It took high maintenance to live in Eureka Springs
Nate Huff has worked as a bartender at Chelsea’s since it first opened in 1989 but has lived in Eureka Springs since 1979. He will proudly tell you that he is a hippie and in his long elegy of local folklore you can still hear his people’s rebel yell.
“It won’t be much longer that the day will come for me where I can’t even count the change in my damn hand. You know, each day I’m getting closer. I keep watching everybody fall apart and I know I’m getting close. It was fun. We were poor but at least we got to see a lot of cool bands,” he jokes.
Nate has been in Eureka Springs so long he can remember the fried bologna sandwiches at the gas station in Clifty. He claims that Jesse James has relatives who still live there. He says that Eureka Springs could have been one of the greater agrarian societies to ever exist and that people, including Willie Nelson, have been driving to these hills to buy sinsemilla marijuana since the 70s.
“Before Reagan, people would drive here to buy pot. There was a lot of poor people growing good pot and that’s how they made it through the winter. Eureka Springs could have been a great agricultural community. It would have had all these little farms and farmers’ markets,” Nate said. “It’s really weird. I think about it a lot now. It really hit me this morning as I was coming down Passion Play Road looking at all this dead wood. In the old days there wouldn’t be no dead wood lying around because people would have been burning it. When I first started working up here, you know there was these big windows, and I could see off into the valley. When all the leaves were off in the winter the wood smoke would kind of hang over the valley. Kind of like, you know, when you see clouds hover over the river.”
Nate remembers chocolate mescaline, and strawberry too. “They’d grind it up and mix with Nesquik to make it easy to eat. It was pleasant and mellow. It’s like peyote. They had it growing in greenhouses, you know the people with flower shops. This was legal, it just didn’t stay legal. Now they are using it to treat people. Out in DC they caught Grace Slick trying to put liquid acid in Nixon’s cup, she had it in a ring you know,” he said.
“Everybody was crazy. On the bus, off the bus. A lot of acids were liquid, then they’d transfer it. They’d mix it with VSOP put it on cop car door handles going into courthouse. It was a war of consciousness. It’s not revolution, it’s evolution. Things are changing, man,” he said.
“The greatest thing that happened was FM radio because they didn’t know how to control it. All music could play. I remember the first time I saw a sign that said Colored or White on bathrooms and water fountains. I was ten. I remember thinking what is a colored water fountain? What color is it?”
Nate said it was the Vietnam veterans who started this agrarian culture growing around Eureka and that hippies found their niche beside them.
“It was a Vietnam veteran who went to oversees to get the [Afghan indica] seeds and traded two revolutionary pistols to get them. And he had to swallow these seeds twice and got arrested once. Once these seeds got here, he spread them out, so they’d multiply. A whole lot of veterans went to U of A and took agriculture to learn about soil. It was Eureka, California and Eureka, Arkansas,” he said.
“They wanted to be away from people. They wanted to be left alone in the woods and that was a way for them to supplement their income. Before Reagan you could do pretty much anything you wanted until they started flying those crazy planes.”
Nate said that most of those local Vietnam veterans have died from Agent Orange exposure.
“For the longest time the law didn’t know what the plant looked like. Once they found out, they kept a baby plant by a window in a building by city hall. This was so everybody could see that they knew now. They would drive by the hippies on the Group W bench with whatever stash they just cut down hanging out of the back of their trunk.” He said it was cheap land and High Times magazine that caused the hippie migration.
“In the early days, this was a ghost town. It was great. Things were still cheap and a lot more communal. But you could afford to live here, we lived downtown,” he says. “If the workers can’t afford to live here, they can’t vote here.”
“The Old Red Schoolhouse was almost a commune, with all the little rooms people lived in. It had a community bathroom/shower in the basement and a communal kitchen where they’d throw potlucks all the time. You could walk right down through the woods and come out at the post office. It had the greatest slide that was a fire escape from the top floor. I always thought we should take it to Leatherwood Lake.
“You know when I first came here, you drove through Rogers and it went right down to the cobblestone square. You turned left and got back on 62, it was such a pretty little town. I went to Bentonville several years ago and what is now a city was all farmland when I moved here.”
Nate, and sisters Pat and Barb opened the restaurant at the top of Chelsea’s. “When we started, we were just in this little room. We did all our music in here, mostly folk music, acoustic music. We got in a lot of trouble because of the noise, you know. We used to give credit. One side was credit, the other side was positive, whatever. We used to do birthday futures. Put a deal on the wall and everybody gave money, so you wouldn’t drink it all in one night. Molly [the owner] hated it because she had to keep track of it all. And it was big sheet of paper on both sides. One of those long yellow deals. She hated it,” he laughs.
Nate is happy that he’s spent the majority of his life in Eureka Springs.
“The people here are great. That’s all changing, too, the hippies got old, and their kids moved to the city. What’s really sad is watching the children leave. My generation grew up in the city and came here to get away from the city. The kids here grew up in a little town and went to big city to get away from the little town.”
Nate works at Chelsea’s on Wednesday through Friday from 12-6. Try his conversations!