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BMW RA #287 |
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The Legend of Boggy Creek
By Paul Yeager August, 2002 The Legend of Boggy Creek was released in 1975, a pretty awful film dressed up as a serious documentary. It concerned encounters that folks in the country around Fouke, Arkansas had had with a large, hairy big-foot-type creature. They called it the Fouke Monster. Several people were interviewed who said they'd seen it, and no one was interviewed who said it was all BS. One family reportedly chased the thing out of a bedroom. It all seemed very exotic and colorful at the time, and yet attainable. Arkansas wasn't that far away. Back in those days, a Honda CB500-4 was my sole means of transportation, and Janice and I thought it would be pretty cool to ride to Fouke and look for that monster. We planned to do it "sometime soon". In August, 2002, we took off. As it worked out, we left from Austin. We rode east on US 290 to Texas 21, the old Camino Real from San Antonio to Nacogodoches. It's a mildly pretty road, the countryside lightly rolling through farmland and cattle pastures between the towns of Bryan, Madisonville and Crockett. There's really nothing about it that says it was the main highway a hundred and two hundred years ago. Then between Crockett and a crossroads named Alto, we flew past a green highway sign that said, "Pepper tree planted in 1848." I looked back at Janice. She was nodding. "Do you want to stop?" I yelled. She kept nodding. We turned back and sure enough, a pepper tree planted in 1848. I always wondered what the plant looked like that grew peppercorns. Out of frothy leaf clusters grow flower stalks, and the peppercorns harden on these. It wasn't very big for being over a hundred and fifty years old, but you could tell it was tough. In Alto we turned north on US 69 to Rusk, then made our way to US 79 into Louisiana. On the map US 79 turns into LA 169, or maybe it's Parish Road 169, or maybe it's "I really shouldn't be on your highway map because I'm such a stupid little road 169." On the map it looks like one of those wonderful little off-the-path routes that's really more direct than the main highways. Didn't work out to be wonderful though. Tight little road crowded with intersections and schools and houses and country stores and people that made you wonder if you were hearing banjos dueling in the background. Quite a bit of traffic at the time, too, including one of those polka-dot-on-white Bimbo Bread trucks being tailgated by a half-full schoolbus. Eventually we made our way to US 71 running north out of Shreveport toward Texarkana. We turned left and headed to Fouke. We were able to pick up the pace a bit, too, though we didn't really relax until we were out of Louisiana. That little road, 169, had been creepy. Fouke is near the Sulphur River, on flood-plain thick with bottom-land woods. Boggy Creek is a tributary, maybe 7 miles south of Fouke, but these days the woods are not close to the highway. It was around 4 on a very sunny summer afternoon when we rode through, and it was hard to conjure the scene in darkness and fog. Mystery did not seem to be lurking anywhere in plain view. We stopped at the Monster Mart. Where else… It was cool inside, that was nice. The lady was quite friendly, but evidently wasn't a believer. She said the last sighting had been last summer by some tourists, and she wasn't buying it. None of the folks who came in to pay for gas or buy groceries were at all concerned about having a bigfoot in the neighborhood. Unless tourists like us asked about it, provoking chuckles, it was no longer relevant - not like the fact that it was almost 5 o'clock and the good restaurant in town was about to open for dinner. That was relevant. So it goes. 
Found him! After finishing a couple of Blue Bell ice cream bombs, we abandonded the quest for the Fouke monster and rode up to Texarkana. US 71 goes to the middle of Texarkana, about 2 blocks from the courthouse at the dead center of town, and heads north, defining the boundary between northeast Texas and southwest Arkansas. The courthouse straddles the line, and the single building houses two administrations of state, county and municipal governments. They have 2 police departments, 2 fire departments, 2 tax bases. Texas is dry and Arkansas is wet, so most of the restaurants and all the liquor stores are on the Arkansas side of the highway. If numbers of stores is any indication, there's quite a lot of competition in the liquor trade on the east side of Highway 71. 
The next morning we headed up US 59 a short ways to Ashdown, and then took smaller highways toward the east and north - Arkansas 32 east to Arkansas 335 north to Arkansas 27 north. 27 took us through Murfreesboro, home of the Crater of Diamonds State Park a few miles south of town. It is the caldera of an ancient volcano that had spit up diamonds milllions of years ago when that part of North America lay under the sea. Someone finds a diamond there every day or so. It's a little like playing the slots, you buy a 5 dollar ticket to get in and the odds are you won't win, but you might be standing there when someone else wins. One of the most perfect diamonds ever found anywhere was found there, and is mounted in a display in the Visitor's Center. The Little Missouri River passes through the north part of town, and the Caddo Indians had a thriving village there a thousand year ago. Their burial mounds were about all that is left, and several of those had been excavated a few miles north of town. Giant pits had been dug into the mounds, and some number of pots and other artifacts had been uncovered, along with the human remains of a dozen or so individuals. A variety of artifacts is displayed in the homemade museum that fronts the village space. On the other side of the parking lot from the museum is a Peruvian Paso ranch, with purebred Peruvian Paso ponies prancing around in the pastures. Arkansas 27 intersects with US 70 in Kirby, where we stopped at the Lux cafe. Good ole country cheeseburger and a bl&t. A marroon '67 T-Bird parked next to us, in very clean original condition. It wasn't showroom, more like daily-use-clean. Rolled and pleated original leather seats. The owner was a fellow maybe in his late sixties, and he was pleased to tell us the history of his ownership in an accent that allowed for one word out of every four or five to be understood. We smiled and nodded a lot. Those kinds of conversations always seem to go on forever. Clouds were gathering as US 70 brought us into Hot Springs. We stopped at a gas station a block from the intersection of US 70 and Arkansas 7, and the first drops started coming down. By the time the tank was full it had started raining in earnest. The wind picked up, swirling the rain sheets and tossing the traffic lights around, and thunder began to boom close by. This was a traditional gas station, the kind with full-serve pumps, three mechanics and a manager named Bubba. We asked Bubba if we could hang out for a while and see if the rain would blow over, and he said it wasn't going to blow over. It was going to storm like this for the next two days. We'd best just get our gear on and head on out in it. He let us know that he rode a Harley, and he'd ridden in plenty of weather like that. We had too, and we didn't feel any need to hurry into something that was getting worse right in front of our eyes. I thanked him for letting us put our gear on, and we rode next door to the Howard Johnsons. They had the weather channel on in the lobby and coffee in the restaurant, and the guy behind the desk was happy for us to come in and wait awhile. I got some coffee and we watched thered spots on the doppler grow and move across the Hot Springs area, and after an hour or so we could see the backside of storm line approaching from the west. Sure enough, in a few minutes the lightening stopped and the rain began to let up. We thanked the counter guy and headed north on Highway 7. We passed by this time-capsule row of bath houses, spas and hotels built in the early part of the last century. I really wanted to stop, but that wasn't going to happen. The rain ended before we got all the way out of town, and within 15 or 20 miles the road dried. It was around 5:30, the sun cast a pretty gold color on the twisting landscape, the freshly washed air was clean and cool, and we could lean a little bit into the corners. It was nice just floating along on the LT, smooth as a flying carpet. The mountains in Arkansas are half the size of the Appalacians and a quarter of the scale of the Rockies. Size isn't everything, though, and the landscapes are very picturesque. Petit Jean State Park is at the top of Petit Jean Mountain. This was the first state park in Arkansas. It has a handsome log and stone lodge and some cabins, built by the Civilian Conservation Corp. in the 1930's and over the years since. Several of the cabins perched on cliffs overlooking Cedar Creek canyon and had extraordinary drop-off views. I think cabin 6 may have been the best. The cabins do NOT have televisions or telephones, and you start to run out of things to do after dark once you've had dinner. If you stay here, you might want to pack a book. The food was OK, but the waitresses were very friendly and the service was great. It was getting close to closing time when we got to the restaurant and the salad bar had only a few scraps, and they brought out a brand new bag of salad and opened it up, just for us. It rained all night, with some fairly spectacular lightening. One in particular sounded like someonewith a giant hammer had just pounded a tree into the ground like a nail. BAM. I shot straight up out of a deep sleep. The next morning, the equally friendly morning waitstaff told us that lightening storms were common on the mountain. It just seemed to attract lightening. After breakfast we toured the Museum of Automobiles at the east end of the park. A 1929 Rolls Royce sat right inside the entrance, from a period when Rolls Royces were made in the US as well as in Britain. For me, that car made the stop worthwhile all by itself. I couldn't get enough of looking at it. The building is full of historical automotive treasures, almost all of them shinier than showroom. You can easily blow a couple of hours here. It was late morning before we got back on the road. We went back to Centerville and headed north again on Arkansas 7. In Dardanelle we turn west on Arkansas 22 and ran up the south bank of the Arkansas River. This is very pretty country, rather like the Texas Hill Country but with much more vegetation. Arkansas is dripping in vegetation. Fields and groves and pastures and woods and more fields - and a nuclear power plant sending up a giant column of white cloud - and pastures and woods and fields and forests. Further up the river, in the town of Subiaco, we came upon a large castle-like structure sticking up out of the woods on the side of a hill. It turned out to be a Benedictine abbey and academy founded in 1878 by three monks from Germany. The "castle" building contained offices, dorms and some of the classrooms, and is part of a complex that includes a large monestary building, a Romanesque church and a number of classroom buildings. Spreading out on the hillside below it were shops, barns, granaries and other outbuildings. It looked like something that had been lifted right out of the Alps and dropped in the mountains of Arkansas. We followed a sign that said, "Shops," but that path led to a wood shop and a metal shop. We circled back through a flower garden in high bloom and full of butterflies and hummingbirds. We stood under a cypress vine exploding with flowers, and perhaps a dozen hummingbirds flew dogfight runs around our heads. We stood there maybe 10 minutes with the birds flying around us. Evidently it was registration day for the coming semester at the academy, and the campus was full of people. (We were the only ones on an LT, though.) More information about the Subiaco abbey can be found at www.subi.org/abbey.html. We continued on to Paris, Arkansas, and turned south on state highway 309. This road crosses Mount Mechanic, the highest mountain in Arkansas. We came upon Shirley's Outback restaurant and had lunch & great place. We were the only customers, and got a lot of Shirley's direct attention. She is a big supporter of motorcycling and riders, used to ride herself (but isn't supposed to anymore, she said, because of an accident), and hosts several bike events throughout the year. She also had an unusual way of preparing a hot turkey sandwich - kind of like a patty melt but with turkey. Tasty. A little further on 309 is the entrance to the Mt. Mechanic State Park HQ. There are a couple of loops off 309 that begin here, one of which goes around the summit of Signal Hill, the tallest point in the state. There are multiple lookout points on these loops - all pretty spectacular. There's a different scale to these vistas than in the Rockies, especially the Canadian Rockies, something closer to the human body scale. You can almost see people in the Arkansas views, where individuals are way too tiny to register much in the Rockies. We continued on 309 to Havana, took Ark 10 to Danville and Ark 27 south to Washita where we picked up Ark 88 into Mena. In Mena we stopped at a beautifully restored Esso gas station. Behind it was a fully restored Studebaker dealership building with an immacualate red Studebaker pickup truck sitting in the little showroom. 
A fellow LT rider, Bob Young, saw us looking in the windows and walked over. He now lives in Mena, and explained that the man who owned the gas station had restored it in the last 6 months or so, as a response to the man who owned the Studebaker dealer building. Evidently there's some kind of rivalry between them, and each is now trying to top the other. Bob told us the Studebaker building housed the first dealership in this part of the state. Next door in the Esso station was a fine collection of Cushman scooters, Mustang motorcycles, a couple of tricked up Harleys, and an extraordinary collection of peddle cars and trucks. There must have been over two dozen, all immaculate. Bob Young was a great example of everyone we met in Arkansas. The people were so friendly. Janice said it was like being in the parade state, everywhere we went, people would look up and wave. Naturally we waved back, and as you know, riding along on an LT waving back at people makes you feel like you're in a parade. Any time we stopped, people would come up and visit. We thought folks in Texas were friendly, but not as universally so as in Arkansas. We continued on 88 up Rich Mt. to the Queen Wilhelmina Lodge. The Ouachita Mountains were uplifted when the South American plate pushed into the North American one, and are the only mountains in North America that run east-west. The south sides of the mountains are warmer, drier and generally windier, and so have very different plant communities. The plant life can only be described as abundant, though, on both sides of the mountains. Over 100 varieties of hardwood trees grow there - I didn't know there were a hundred varieties of hardwood trees. 
Probably quite a few folks who went to CCR 2 rode the Talimena Skyline Drive. Afternoon is the time to ride that road. As often as not, the road is inside a cloud in the morning. We stayed at the Queen Wilhelmina two nights, and both mornings we were solidly inside a cloud with very brisk winds. I had planned to take the Skyline Drive into Oklahoma on the way home - had saved it for that very purpose - but as it worked out, that'll have to be added to the list of things I need to do next time I get to Arkansas, like stop at one of those classic Hot Springs hotel/spas, and take a ride up Mount Nebo. Total mileage door to door was 1795. We hadn't found the Fouke monster on this trip, but we had seen some extraordinary country, rode some beautiful highways, and found out that folks in Arkansas are just as friendly as those in Texas. |
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