Isn’t it amazing that we never seem to run short on mistakes, hopes and dreams? With all the thoughts, words, and other clutter that float and fly around us all day every day it’s no wonder that we’re casual about collisions and oblivious to strife. We’re accustomed to pandemonium, maybe that’s how we dodge calamity. One of the things I love about Eureka Springs is that the people here seem to move fast and breathe slow.
And at the end of the year, we sometimes take stock on where we are.
Almost ten years ago, there was a Chicago Tribune book reviewer who happened to land in Eureka Springs for an evening. She had decided that for her 62nd birthday she would drive the length of U.S. Highway 62, the whole thing, from Niagara Falls to El Paso. It was serendipity, happenstance, luck of the Irish, or maybe excellent highway planning that in 1930 someone thought it was a grand idea to run 328 miles of the 2248-mile highway through Arkansas, part of it right on top of Eureka Springs.
It was a marvel to be expected that in 2012, this woman navigated Highway 62 and Eureka! She found it.
“I had no idea this town was here or even existed,” the book reviewer said.
She had such a fine one-night stay in an authentic roadhouse on that late autumn evening that nine years later, when she turned 71, she decided to drive the 1500-mile U.S. Highway 71 from International Falls, Minnesota to Krotz Springs, Louisiana.
She said it gave her a good reason to come back to Eureka Springs.
“Why?” was the obvious question.
“It’s different. It has a different feeling, even an aura. The shops have changed, the Quilt Shop is gone, the classical music festival is gone, but you still have outdoor opera and an outdoor drama. Some restaurants have swapped names, but your food is still varied and exciting. Not just for a small town but imagine if you were in a Chicago neighborhood and had all these restaurants in a few blocks’ area. You would never move.
“You have a city park more than two square miles huge. Not even big cities have parks that size. You have springs and winter flowers and a million trees. You have hand laid rock dams and miles of limestone walls right in town, and a dam on Beaver Lake with seven gates.
“You’re preservationists, even if you’re accountants. You have a Porsche parade. Polar Plunge. Park drumming. A train. A tram. A monastery. Cocktails for a Cause! What a way to raise funds! Genius!
“You have a live leprechaun rolling on a beer keg down Spring Street on St. Patrick’s Day. You have people who whittle. A month-long Festival of the Arts. Ghosts. Zombies. A barefoot ball. A three-story stone house that was disassembled, moved eighty-five miles, and put back together with an engineer’s precision.
“And you don’t have a traffic light. Do you know how amazing that is? If that’s all your citizens can agree on, at least they agree on something that’s meaningful. Maybe it’s because nobody makes or loses money from a traffic light, but whatever your reason, it’s admirable.
“It’s almost like you all are asking dad for the keys and when he says no you find something more fun to do anyway. Who are you people? Why are you all so pleasant?”
The woman could be a walking testimony to how to love a town where you don’t live. She said that walking is her favorite activity when she comes to town. She walks. And walks. She doesn’t stop to admire, she doesn’t start or seek conversation – it’s as though she’s reviewing a town instead of a book. She concentrates.
It was hard not to mention what we have had but couldn’t keep, like Charlotte Buchanan’s Lucky 13 Starlight Cinema and Jeremy Mason McGraw’s version of Halloween, but maybe we’ll wait until she turns 86 and follows Hwy. 86 so she can come back. We’ll tell her then.
Just 15 more years, it could happen.