Heat Moon), 800+ pages of musings on just one county in Kansas at the geographical center of the country, a literal slow walk across every square mile. I bought it four years ago at kaldi's along with blue highways after reading Kathleen Norris' references to it in dakota. I read his 'blue highways' and 'river horse' first. I liked blue highways and the people in it, but not so much the author's relationship angst and general bitter old hippie passive-aggressive anger. but it was more that I knew prairyerth was great, and I wanted to put it off as long as possible. I do this often...putting off sublime reading so as to delay the experience and save it for another time. other books in this category are various unfinished faulkners and let us now praise famous men (evans/agee). for the latter I could read a page a day and still it would pass too fast. just achingly perfect. so it has hidden half-read for most of this decade, and prairyerth is destined for the same place, I think.

I know I don't have trogdon's patience, but his passion for thick description resonates. when I'm on the road I get wrapped up in speculating on people at their kitchen tables, what it would be like to spend an evening with each of them, daunted by the sheer impossibility of the number of those implausible encounters. wanting to stop and just set out diagonally across a field walking forever in no particular direction through landscape distinguished only by its lack of distinguishing features. and on and on. trying to do something like that now, though I've already cluttered the drive around in no particular direction with a handful of destinations. the genius of prairyerth is in its random accounts history and people, moments that he can't force but has to wait for. I'm working on that a bit now, but struggling a little to suppress the countervailing urge to regret all the landscape that I wasn't seeing while walking batesville.