| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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The town is like a medium in the middle of her act who been released by one spirit and is waiting to be possessed by the next.
Right now the big tourist attraction is the Ducks. Ducks are amphibious vehicles. They are about big enough to carry thirty people and you take rides out on the lake. Also big are the scenic drives, though some people do still bring jugs and fill up on mineral water.
We saw a UPS truck back on the streets, the first we have seen since the strike ended. This is the first strike I can remember where the Teamsters actually had public sympathy. People are just tired of seeing executives get obscene salaries for downsizing. Technology has gone very heavily against labor in recent years. machines can maintain facilities that used to require humans. Increases in productivity due to computers have gone to benefit management in their salaries and corporate value while the workers' position has withered. I think eventually we will see either legal protections or white-collar unions.
We visited the Golden Leaves Bookstore and discovered it was almost entirely books on New Age thinking: Mysticism, Tarot Reading, Astrology, etc. Why are so few people willing to spend money on real science and so many people willing to spend on goof-ball stuff? Once a theory gets given some good skeptical scrutiny and gets some evidence, it loses its romanticism and people start caring less about it. And besides that is testing by other people. Anybody can get their horoscope and see how it applies to them while few people can test the speed of light for themselves. The way to test an astrologer is to take a horoscope written for you and one for a friend and, without knowing which is which, decide which fits you better. Most people can read just about any horoscope and see pieces in it that seem perceptive about them. The new thing is claimed psychics. They sell feel-good predictions. They never predict anything bad. Back home, very near where I live I psychic and fortune teller had a big lit sign. It was the kind made of glass or plastic with a light inside so it would be illuminated at night. We had a windstorm and the sign was destroyed. A sheet of plywood on either side would have saved it. It wouldn't have been too hard to put up either. The psychic just would have had to know the storm was coming. She didn't know, apparently. Some psychic!
Back to the room for some writing before dinner. I put on the film Congo. This is a film that got a bad rap. People were expecting another Jurassic Park and what they got was a fun African adventure. At least the African adventure parts of the film are a lot of fun. Once they get to the lost city, it loses something. About that time we turned it off and went to dinner. There is a restaurant called Cajun Boilers. Good food. Unfortunately the crawfish are out of season, but I had a big plate of what they call crab fingers. They are basically the thumbs from crab claws. Evelyn got half boiled shrimp, half crab fingers. That might have been better overall, but the crab fingers were the unusual thing. Also as seasoned boiled seafood, these were fairly healthy dinners. So I felt a little less guilty when I ordered a dessert. I almost never do that. But they had Peanut Butter Pie. Wow! Besides barbecue this was the first Southern gourmet meal we have had. The Southeast and Southwest really have the best cuisines in the country. Northern cuisine has little to compare. And Southeastern cooking probably is better than Southwestern.
I fell asleep soon after getting back to the room, but woke up several times in the night.
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08/22/97--Hot Springs and Hope, Arkansas; Dallas, Texas:
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We both awoke at about 5 AM. Not so bad when you consider we fell asleep about ten.
We went to Evelyn and Carol's II, a sort of no-nonsense good-old-boy restaurant for breakfast. We sat at a table, the surface of which was all ads under a plastic veneer. So what happens when some of the businesses close?
After breakfast we took a couple of scenic drives. Not a lot to see that we did not see on the Blue Ridge. There were some views of the town. I am not sure why we go up to a lookup point and then look at the town with binoculars. If you wanted to see it close up, you didn't have to come up the hill, you were right there. You can take the two scenic routes in a matter of seventy-five minutes.
Bathhouse Row, our next stop, is one bathhouse after another. Some plain, some fancy. It is an artifact of a nearly gone time when people would take a week's vacation to sweat, steam, bathe, wash, exercise, and be massaged. It is a time that has almost passed. There is only one bathhouse still operating. Hot Springs would have been more at home in Europe where bathes seemed more like what people would do for fun. Actually, it was a time when home bathing facilities were neither common nor comfortable. Medicine was also relatively rudimentary and it was thought that really good bathing could be a particularly effective treatment of some diseases. In any case, they were an aid to relaxation.
We take the self-guided tour through the Fordyce bathhouse, now a National Park. In addition to the tubs there were odd pre-World War I cutting edge therapies like electrical baths, hot and cold baths, high-powered douches, and weird gymnastic equipment. The whole process is little more than snake oil as far as I am concerned, but people thought it was you needed to do in order to be really healthy and beautiful. The local guide had ads that tell much of the story how general they claimed their cure was. 'Cutter's Guide can be obtained free by patrons…You will confer a favor on your sick friend if you mail or take him a copy of this publication.' They did not try to limit what they would claim the waters would help. It is not surprising that as an industry it is dying and the town is dying to replace it.
We headed southwest on Route 30 for Hope, birthplace of Bill Clinton and home of the state capital during the Civil War. This is the first day of bad weather. While we were in the bathhouse the rain started. At times it fell fairly hard.
Not surprisingly, Bill Clinton is popular in Hot Springs and Hope. At Hope we went to the Hope Visitors Center. There does not seem to be a whole lot that they have to say about themselves that does not involve the birth of William J. Blair in their town. Blair never knew his father who died before his birth. Blair lived a hard life as a child in poverty. His mother married a man who was an alcoholic who abused her. At some point young Billy Blair decided to officially take his father's name so changed his name to William J. Clinton.
They have a tape about Billy Clinton's boyhood. After that we drove around to see the major sites of Hope, including where Bill Clinton was born and another home where they lived. And there was his school. And there were a couple other points of interest from his past. All this time it was raining. To this point we had had mostly dry weather and my turns to drive had coincided with dry weather. My luck ran out as the sky really opened up as I was driving to Dallas. We had low visibility, other cars flooding out windshield.
The speed limit was 70 and I was trying to drive that because that was what the other cars were doing. It was not easy. Of course, we were covering so much territory that eventually we ran out of clouds and I was driving in Texas in nice weather. The day was very pleasant, the countryside nice, and I was enjoying driving. Evelyn had chosen a cassette to play, and it was one I was saving for a special occasion. It was Jerome Moross's score for the film The Warlord. Just listing to the music and driving, I was enjoying myself.
I read a story about someone who was given the gift of being able to choose one instant of time and to live that instant for all eternity. He would not grow tired of the instant unless he was already tired of it in the instant. He went through his whole life never choosing the instant because it is human nature to always want something more. You are always looking forward to some better instant to come. It occurred to me as I was driving that the story got it wrong. I may well have better instants to come, but that would not matter to me. If I chose one happy instant, that is sufficient. I think I would have chosen an instant during this trip. And even while it was going on I knew I would choose one of those instants. The story simply got it wrong. People really do have instants of time they would choose to live forever.
Of course, once I got to Dallas and got stuck in traffic jams, all bets were off. Newt Gingrich was in France with his parents in the 1960s and was amazed to see buildings still wrecked from the war that had not been repaired yet. This shocked him because World War II had been two decades before. But what really shocked him was when he found out it was damage from World War I. What is wrong with this economy so things take so long to repair? There is another side to the coin. Everywhere we go things are under construction or restoration. We have been in more traffic jams. I wonder if it wouldn't be better to let some things go a little longer.
We got to the Motel 6 we had picked out and told them what we wanted in a room. They had one left in non-smoking. But when we got to the room, it had not been made up. We had to give them back the key so they could make up the room while we were gone.It was now about four and the first order of business was dinner. We had skipped lunch and were hungry.
Mexican sounded like a good idea. We looked around and were thinking of going to one when we saw a another Pho, a Vietnamese soup restaurant. They must be some kind of chain in the South, though they did have the look of having been stamped from a cookie cutter the way McDonalds do. We each got soup with beef and noodles. Evelyn's had meatballs, mine had meat slices.
Now we had a choice of two science fiction films. Event Horizon had opened the previous week and look to be exciting from the ad. Mimic had just opened and was based on a story by Donald
A. Wollheim, at one time one of the established science fiction writers. We were leaning toward Mimic until I saw that it involved giant cockroaches in the New York subway system. Probably it was on the level of Deadly Eyes. The latter was a Canadian film about rats who were eating growth hormone and were living in the Toronto subways. The filmmakers had to find an animal that had a stature much like a rat with a two-foot-long body. What they got was the right shape but the wrong animal. It is really hard to be frightened of even a dozen dachshunds in rat suits. There is something about how a dachshund walks that makes it obvious it is a dachshund. Just the images of dozens of dachshunds chasing a screaming actor turned this film into a cult classic.
Anyway, we chose Event Horizon as sounding like the better film. We went to the theater, got tickets, but since the film would not start for almost two hours we went to a Jack in the Box and worked on our logs. I got a chocolate milkshake because I was thirsty and we wrote in our logs. (Unsolicited testimonial: I am not a big fan of Jack in the Box which I kid by saying it is Purina People Chow. It is or was at one time owned by Ralston Purina. They make a big thing that their shakes are made with ice cream.
Anyway, I did a double-take on the shake, like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. That was one heck of a good milkshake. I guess most hamburger places use gelatin. An ice cream milkshake is a whole different animal. It tastes like a real fountain milkshake.)
We worked on our logs and I made funny faces for a two-year-old Latina girl in the next booth. At thirty minutes before the movie we headed out. |
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