Here you go, more Digital Potlatch.
On this Sunday morning, the only antidote to the ache in my soul is to publish another piece of the unfinished epic YELLOWHAMMER FARM: An Autobiographical Trip from the ’60s to the Ozarks. This chapter is over 1,800 words, but you can handle it. The story describes a place that doesn’t exist any more. No parts of our past ever do, but this one resonates strongly with me and is of a piece with this recent blog post.
The setting is rural northwest Arkansas in the summer and fall of 1971. We paid $50/acre for 170 acres of beautiful land. A visit to the doctor cost $5, and no one needed any insurance. Read on, reflect on what you have now, and consider all we’ve wrought in the last 40 years. In ’71 I was 26 years old and happy getting by with almost nothing–excellent practice, wouldn’t you say?
Yellowhammer Farm: The Place
Yellowhammer wasn’t really a farm, and who knew what a “yellowhammer” was? We named it after the road, or what the locals called a road.
The portion of “Yellowhammer Road” that bisected our property was rough and rocky, due in part to its being sloped and consequently scoured out by rain and snow. It began at the foot of the hill by the mailbox, came all the way up to the turnoff past the stone pigpen, then curved steeply upward beyond our property line and kept on going, farther up the mountain. I don’t believe we ever followed to the other end, if there was one, probably because of fear of breaking down and getting lost forever.
I do remember walking a considerable distance beyond our land and observing that the road was in better condition up there, though on that exploratory journey I saw no other vehicle or human being. There were a couple of what passed for crude homesteads, fairly wretched country enclaves best left unmolested, and I did. At that time in that part of the world, just approaching the usually-closed gate of a backwoods farm would often bring a rifle-toting man or woman to the porch and a shouted warning that one was on private property, with all that implied. It’s not that the locals were unfriendly, just wary, as anything could and did happen in those hills.
That region of the Ozarks was all hills, too. What little flat land there was could be sometimes found along the creeks or more often high atop the ridges. We called these “mountains” but they weren’t, in the strictest sense of the word. The Ozarks are actually the eroded remains of an ancient limestone seabed now raised more than two thousand feet above our present sea level. This means that most elevations are more or less equal, separated by steep wooded valleys carved out by streams. The limestone rocks are everywhere and appear as outcroppings and cliffs in some unlikely places. The limestone, being relatively soft, allows for countless underground channels and caves, producing an abundance of small creeks and springs.
Sometimes the underlying rock must have eroded away whole layers at a time. On our “L”-shaped 170 acres, which extended mostly parallel to the slope except for a leg running up one particularly deep hollow or “holler,” there were several wide open fields that stair-stepped up the hillside. None of these was truly flat but tilted gently toward the bottom and were separated by steep rocky places that divided the “steps.” Anywhere there was exposed rock on a hillside, there was likely to be a spring. The higher reaches of these fields were crisscrossed by a number of very small but always-flowing rivulets of water from these springs.
Closer toward the bottom of the hillside, where the hollows widened and the streams flowed more strongly, there were places where the water tumbled over outcroppings and made significant waterfalls. In one place the stream fell ten feet or more at once. There were at least three major streams that crossed the land, merging eventually with Panther Creek at the foot of the mountain, and every one had waterfalls. The smaller streams were too numerous to count and we were always finding more.
At one end of the property, the farthest removed from Yellowhammer Road, the ground dropped steeply to a broad shelf of ground beside one of the three large streams. In this well-watered and relatively flat area was a major forest of oak, poplar, hickory, and beech, the largest of which reached 80 or 90 feet. These were mature hardwoods whose trunks rose half their height without any branches. I often thought to climb them but had no way of doing so. My fantasy was to reach the top of one and build a rope bridge stretching horizontally across to reach another, and then another, and so on. I envisioned a network of rope bridges like I’d seen in jungle movies, accessible only by climbing ropes. There would be observation platforms built atop the tallest trees, and climbing up to them would transform me into a most magnificently muscled hippie Tarzan of the Ozarks. I had no idea how to build a rope bridge but spent some time in town once pricing giant coils of sisal. The trees were terrifyingly tall, however, and I never bought the climbing gear required to make it to the top.
Our land and other tracts in those thickly wooded valleys had been parceled out to veterans of the Spanish-American War. The orginal homesteaders thereabouts had cleared the fields of rocks and built low stone “fences” that followed the contours of the land. Their cabins featured rustic mortarless fireplaces built of laid-up flat pieces of rock. These same rocks were often used to wall in small corrals or storage bins. I learned all this from discovering abandoned places in the woods. Obviously the valley had once been much more thickly populated, and once I trained my eyes to see the grown-over wagon ruts beneath the leaves, I’d follow them to find, more often than not, half a stone chimney amidst the trees. Sometimes I could find these tracks by half-closing my eyes and scanning the tree trunks out ahead: where their diameters sharply narrowed, there would be a road. I spent much time at this, mostly on some other’s land but never with the fear of being caught at trespassing. The place was simply too remote.
I often thought about the early ones, the evidence of whom was all around. The place we picked to cook our meals and hang about was where some kind of dwelling had obviously stood. Beside a large oak tree sat a solitary fireplace, the house it heated long since burned away and vanished. This one was grander than the others, with hearthstones wide enough for sitting and resting utensils. There was even a mantel consisting of a single slab of stone, this and the two-thirds of a chimney that remainded held in place only by the weight of the interlocking stones.
At first we hung a tarp across the narrow space in front, securing one end to overhanging branches and propping up the other end with poles. We had a sturdy cast-iron two-burner “hotplate” fueled by a propane tank, water from the well, and camp tables to keep provisions off the ground. This arrangement worked for quite a while, until a thunderstorm wrecked our makeshift kitchen and prompted the construction of sturdier shelter.
Using the big stone fireplace as one end of what would eventually become my shack, we marked off slightly less than eight by 16 feet, calculating how much space we could easily cover with four by eight foot corrugated metal roofing panels. We cut six sturdy saplings for the posts, dug holes for them at the corners and halfway along the sides, then set them in concrete. When this was firm, we sawed the ends off evenly, allowing for a gentle slope, and nailed a horizontal frame of two-by-fours up high, from post to post. This served to nicely hold the metal panels and give us something to nail them to. When we were finished we had what amounted to a rustic carport with a sloping roof, open on all sides except where the fireplace stood. By hanging plastic down from the roof we even made a storm-proof shelter and a humble place to sit and cook our meals. The usefulness of such a spot was not lost on me, and I appropriated this beginning of a shack to build my place when everybody left.
By the time I found myself alone there in the fall, the weather had turned cool enough to give serious thought to building walls to enclose the space. This was easier than I’d imagined, thanks to what I had to work with: wooden windows in their frames, bought from nearby auction sales; two-by-fours; a roll of roofing paper; lots of nails; and all the slab-side lumber I could haul away for free from a sawmill down the road. I even had a wooden door. What I made of this was simplicity itself.
First I determined where the windows should be and used that mark to position horizontal two-by-fours to rest them on. These I nailed to the vertical posts, of course. I picked a spot to hang the door and built a frame for that. Eventually I had a roughly framed-in shack. Since I’d been careful enough to nail the horizontal boards at just the width to accomodate the roofing paper, covering the shack was simple. Pretty soon I had an eight by 16 foot tarpaper palace with windows and a door. Any irregular sections of framing, like up below the edges of the roof, I covered with two layers of plastic sheeting. When all of this was done, I cut the slabs and nailed them up with the bark facing out, which gave the place the look if not the sturdiness of an actual log cabin. The massive fireplace itself substituted for one wall but couldn’t fill the gaps at that end, so I piled up rocks to fit the openings on either side and filled the cracks with mud.
Finally there was only one more thing to do. I somehow carried natural flagstone rocks from what we’d called “the pigpen” and built myself a floor. The stones were wide enough that even with the resulting gaps I managed rather well. I even built a tiny desk from scraps of slabs and nailed it right against the wall beside the fireplace. There was room for my portable typewriter, a few books, and a kerosene lamp, which delighted me no end. My bed, a metal army cot with a thin cotton pad for a mattress, was opposite the fireplace against the wall. I had room for everything I owned, which wasn’t much, a well not ten feet from my door, and I was happy. I even had a place to pee.
Not there, of course. And nowhere near the well. What I’d done was find peaceful spot back in the woods, some distance from the shack. I dug a pit, not very deep or wide, and laid two wide flat rocks beside it in such a way that I could comfortably squat, my back to the hole, and do what was required. To keep from pissing on my shoes, I dug a shallow sloping trench between the footrests and lined this too with stones. I kept a roll of toilet paper in a jar and had a can of lime beside the pile of dirt from digging the pit. When I’d finished, I tossed in a little lime with dirt and leaves and never had a problem with flies or odors. I’d managed to pick such an agreeable location that on warmer days I’d take a book along and spend more time than strictly necessary.
Going out to use my open-air latrine at night was more of an adventure than I liked, but with my dog for company and machete for protection, I always made it back alive!
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