Two grumpy women walked into a downtown shop last week, and “grumpy” is the word of the shop owner telling the story.
They said there really wasn’t anything worth buying in there. Nevertheless, the women wandered around touching things. They were treated the same as everyone else – where are you from, where are you staying, what got you to Eureka Springs? The women responded – they were from Wisconsin, came south for warmer weather, went to Branson but didn’t find anything there that interested them. They saw a Fun Guide at a Branson kiosk and decided to drive to this town in a state that was neither on their itinerary nor their radar.
Then the two grumpy women left the shop.
After a while, they were back, and each had a husband. Now four people are in a shop and all four are talking to the owner. Then a friend they were traveling with wandered in and said, “Wow! Look at this!” He was enthralled with what the shop had to offer. “Do you have this as a print? Maybe a little smaller?”
Yes. Here. Is this what you had in mind?
“Young lady, I am about to make your day!” And the friend traveling with the grumpy women and their husbands spent a lot of money buying a print to hang in his Wisconsin workshop where he could look up and see it and remember Eureka Springs and the shop where he bought it. “This makes me so happy!” he told the owner.
There was a meeting last Wednesday about how to attract an executive director for a tax collecting entity where the money is spent on advertising and promotion. A commission of people who own restaurants, motels, or no business at all. The meeting’s purpose was to lure someone to pilot this tourism ship.
So. Are we searching for someone from far, far away who has important degrees, metropolitan expertise, a knockout résumé, and knows nothing about us or why we’re even here?
Seems to us we need someone who understands that effective tourism is about kindness, not growth charts. Someone who sees value in who we are and what we do. Someone who can understand that if we wanted more money, more business, more people, more traffic and more noise we would live in Branson or Austin or Taos or Sedona.
We chose to live where we are because it’s beautiful. If every one of us disappeared tonight, this town of pillowy hills, gurgly springs, dry-stacked rock walls and whistling pines would still be beautiful. It doesn’t need us, we need it.
Sure, tourism is a clear economic boost for business owners, investors, and those simply wanting to eat and stay housed. Tourism is also harmful to the environment, so sensitivity should be more important than a marketing degree.
Yes, there was a heyday in Eureka Springs when commercial buses flatulated down Spring Street, shaking windows, shifting underground pipes, loosening rocks, buckling sidewalks and creating an impenetrable knot for emergency vehicles trying to put out the fire at the Basin Block Café on War Eagle weekend.
The buses brought groups to town, but we outlawed the buses in the historic district in order to save it. Then we turned our attention to weddings because they weren’t as loud as motorcycles. Then laws in surrounding states about who could get married and when changed, and now big weddings are in big towns with big amenities. So we’re left with beauty and simplicity and lower tax collections and people who don’t look at the plastic water bottle as the state flower.
Why would we want to have all the same stuff as Branson or Bentonville? Isn’t there a deeper beauty in a clean, happy, vibrant village that’s hard to get to than a town with traffic lights and too many dentists?
Managed tourism is where we tax what you drive instead of what you eat. To build a parking garage instead of running trolleys from the community center or the high school or the Victoria Inn parking lots seems like pure folly.
Whether we’re advertising people to come here for the music, the mountains, the art, the food, the bike trails or the Passion Play, we’re asking for more, more, more, and it’s affecting our air, air, air, water, and quality of life.
If we insist on hiring someone from the outside world to relocate here, meet everybody who thinks they understand “what this town needs is…” and that person is willing to be wined, dined and raked over every coal we can find if they take too much time to save us from ourselves, then we deserve what we get.
We have capable people in place right now who might not meet the criteria the CAPC is advertising for, but they do understand how to get things done legally and beneficially. And they already love this town.
Mary Pat Boian
Thank you.