Welcome to Cotter, Arkansas

The anticipation was building. My destination: Mountain Home, Arkansas. What a name. What a promise of even more beauty in the already stunningly beautiful Ozarks. What a….letdown.
I spent one of the nicest days of this journey on top of a stretch of Ozark hills, with incredible vistas and trees and streams and excellent roads and the cleanest and freshest air that my lungs have had the pleasure of knowing. I stopped on top of the mountain, where a large house and property complete with a nice wooden fence sat, for sale. I made myself a couple of sandwiches and just leaned on the fence and enjoyed every single minute of it. Warren Zevon told David Letterman that when you are dying, as he was, you learn to enjoy every sandwich. Well, Warren, I aint waiting to die. Bologna never tasted so good.
Winding my way down the slowly sloping roads from the top of the ridge, I saw a large bridge in the distance. I had been told by a passerby that there was a bridge that I was not going to be able to cross with my cart, but having made the trek across the Mississippi River, I was not terribly worried.
As I descended and saw the bridge, which crossed a large lake, I could see that there was going to be plenty of room for me to go over and my fears were allayed somewhat.
Nearing the entrance to the bridge, which crossed Norfork Lake, but still out of sight of it due to trees, a black, older model pickup truck pulled to a stop on the shoulder ahead of me. A Neanderthal leaned out of the passenger side window and beckoned me over. I approached slowly. He said to me that I should put my gear in the back of the truck and they would get me over the bridge. As I reached his side, I saw a driver, looking for all the world like a drunken Alfred E Newman (Mad magazine) waving a tall beer can and smiling a semi-toothless grin. Between Alfred and the Neanderthal was a woman, a distinct cross between a Neanderthal and Alfred E Newman, with a little Porky Pig thrown in. When I declined their offer, the driver told me in no uncertain terms to “put my f---ing stuff in the truck and get in. I told him that I was not going to do it and he sped off, with caveman yelling that I was going to get killed going over the bridge. He also flipped me the bird.
Needless to say the trip over the bridge, while a beautiful half mile or so, was a bit nerve wracking since I had no idea if they were coming back. They didn’t, and I made it across safely and without incident.
It was still several miles to Mountain Home. About two miles further the road suddenly lost its curbs, and that left me with no options but to walk in the traffic lanes. After a short while a Baxter County Deputy pulled up and told me that he had had several calls about me walking in the traffic lanes and he ordered me to walk on the grass, which was unmowed and almost impossible to push the cart through. I told him I would do my best and he said that I was impeding traffic flow by walking on the side of the road and that I really needed to stay on the grass. He also explained that Mountain Home was voted one of the top ten retirement communities in the US and that the old folks were not good driver s (I had noticed that myself, thank you) and that it was for my own benefit to stay off the road.
I stayed on the grass. It took me an extra hour and I was really hurting. A beautiful day had turned a bit ugly, and necessitated me getting a room for the night at a Super 8 Motel.
Despite its name, Mountain Home, Arkansas is nothing more than a few retirement communities surrounded by a laundry list of the usual nonsense---McDonalds, Chili’s, a zillion chain hotels and motels, all set up for the tourists who come for the lake a few miles away. I saw nothing unique and it almost seemed to me like a bait and switch deal.
Mountain Home? Not for me.
Now, let me tell you about what a gardener named Linda, who I met at a gas station in Mountain Home, told me. With a couple of sentences, she completely changed my life. She told me about Cotter.
In the litany of place names that I have visited---Savannah, Memphis, Jonesboro, and others, Cotter is an unknown quantity. When Linda, a fiftyish hippie chick, told me that I needed to go check out “this old river town” called Cotter, I thought, “yeah, maybe” to myself, because when you are walking, detours are two way deals, doubling the miles, but when she said that the road would take me back out to the main road, I figured that just maybe I would check it out.
Down ,down ,down the road went. I began to wonder if I had made a mistake, because if the road went down this steeply, it seemed like it had to go up just as sharply. But I was too far to turn back, so I let it ride, finally realizing why my cart has a handbrake.
The payoff came as I cleared the last of the incline and saw a small railroad tressel, and heard the sounds of water, lots of water. Then I saw the river. It was so beautiful it almost literally took my breath away. Wide and wild, it ran strong but not too fast. Approaching the banks I saw that there appeared to be trees and grass under the nearest edges of the shore, signs of flooding. I watched as long legged cranes and herons took flight when I approached, and even managed to capture one on camera.
Venturing further along the river I noticed smoke rising from below my field of vision. I parked my cart and crept up on a grassy knoll to see what was burning and saw a couple of people in a campsite type place with a fire going, and a large tent set up. I backed off the knoll and headed quickly down the road, to see where the access was to the place where they were camping. I found the dirt road and walked down to a heavenly sight. It was the river, but a section that had somehow been cut off by islands and was peaceful and calm. A Canada Goose pair with their five goslings floated and paddled in single file past me, another heron flew by and the smell of a campfire wafted through the air. I approached the couple, a middle aged husband and wife, who were not very talkative. I did ascertain that they had come all the way from Kentucky to fish here, in the river known as Big Spring, known famously for the huge trout that were pulled out each year. A sign on the side of the area did say “Catch and Release Only” but from the smell of what was cooking on the fire….
I finally left this little Eden and headed up the road a bit. Linda had told me about a bridge that people camped under and I wanted to see where it was and if it was truly “campable” before it got too dark. I finally found the bridge, a magnificent structure composed of many concrete arches and extending for quite a distance into the darkness of Marion County. I had not beaten the nightfall, and was unsure of what was beneath the bridge or how I would get my stuff down there at any rate. Adjacent to the end of the bridge was a motel that seemed to be closed for the night. I hid my cart behind a shed, brought my bedroll and backpack with me and settled down for a cold night next to a room at the motel. The outlets along the outer wall of the hotel worked and I charged my electric things, camera battery and phone.
I froze my (ahem) off that night. And I don’t care. It turned out that the hotel, the White Sands, has been closed for years and is for sale as I write this. How a hotel on the edge pf paradise cant make a go of things is beyond my scope of comprehension, but I do know that Cotter, Arkansas, is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen, and I will return someday, and hopefully camp for a night next to that magnificent river, and grab a different kind of sleep in the motel, if it should re-open.
Cotter, Arkansas. A modern Eden. Who’da thunk it??