As a Westerner, the word “Arkansas” almost never crosses my mind; that is, except whenever I see what Walmart has done to the business district of my hometown, which at one time had a walkable main street lined with locally owned shops, drug stores, a hotel and two movie theaters. Nowadays, most storefronts are shuttered and pedestrians are few. In order to shop, one must drive to the big Walmart Superstore just east of town, there to be greeted by a spiritless, underpaid drudge sporting a blue vest and a forced smile.
Arkansas gave us Sam Walton, and also Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who, to my astonishment, has been elected governor of her state. Which breaks my heart, because heretofore, I’ve had nothing but good things to say about Arkansas–with the exception of Walmart, that is. I’ve been there twice, both times to visit my hobo friend Floyd Eaton, who I first met when he lived in the town dump of Wendover, Utah. Floyd had grown up in the South and for years dreamed of returning to the land of rattlesnake melons and free-range raccoons.
In 1975 Floyd wrote that he had relocated to a forested campsite next to a bayou, or whatever it is Southerners call a body of still water fringed with half-submerged trees draped with garlands of moss. It looked to be a good habitat for alligators, but I later learned the area’s apex predator is a large hairy hominid known as The Fouke Monster, which inspired the 1972 docudrama, The Legend of Boggy Creek. Had we been familiar with the legend, Anne and I most likely wouldn’t have gone fishing that day.
Having caught nothing, I volunteered to drive Floyd into Doddridge for groceries, while Floyd’s dog Tina and Anne would stay behind to guard the camp. Indelible in my hippocampus resides an image of my mild-mannered librarian wife sitting bolt upright in a folding lawn chair, cradled in her lap Floyd’s snub-nosed .38 revolver.
A year later I revisited Floyd, who by this time had moved from a tent to a small cabin, thanks to the generosity of friends he had made, among them a good old boy by the name of Tillman Crabtree. Over a supper of fricasseed opossum, Tillman ranted that he and other local residents, many of whom had appeared in the film, had been taken advantage of by the producers of The Legend of Boggy Creek. Pretty much everything in the film, he declared, was pure bullshit, which kinda brings me back to the subject of Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Or, as the late, great Christopher Hitchens once phrased it: “All politics is yokel.”