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The Struggles of a Vacation
Some years back, my wife and I rented a cabin in Ponca near the Buffalo River. The idea was to snuggle down for a cold weather spell over Thanksgiving week, spend time reading books while a fire crackled in the fireplace, and generally disconnect from work and everything else. However, our dog would need his regular walks, and so down the hill he and I would go, through the town of Ponca, and over to the river to catch the Buffalo River Trail.
Ponca is a good 150 miles from our home in Little Rock, but what do you think happened that first morning when I got up to walk the dog? I met a coworker. At first, he was just a man-shaped figure in the gloom of the trail, but as he got closer, he started to look familiar, and then I could see him gazing back at me with the same intensity, until finally we were close enough to ask each other: “What on earth are you doing here?” It turns out that his entire family had the flu, so Thanksgiving for them was canceled, and he just decided to go for an extended hike.

An encounter with work like that was just random. But other instances I brought upon myself, because it was hard, being up there, not to see everything for which we needed media for here at the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA). There was the Ponca Elk Education Center. I saw an elk-crossing sign that would go well with our entry on elk. And though we don’t presently have an entry on the community of Ponca itself, I went ahead and took some images of the town, as well as of the Ponca Bible Camp (entry also needed), and a few of the Buffalo River Trail (ditto). (I wrote about some of this trip here.)
This is just what I do. Bumming around in Hot Springs some time back, and knowing that we had an entry on distilleries in the works, I took a few pictures of the Hot Springs Distilling building. I’m not usually a compulsive photographer—just when we need something for the EOA, and I happen to be right there.
But my wife, she was not amused by my spending quality vacation time there in Ponca thinking about media for the EOA. “We need to start vacationing out of state,” she said, “just to keep you from working.”
And so we have. We vary it up a bit between larger cities and all their amenities and more rural areas. In October, because my wife loves to knit and weave, we went to New York to attend the Sheep and Wool Festival at Rhinebeck, renting a room with a kitchenette in a town called Phoenicia at the edge of the Catskills. We had a few days before the festival to kick around various towns a bit, and what began to impress me was that there were so many towns (or hamlets or villages, as they were called up there) every few miles, and that even the tiniest of these communities often had attractions like a diner or a little library, even if only 100 or so people lived there.

Of course, much of what sustains these little communities is tourism, which is why our own unincorporated community of Phoenicia had a choice of places to stay and eat. Folks love to leave “The City” on weekends and stay in these little hamlets and villages, and if the locals in the mountains tend to call these people “city-ots,” they nevertheless don’t mind the infusion of cash.
But something more was at work here. It seemed that, in New York, there was a greater value attached to local products. The nearest grocery store, an IGA in Boiceville, the next hamlet over, was stocked with locally harvested mushrooms, bread made at a bakery on the edge of town, and beer from nearby breweries. Your basic diner with stools at the counter would nevertheless offer a range of dishes made from local ingredients, as did the one we visited most often, which had on the menu fish caught from the nearby Esopus Creek. Everywhere, we saw farmstands offering local products, in addition to a number of orchards offering “pick your own” deals (because it was apple season up there, and the apples were amazing).
My biggest awareness of just how much local culture was prized by locals themselves came when my wife and I stopped by a “service area” off one of the highways. It was like a combination truck stop and airport terminal, with a lounge area, different restaurants, and a convenient store inside, and a gas pumping area outside. But also inside was a small grocery store selling local products, and outside was a farmers market set-up offering apples and other produce, as well as maple syrup and beef jerky. All on the side of the highway.
Now, I’ve long been a proponent of local Arkansas culture and its products, and it rather embarrassed me to see these citified Yankees seeming to support their rural farmers and their bakers and brewers much better than we do. I began to wonder just how this might have happened.

Cotton is probably the main culprit. The settlement of Arkansas by people of European and African descent (the latter enslaved by the former) was predicated in large part upon the establishment of large cotton plantations. As historian Walter Johnson noted in his 2017 book River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, the French had long run Haiti as a slave colony dedicated solely to the production of sugar, and Napoleon had the notion of using the Louisiana territory, to which France maintained a claim, as a site of agricultural production for the purpose of feeding the Haitians, so that yet more land could be turned over to sugar. So when Haiti revolted, Napoleon had no use for that land and was amenable to selling it to the Americans. However, instead of following Thomas Jefferson’s ideas of using the new territory to establish a landscape of small farms that would be self-sufficient, settlers instead quickly founded a regime of cotton monoculture, figuring that, if need be, they could import food for the slaves from farther up north.
While there were later attempts to develop textile mills in the South, in Arkansas, cotton was always an export product, something sent off to northern or foreign mills to be spun and woven. Cotton plantations would tend to be vast, squeezing out any room for an actual town to develop. Moreover, after the days of slavery, when cotton was harvested mainly by sharecroppers and tenant farmers, plantation owners often paid in scrip, which could not be redeemed anywhere other than the company store, thus further limiting the sort of economic exchange that would have sustained a small town. And then the mechanization of agriculture drove away the majority of the people who once were needed to bring in the harvest.
Well, that’s the story for the Delta and much of southern Arkansas. But much of what dominates our agricultural landscape is for export. Arkansas alone does not eat as much rice as Riceland can generate. Soybeans aren’t a staple of our diet but are grown primarily for hog fodder. This focus upon export goods makes Carpenter’s Produce a rare example of a farm family in the Delta moving away from crop monoculture and embracing a diversity of fruits and vegetables aimed for more local consumption.
Although I never figured out what was so allegedly transcendent about a New York bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich (and why one should prefer it to a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit), I was nevertheless rather impressed by how passionate New Yorkers were about their own local worlds, and I hope that we can work to develop more of that consciousness here in Arkansas.
And I want it noted that, this time, I did much better about ignoring the needs of the EOA (even if I am turning my remembrances into blog fodder…), for we drove by a sign marking the “Levon Helm Memorial Boulevard” several times, and I never once stopped the car to take a picture for the Levon Helm entry. I just want that fact noted for the record. Granted, my wife was in the car with me, each time saying, “Don’t do it. Don’t you dare.” And I didn’t.
Because I can manifest self-control when not in a bookstore or eating those lovely New York apples.
By Guy Lancaster, editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas