❧
The Sunday morning news shows are all gone for today. I stayed in bed as long as I could. It's not a pain free day. I got up to urinate several or three times. Cold. Mid-twenties. There is a documentary on PBS about the Buffalo River National Park in Arkansas. Been there. Would go again.
This is the place I went to find a cave to meditate in several years ago. I didn't find one, and got lost instead. It wasn't that I was exactly lost because I was within sight of the river. I just didn't know how to get away from it into civilization. It wasn't a happy place for me.
I had hitch-hiked west on InterState 40 to just past Little Rock to Conway, Arkansas and took the highway from there to Greenbriar, then Clinton, through Marshall, Arkansas. The Buffalo River was next, but the ride I had was with this middle-aged married woman who said she only lived about two miles up the river, and I could hike to the river from her house.
She took a lonely dirt road that went to the river and let me out, and told me she would be back in about an hour to see if I was okay. She wanted to mess around, but I wasn't okay with that. I was out in the middle of nowhere in Dogpatch and I didn't think she would come back alone.
I decided to go upstream a little ways to a place where I could watch to see if she came back, but mostly to stay out of sight until I felt secure. I was there looking for a cave, not to have an affair.
The river was nice. There was a sandbar/beach there where I'd been let out. The road that crossed the Buffalo River had a place where canoes could be rented to float the River. I think it's the only National Park based a river. Google Maps will take you to where I was if you type buffalo+river+national+park&fb into the search box.
There was no trail along the river where I was. The river was in the canyon that it carved for itself . The sides of the canyon was steep, but covered with primeval forest the loggers couldn't reach. Good thing the government was called in to protect it or it'd be gone probably by now. It was rough walking, and it took me a long time to get to where a small stream entered the river, and there was a dirt road that followed the stream up the hill.
The place where the stream entered the river was one of the most unique natural sights I've visited. It was very beautiful. I stayed there several hours. Only one vehicle came down the road. I hid until it was gone.
After I'd had my bait of nature, it happens, I started walking uphill on the gravel road that followed the small stream down to the Buffalo River. That gravel road had some interesting features along the way. There was a series of small waterfalls where the stream dropped incrementally from the plateau into the Buffalo River Canyon. There were a couple of homestead ruins where only the chimneys and stone footings still stood. To me it seemed obvious that the stonework was sturdy, but home-made. They made up with mass what lacked in engineering. I got the distinct impression the cabins were originally built and occupied by homesteaders or pioneers, and then later bought out by the government to make the National Park.
There was only the gravel road to suggest there was a fruitful route to civilization. It only went in one direction, and that direction was all uphill. I was physically tired to death by now. I had been on the road for four or five days previous to getting lost at the river. I had to keep going to see if I could find a road or highway someone lived on so that I could figure out how to get back to the small town of Marshall.
Eventually I came to a paved road and hitched a ride into town. I found a Laundromat and washed my clothes. I still hadn't gotten any sleep, but I got back on the highway to Little Rock, and didn't stop to rest until I found a convenient clump of bushes to hide behind inside the bypass around Memphis, Tennessee.
That's one way of being that always returned instinctually to me. How to hide in plain sight. I'd be hiking through some well-lit avenue in some of the largest cities in the United States, when suddenly I'd spot some unique out of the way nook I could drop out of sight into, and be quickly be covered by a darkness many people would dare not enter.
When I realized I could live like that it was almost impossible to not just give it up and go do it. I knew where to go that I wouldn't be followed. I hardly ever was by man or beast. That's not to say there ain't some real crazies out there that can be unknowingly provoked into doing a body harm, but that's easily avoided by the self-acknowledgement that I am is also that. When I admit their terror in my heart they gotta leave me be. No one person taught me that. I wouldn't know who to send a person to for them to learn how to be unfollowed.
❦
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
