“Finally” because the region, which straddles the Missouri-Arkansas border, is at best competing for Miss Congeniality in the pageant of American mountain ranges. They are more like hill ranges — and some point out they are really not even that, but valleys carved into a plateau, as if the reflection of hills in a vast lake became the hills themselves.
But what the Ozarks lack in soaring grandiosity, they make up for in subdued beauty and cultural quirkiness. They are a place to hike and canoe and fish and rubberneck as you drive by old-fashioned pickups residents have left to rust on their properties, the whole time taking joy in even the slightest changes in elevation, so absent from this stretch of the country.
I based myself in Harrison, Ark., which I had chosen because it was close to the Buffalo National River (like a national park, except water-centric) and because I found a pretty-looking inn called the Queen Anne House, where I could take a break from run-down motels but pay a motel-like price, $55 a night plus tax. What is billed as a historic town was the actually quite pleasantly humdrum; a front-page headline in the local paper the day I arrived was “Council Approves Dirt.” (To be fair, it was dirt needed to shoot scenes for “Bald Knobbers: The Movie,” currently in production.) Even when I had to drive far, I flipped between radio stations like Big Country 99 (The Rooster) and 102.5 FM (The Ozarks’ Best Country) and caught up on two decades of Tim McGraw lyrics. (“I had a barbecue stain on my white T-shirt, she was killin’ me in that miniskirt.”)
But the Ozarks has its own, more local genre of music: the fiddle jam. If you’re willing to drive, you can find one most days of the week. In preparing for my trip, I had rather randomly contacted Fred Phister, a retired professor of English and longtime editor of the recently defunct Ozarks Mountaineer magazine; he directed me to the Monday night jam in McClurg, Mo.
The directions, though, were vague: I had no starting time or address. Seven o’clock seemed a likely fiddling hour, and reaching the speck of a town, it didn’t take much work to find the former general store, a white clapboard building that the owner opens just once a week for the jam and the potluck supper that precedes it.
They get the occasional stranger here, and I was peremptorily directed to fill a plate with sausage and potato casserole and a fruity green salad (and eye the Nilla-wafer-studded banana pudding I’d come back to shortly), before being gently drawn in to conversations by the mild-mannered crowd. “We’re not related, but we’re like family here,” said Mona Decker, a retired history teacher who talked my ear off and then apologized, quite unnecessarily, for talking my ear off. “It’s the same people week after week.”
The crowd soon split evenly into musicians — fiddlers, banjo, guitar and bass players sitting in a rough circle — and spectators, most of whom played cards and gossiped rather than spectating. The music was rollicking and lively, typical of Ozarkian music from this region (or so I was told); it was led by David Scrivner — a disciple of Bob Holt, the regionally famous fiddler who used to lead the sessions and died in 2004.
Ozark folk music has roots in the Appalachians, and the two regions’ linked history also share a more illicit folk tradition: moonshine. Just as city slickers have revived their own Prohibition tradition with chic, legal versions of the speakeasy, refined moonshine has made a comeback in the mountains where it was big business back in the day. Appalachia may be the legal-moonshine capital, but Copper Run Distillery in Walnut Shade, Mo., claims to be the Ozarks’ lone licensed producer. You can take a free tour of the modest facilities, see the custom-made copper still and hear how the makers “cut the head and tail off the snake, and leave the heart” — resulting in a more refined, smoother product (which, now that it’s legal, might more accurately be called unaged whiskey). The distillery also produces aged whiskey and rum; a tasting flight of each is just $5 and is generous enough to require a designated driver. I found the moonshine quite smooth, though I didn’t catch the “hints of delicate caramel” the Web site touts — more like hints of the low-grade grain alcohol we used to spike punch with in college.
A bit of tippling aside, I spent most of the time exploring nature, starting with some perfectly free hiking a short drive from Harrison around the Buffalo River. One three-mile hike leads to a place called Whitaker Point, which people and pamphlets love to say is the most photographed rock in Arkansas. I figured I’d see what the low-key hype was about.
After an early $4.95 chicken-fried steak sandwich lunch special at the famed 100-year-old Ozark Cafe (ozarkcafe.com) in the pretty little town of Jasper, I drove out to the trailhead, a few miles down a bumpy county road. It started out with a pleasant but unremarkable stretch of woods that could have been located in any state park. But soon the trail began to follow the brim of a dramatic bluff, high above the tree-blanketed valley below. At the bluff’s edge were curious squared-off rock formations that seemed not so much products of nature but what was left when a giant’s limestone house had collapsed over the side of the cliff, leaving just a few chunks on the edge. The point itself comes shortly thereafter: a bare rock outcropping thrusting out into the void. And suddenly, I felt it: that urge to capture the moment, as irrationally irresistible a photo-op as pretending to prop up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Alas, I was alone, but it was not long before a group of young hikers from Missouri came along and we traded cameras to get the required shot.
Another nearby can’t-miss Arkansas spot is the Parker-Hickman Farmstead, maintained by the National Park Service but barely visible on its official map of the Buffalo National River. Down a dirt road near the Erbie Campground, it’s a clearing with a 1930s tin-roofed log house surrounded by a smokehouse, outhouse, barns and other outbuildings; it all felt as if it had just been abandoned yesterday. (It was lived in until 1978, the display notes.) I arrived at around 6 p.m., fearful it would be closed, but it turns out there’s nothing to close: this is self-serve history.
On my last day I went to Ozark County, Mo., to see old mills (ozarkcountyrealty.com/mills.htm) and go canoeing from one of them, the Dawt Mill (dawtmill.com/canoeing.php), which like the mill at Rockbridge, has been restored and seen the area around it turned into an outdoorsy resort. From there, canoe rental and transport to the put-in point start at $37.95 (kayaks are cheaper), and you’ll probably spring for another $7.99 for a four-pack of locally brewed Float Trip Ale, irresistibly named and just begging you to break Missouri’s strict BWI — Boating While Intoxicated — laws. (I took just one beer with me.)
The trip was classically Ozarkian in its pleasant mellowness — no rapids over Class I, scenery that was pretty but not dramatic, and far more animals than humans on the water, like a dragon fly that had hitched a ride on a floating leaf and cruised by me, and the dozens of turtles that sunned themselves on whatever tip of a fallen tree that happened to be sticking out of the water. This local species seemed has evolved an aversion to Instagram, apparently: every time I approached, they toppled one by one into the water, as if auditioning for an Esther Williams film.
At the spot where I had put the canoe in the water, near Patrick Bridge, a fisherman had asked me where I was from. I answered, and added — really just to make conversation — that people in New York had no idea how beautiful the Ozarks were. “That’s the way we like it,” he said. I floated off and he shouted after me: “Don’t tell anybody about us.”
My whole job, unbeknown to him, is to tell people. But he shouldn’t worry: his land should remain safe from a flood of visitors from the coasts, unless I’m severely underestimating the demand for fiddle jams, moonshine distilleries, the most photographed rock in Arkansas and one golden hour of beauty a day.