Heck Of A Guy

Alice’s Restaurant Meets Deliverance Meets Perfect Storm – Bluegrass Soundtrack Sold Separately

As Told By Survivors

Comprising events that took place 34 years ago within a period of less than 72 hours, the story of The Great Ozark Folk Festival Flood of 1973, part travelogue, part drama, and part farce, has proven difficult to relate.

The audience might be better served were this saga portrayed through the eye-dazzling technology of a disaster film along the lines of “Titanic” or the afore-mentioned “Perfect Storm” or by invoking the emotional resonance of music with a haunting, melancholy ballad such as Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck Of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Perhaps the recitation of an epic poem in the oral tradition could conjure up, through the power of meter and rhyme, the phantasmagorical mental imagery representative of this incursion into the American Midwest’s Heart of Darkness as successfully as the Homer revivified the mythic battles fought by Trojans, Greeks, and Olympian Gods.¹

DrHGuy is, alas, but a simple blogger, who, lacking the requisite skills, funding, and patience to produce a more artistic presentation, can but lay the events of this tragedy before the reader in simple prose supplemented by the occasional graphic.² Consequently, the viewer is urged to read this account both attentively and forgivingly.

So, y’all gather together in the glow of the monitor, & Uncle DrHGuy will keyboard you a tale from a time so long past that DrHGuy was then only HGuyM2,³ which doesn’t scan nearly as well and loses much in the necessity of a footnoted explanation.

By cracky

While events become a tad weird further down the road, today’s post is a relatively straightforward but, one hopes, moderately interesting account of the opening of this tale.

From Lord of Leisure’s Tale To Six Miles From Mountain View

My involvement in this adventure was largely the consequence of Lord of Leisure’s skillfully told story of an intriguing phenomenon, The Ozark Folk Festival, which, since its origin in the early 1960s, has annually featured a weekend of unalloyed, down-home bluegrass music played as God intended it, by overalls-clad fellows, red of neck and wizened of visage, each with a hefty wad of Red Man twixt cheek and gum and a can at the ready for use as a spittoon – well, by those guys and by the hippies, of course.

As a bonus, the Festival took place in a beautiful wilderness area in Arkansas.⁴

Hearing this description under the complementary influences of (1) the collegiality generated by friends feasting on Hippie With Tiara’s handmade tacos washed down with significant quantities of cheap wine and (2) my persistent desire to elude, however transiently and at whatever cost, the drudgery that was medical school, I quickly came to the inescapable conclusion that “this thing sounds like more fun than anything else I could do that weekend.” (Given that the only alternative activities that beckoned me at the time were slicing up a cadaver and tying down the trailer, the cognitive power required to formulate this realization was, admittedly, modest.) So, empowered by the lack of adult supervision and the availability of gasoline for 36.9 cents per gallon, I accepted the invitation proffered by Lord of Leisure and Hippie With Tiara (who were already well along into wedded bliss) to attend the Ozark Folk Festival with them.

As it turned out, my romantic companion of that era, the then eventually-to-become-first-
Mrs-DrHGuy, also decided to sign up for the trip as did two of my high school buddies, PolySciGuy and Flame, who had married each other and were living nearby.

Thus it was that on Good Friday, 20 April 1973, I and my still-later-to-be-ex-spouse were ensconced in the back seat of a metallic blue 1968 Pontiac Tempest⁵ driven by Lord of Leisure with Hippie With Tiara by his side and followed by PolySciGuy and Flame in a newish Fiat as we departed civilization as it then existed in the university town of Columbia, Missouri to journey across 265 miles and a time-space vortex into the Kingdom of Mountain View, Arkansas.

The drive to Mountain View was, for the purposes of this narrative, uneventful. One portion, however, is worthy of note, both for its intrinsic interest and for its presaging of the environment we were entering.

Much of the trip through Arkansas was, if the black and white highway signs, displayed in miniature to the reader’s right, posted alongside the semi-paved route were to be believed, via State Highway 9, a (barely) two-lane road that meandered through gorgeous Ozark hills.

One portion of that road was particularly memorable, an expanse shorter than a football field that took us across a small river – without the assistance of either a bridge or a motor.

In 1973, Arkansas State Highway 9 traversed the White River at Sylamore by transforming itself from an asphalt road into a current-driven ferry⁶ (more properly classified as a reaction ferry), which, as its name indicates, depends entirely upon the river’s current to propel it from bank to bank.⁷

And, attached to a post on the Sylamore Ferry was that same Arkansas State Highway 9 sign.

The reader accustomed to that comforts and conveniences wrought by that miracle of contemporary travel, the bridge, might do well to pause for a moment to consider the implications of a route dependent on an non-motorized ferry, an opportunity in cogitation that was, in fact, afforded us on Arkansas State Highway 9 that day.

If all goes well, traveling via reaction ferry over a river, across which one could easily hurl a rock, involves waiting for any cars already at the river to be hauled across one or two at a time, edging ones (or ones brother’s) incredibly expensive automobile carefully onto what is little more than a raft constructed from scraps of wood, watching the ferryman cast off, adjust the windlass, and then dock the ferry, and finally driving cautiously from the bobbing platform onto the bank of the river.

And, of course, things don’t always go right. Flooding and ice, for example, frequently closed ferries in the Ozarks. More mysteriously, the ferryman sometimes simply could not be found although the ferry itself might be tantalizingly visible on the other side of the stream, an occurrence known to induce the occasional driver to take advantage of the afore mentioned capacity to fling a handy hunk of mineral across the waters.

And if the ferry doesn’t operate for any reason, the driver is left with no option other than reversing his course and trekking to the next bridge or ferry across the river.

For example, on arriving at Sylamore Ferry, our tiny caravan was only six miles from our destination of Mountain View. For reasons that were as nonspecific as they were dubious, the ferry’s continued operation that day was in question. Were the ferry to close, we would be forced to backtrack 41 miles to Calico Rock⁹ to the next river crossing and then drive 17 more miles on an alternative route to reach Mountain View.

The last folks served by the Sylamore Ferry that day, we were thankful to make it across the river (just as today’s reader should be grateful for the plenitude of bridges now part of the roadways), but those whiffs of anachronism and amorphous weirdness evoked by the primitive ferry were only to intensify during our stay in Mountain View.

Next Episode: Bluegrass, The Courthouse, The Campgrounds, and Hungry Hungry Hippies


Credit Due Department:
The sketch atop this post, featuring the visored face of Lord of Leisure, was drawn by Hippie With Tiara.

Lord of Leisure and Hippie With Tiara, thanks to their superior memories and willingness to help, provided much of the detail presented in the posts about this adventure.

_____________________

1. ”The Great Ozark Folk Festival Flood of 1973″ would also sound more authentic if it had taken place in the first decade of that century such that the title could be enunciated as, for example, “The Great Ozark Folk Festival Flood of Aught 3;” that folksy “aught-3″ construction is chock-full of verisimilitude and instantly conveys the honorific of “Old Codger” on the speaker.↩
2. This is not to say that the author would look with disfavor at an offer to purchase movie rights.↩
3. ”M2″ translates as “Second Year Medical Student”↩
4. Arkansas Motto: For the last time, Deliverance took place in GEORGIA, not Arkansas. But you sure do have a purty mouth.↩
5. The legendary Tempest was loaned for the occasion by the younger brother of Lord of Leisure in a gesture that, in retrospect, was perhaps more generous than wise. Again, we are very very very sorry.↩
6. The Sylamore Ferry continued in operation, in fact, for some years afterward. One current-driven ferry, Akers Ferry, still operates in the Ozarks and, in fact, crosses a branch of the same river, albeit some distance away↩
7. A Digression On The Nature Of Reaction Ferries
   The key to the operation of a current-driven ferry is adjusting the angle of the ferry such that the current drives the correct direction. These adjustments in the angle of the ferry are accomplished by use of a windlass on the ferry which is attached to a bridle cable (the “V” shaped cable attached to the ferry in the diagram below). The bridle cable is also attached to a continuous cable running from one side of the stream to the other. By manipulating the windlass the ferryman points the front of the ferry slightly upstream. The current then exerts force on the boat in two directions: (1) the current pushes directly downstream against the boat, but the link to the continuous cable prevents the ferry from moving that direction and (2) the current pushes against the angle of the boat, propelling it, in the example below, to the reader’s right.

   When the ferry is somewhat past the halfway point of its journey across the river, the ferryman uses the windlass to point the ferry toward the landing, using the boat’s momentum to glide into the bank. An incorrect judgment of the momentum results in either a collision with the bank or stalling in the river. In the latter case, the ferryman has no recourse but to pole the ferry and its cargo to its destination.

   
   

   

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8. The Sylamore Ferry postcard was a nice find by Lord of Leisure↩
9. ”Calico Rock” is Lord of Leisure’s favorite Ozark place name. Nonetheless, he, like the rest of us, would have been mightily disappointed and frustrated to return there because of an inoperative ferry.↩