Arkansas and the Geography of the Invisible

During this month’s total solar eclipse, listen to the landscape’s hidden flows.

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If Arkansas is known as “The Natural State” — for good reason — keep in mind that its expanses of wild terrain, its mountains, fields, and meadows, are only part of the story. The sheer beauty of the state’s famous parks and trails can obscure more subtle dimensions that lie just beyond vision’s reach. Case in point: My most recent foray into Arkansas, ranging from scenic Hot Springs to the farmlands of Mississippi County, gave me a new appreciation of the flows beneath the surface and the reverberations in the air, quite aside from any spectacular views. More than ever before, my thoughts turned to rivers and lakes not noted on most maps, yet flowing beneath us, unseen in the very bedrock below.

And there were other invisible forces at work. I kept encountering those flowing sound waves that strike our ears, collectively known as music — a power emanating so prolifically from the Natural State that it’s sometimes referred to as “Arkansong.” And so through its waters and its melodies, a whole new dimension of the state emerged: a geography of the invisible.

Such a landscape resonated well with my anticipation of that ultimate expression of things hidden from view, the total eclipse of the sun on April 8th. On that day, a wide swath of Arkansas will be in the path of totality, in complete shadow. Within that hundred-mile-wide band ranging from the northeast to the southwest corners of the state, after the moon’s disc creeps across the face of the sun for over an hour, gradually dimming the day, it will, for over three minutes, completely block all direct sunlight. Afternoon will turn to night, birds will fall silent, crickets will chirp. And then the moon will just as gradually move along and daylight will resume. For those who watch — and those who listen — those three minutes of darkness will be magical.

Hot Springs: 4,000 Years in the Making

With the eclipse in mind, I was predisposed to appreciate all that’s obscured or hidden in nature as I wound through the Ouachita Mountains to that iconic epicenter of hidden flows, Hot Springs. Knowing the old resort town would be in the path of totality, I wanted to get a feeling for the place before making the trip there in April.

Instead of opting for one of the posh establishments along Bathhouse Row, I settled into The Happy Hollow, a quaint resort motel from the 1950s situated off the main drag. From my room, I could see vehicles pull up to Happy Hollow Spring day and night, as people refilled their jugs like pilgrims seeking holy water. It’s one of a handful of cold springs access points in the area, each offering water of a slightly different pH level.

Hot Springs Mountain loomed across the street. Its wooded slopes dominate the center of town, jutting from the heart of Hot Springs National Park like a gigantic fountain itself, streaked with brooks and rivulets that seem to sing. I threw down my bags and headed up the trail, crossing many trickling waters, to the observation tower at the mount’s summit, with views of 140 square miles in every direction. I imagined the water coursing unseen beneath those distant hills before rising to the surface just below me.

Over four millennia, ancient rainwater has been seeping down thousands of feet through fissures in the rock, its temperature rising the deeper it goes (though here not due to magma or sulfur deposits, as with some hot springs, but from the heat of the earth’s mantle). By the time the flows reach a fault line on the west edge of Hot Springs Mountain, the waters are propelled upward to the surface, at an average temperature of 143 degrees Fahrenheit. And there it at last emerges, visible in the park’s hot water cascade or the public fountains that dot the sidewalks along Bathhouse Row.

Such fountains are the legacy of federal efforts to contain and protect the springs, beginning in 1832. It was the first federal reservation of its kind — national parks did not yet exist, nor did the Department of the Interior, nor did the state of Arkansas. Ultimately, just after the turn of the century, the springs were enclosed and the water distributed to various bathhouses that had cropped up by then. Over the course of the twentieth century, eight palatial spas came to dominate Bathhouse Row, making Hot Springs a Mecca for health enthusiasts, baseball teams in training, and even gangsters.

Imagining all that thermal power flowing through the rock beneath me, I resolved to test the healing waters myself and headed downhill to the Buckstaff Bathhouse, built in 1912. While eight of the ornate stone bathhouses have survived, most of them serve other uses now; the Buckstaff is the only one to have operated continuously for over a century. As I checked in and entered the spa area, every detail conjured up a bygone age, from the laconic, friendly manner of my attendant, Bobby (a Hot Springs native), to the steel pipes sprouting from the tile, to the sound of burbling faucets behind every curtain and chamber.

Immersing yourself in that pure mountain water, its heat and provenance seem to connect you directly to the earth’s core — and to your own interior musings. At such times, closing one’s eyes, one has a keen appreciation of the invisible. But there’s more to it than your typical hot tub. A century of tradition has provided a series of stations for one to move through for the full spa experience: first the tub, then the sitz bath, and thence to the very Victorian vapor cabinet, its fitted metal doors closing snugly around your neck as steam is piped around your body. Then, after being wrapped on a hot pack table, Swedish massages, manicures, pedicures, and facials are available. This is one tourist attraction that’s most thoroughly enjoyed with your eyes closed.

By then I was feeling like royalty — or a Godfather, perhaps? I imagined Al Capone musing over his empire, wrapped in a towel. Yet it struck me that a true big shot would want an even more posh experience in today’s world, such as that offered by the Astral Spa at the nearby Oaklawn horse track, casino, and hotel. Al Capone, or Queen Victoria, for that matter, wouldn’t want just a facial: They would want a “hydrafacial,” a “triple crown luxury facial,” or a “gift of glow brightening facial.” They might even opt for a Himalayan stone massage, or a mother-to-be massage, perhaps followed by a rose quartz manicure.

All of which made me want to learn more about the real kingpins who’d once enjoyed that royal treatment, so I headed over to the Gangster Museum of America, where I found something unexpected: music. Ownie Madden, the first gangster of note to settle in Hot Springs during Prohibition, had previously founded the Cotton Club in New York, a connection which started the long tradition of jazz luminaries playing in the hills of Arkansas when he relocated. The museum’s playbills and posters, stretching from the early days of Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra to mid-century stars like Kay Starr or George Shearing, made it clear that Hot Springs was really swinging, especially at the renowned club known as The Vapors, now recently renovated and back in business.

Music still fills the air in Hot Springs, from the buskers’ trumpets, guitars, and accordions on the street to venues like the Ohio Club, the oldest continuously operating bar in Arkansas. On nearly every Thursday, a trio featuring pianist Clyde Pound (who played with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Maynard Ferguson) keeps swing alive in the city with classic jazz standards. (Many other notable players perform at the Hot Springs JazzFest every Labor Day weekend.)

A few blocks down, Maxine’s, a small bar/restaurant with an adjoining show room, was hosting a drag show during my stay, with singer-songwriters on the following night’s bill. And just a bit further, I snacked on authentic German cabbage rolls to the sounds of polka at Steinhaus Keller. All babbling brooks aside, the town is bursting with music. There’s even a top-notch record store in the basement of the famed Arlington Hotel, the Downtown Record & CD Emporium, with some of the finest, rarest vinyl one could hope for.

Even more tonal reverberations will be heard when the eclipse is imminent, leading up to April 8th. At The Happy Hollow, owner Rob Cox, also a DJ on local radio station KUHS and vice president of the nonprofit Low Key Arts, told me about the Valley of the Vapors music festival, held every spring. This year it will be especially ambitious thanks to the involvement of Atlas Obscura, an online magazine and travel company specializing in unusual destinations. They’re partnering with Low Key Arts to stage the ultimate mix of music, light, and shadow on April 5-8, dubbed the Ecliptic Festival.

This event will feature a who’s who of indie hitmakers, from Deerhoof to Blonde Redhead to Shannon & the Clams, but for these ears, the real headliner will be arguably the greatest jazz group in America today, operating continuously since the 1950s, the Sun Ra Arkestra. Though Sun Ra died in 1993, his band carries on his avant garde innovations and so-called “Interplanetary Music.” Given Ra’s fascination with outer space and the sun, hearing his acolytes celebrate totality on April 8th will have a deep historical resonance, and fully capture the eeriness of such a celestial event. (Visit ecliptic.atlasobscura.com for details.)

Mississippi County: Return to the Lowlands

It’s worth remembering that the eclipse affects more than just the path of totality. A partial eclipse will be visible across a much broader swath of America, and while the ensuing darkness won’t be quite as intense (and will require observers to wear protective glasses the whole time), we’ll sense the intersection of heavenly orbs even in Memphis and nearby environs. To see what might be happening closer to home, I left Hot Springs and followed the water’s invisible flow, downhill toward the Mississippi River.

And so I arrived at the county named for that river, another of the Natural State’s hidden gems. The impact of both unseen waters and sound waves has been considerable in the history of Mississippi County, despite its lack of spa-friendly mountains or fountains. The so-called “sunken lands” along America’s grandest river were recognized as America’s swampiest region as early as 1850, and that was one reason that a certain Ray and Carrie Cash wound up moving to Mississippi County back in 1935.

The family was selected as participants in the Works Progress Administration’s Dyess Colony, a town built from scratch, which incentivized farm families to clear trees from swampland so they could settle there and farm cotton. Because the Cashes’ son J.R. later went by the name Johnny, his music loved around the world, their house in Dyess is preserved to this day as the Johnny Cash Boyhood Home. And throughout his childhood, despite the work of the colony families, the area remained prone to floods. The inundation of 1937 certainly made an impression on young Johnny’s mind — just listen to his song, “Five Feet High and Rising.”

“The groundwater was only 25 feet deep at the time [the Cash family arrived],” noted my tour guide, Tim Allen (not the actor), adding that eventually efforts to grow cotton on the land declined. “It’s mostly rice farming now,” he said, noting that crop’s need for seasonal flooding. But the young J.R. mostly knew cotton, living in Dyess through his high school years. In a film at the visitor center, his brother Tommy recalls the importance of other waves, those received on the radio antenna and via sounds of its speaker, while growing up, evoked by the vintage Silvertone unit on display there. As Johnny Cash later said, “Nothing in the world was as important to me as hearing those songs on that radio. The music carried me up above the mud, the work, and the hot sun.”

Radio, of course, would play a pivotal role in Johnny’s life: first as a Morse code operator in the Air Force, and later as a pop star. Yet he always carried his time in Mississippi County with him, and with it his sense of what lies below the surface, as a quote in the visitor center reveals: “At a very early age … I was very aware that I was part of nature — that I sprang from the soil.”

Cash wasn’t the only soul inspired by that landscape, as the careers of Mississippi County natives Albert King, Billy Lee Riley, Reggie Young, and Dee Clark attest. They mostly had to go elsewhere to make their names, but lately that’s changing, especially just down the road in the village of Wilson.

Founded as a company town by logging and cotton magnate Robert Wilson in 1886, it’s now a prime example of how to take planned development in a decidedly epicurean direction. As Steven Ouellette, the Village of Wilson’s vice president of leadership development, culture, and culinary experience, explains, “Gaylon Lawrence Sr. purchased all of the farmland and a lot of the commercial property here about 13 years ago, and we decided to really expand on the hospitality sector.”

That meant revamping the longstanding Wilson Café, but also establishing The Grange, a spacious kitchen, lunch venue, and gift shop in a remodeled warehouse. “It’s all made fresh daily,” Ouellette says of The Grange. “All of the bread, all the desserts, even the ice cream, is made here now, and that’s brought over to the hotel, the café, the golf course, and all of our events.” My mouth being full from enjoying a grilled Cuban sandwich and a slice of fresh pecan pie, I could only nod in enthusiastic affirmation.

As the eclipse draws nigh, Wilson will be especially active. Their Crawfish Festival takes place through the day of April 6th, giving way to live music that evening and ultimately an eclipse-viewing gathering two days later, when the sun’s disc will be 99.38 percent blocked at its peak.

Just down the road in Dyess, Arkansas State University’s KASU radio station will host the Arkansas Roots Music Festival in front of the Cash home on April 6th, with El Dorado native Jason D. Williams headlining, followed by a “lunch and learn” with NASA scientist Dr. Les Johnson on April 7th, and the option to park campers near the historic home for the following day’s astronomical event.

And yet, lest one forget the wide-ranging impact the eclipse will have on all of nature, another NASA initiative may persuade you to eschew the music and hoopla and simply listen. The Eclipse Soundscapes Project puts the invisible at the center of the celestial experience, encouraging people from all walks of life to document the stark changes in animal behavior when all goes dark. As noted on the NASA website (nasa.gov), the eclipse offers “the perfect opportunity for a large-scale citizen science project.” Volunteers will be asked to use a low-cost audio recording device to capture the sounds of an eclipse, or to write down their multisensory observations and submit them to the project website.

And, as my pre-eclipse adventure wound down, I came across the perfect place to take in the invisible shift in sounds on April 8th, at the Big Lake National Wildlife Refuge just north of Dyess. The refuge’s virgin swampland, still subject to the ebb and flow of groundwater and at times 99 percent submerged, preserves more than habitats for waterfowl and other creatures — it preserves nature’s quiet.

As any hiker knows, that doesn’t mean silence, but rather the hoots, howls, and honks of the nonhuman world. And ultimately, those sounds may be the greatest gift of the Natural State, reminding us just how attuned to nature’s cycles wild creatures can be. That will perhaps make the strongest impression on any who venture out on April 8th, as the moon engulfs the land in its shadow. The birds and bees will fall silent, the crickets will emerge, and nature’s invisible kingdom will make itself known in the dark of the day.