Somewhere around Eureka Springs, both Michele and I caught colds – or the same cold – that took much of the happiness out of the trip, although any trip like this was never going to be very happy in the first place. Now I am home and the blog is stalled in the Ozarks, most of the time with gray skies that fit our gray mood. In other times, coming here for another reason, the Ozarks, with its wild rivers, seems like a great place to explore.
Collectively, the Ozarks are a very old mountain chain – now worn down to about 2,500 at its highest – in Northern Arkansas and Southern Missouri. It was probably lifted up – very roughly – 300 million years ago. To put that in perspective, the center of the Sierras uplifted about 10 million years ago. Most of the time we were there, the light was flat and everything looked dead but it still had an almost Zen-like beauty.
In Eureka Springs, we stayed in an old auto court, Sherwood Court, that had just been taken over by new owners. The rooms were cute and clean and the owners were enthusiastically helpful.
On the outskirts of Eureka Springs is a small chapel designed by E. Fay Jones who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright. It is not a building I’d ever heard of before but it is on the AIA’s short list of great 20th Century buildings.
The Ozarks and the small city of Eureka Springs remind me of the California Gold Rush Country, partially because the landscape of low hills and scrub oaks are similar and partially because the buildings have the same feel.
Often, when I ramble on about the country being more liberal than our politicians, I’m told that I live in a bubble in the Bay Area and the rest of the country isn’t like that. The bubble part is true but the country has a lot more bubbles than many people acknowledge and Eureka Springs is a good example. The weekend we left, was a weekend of Diversity Celebration and there were rainbow flags everywhere. The weekend after Easter will be the Earth Celebration weekend and will feature, among other things, an Universal Service with Rev. Melissa Clair, a Buddhist Study group, and a Sufi guided meditation to connect to dolphins and whales.
One of the points of interest we were told not to miss, was the Carnegie Library which was donated to the city by Andrew Carnegie. I was impressed until I found out that a total of 2,509 Carnegie libraries were built between 1883 and 1929 and both San Francisco and San Jose have one. On the other hand, what Eureka Springs does have that neither San Francisco nor San Jose has is natural springs.
To be continued….