The northwest corner of Arkansas was hazy with dust as August crept towards its end after a summer of one hundred and two degree days. We were visiting a friend who invited us to join her and her family on a river float, in the hope that the cool water and the lazy current would be an antidote to the dry and austere heat that enveloped that part of the Ozarks. From Fayetteville we drove west on Route 62 to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, before taking a side road where a bend of the Illinois River shelters a cluster of businesses that sell access to the river: guided fishing trips, rental of inflatable tubes, rafts and canoes; the stores cluttered with displays of cheap sunglasses, floppy hats and sunscreen that everyone wishes they bought more of. Northwest Arkansas in where Bentonville is located-- the seat of the world headquarters of Wal-Mart, the retailing giant -- and that corner of the state has a slight polish, the roads are in good condition and the housing stock mostly looks decent. Driving from Arkansas into Oklahoma it becomes noticeable immediately after crossing the state line that things are a little more rundown -- ragged trailers and impromptu ranch houses with cheap siding and tin roofs line the roads, and in late August the hills are the color of burlap.
The other rafters were largely in groups: families, some couples, and crews of friends carting picnics in an assortment of coolers with cans of beer hidden in the ice -- there were signs everywhere warning the consequences of drinking while rafting, including the possibility of being banned from that stretch of the river. Visitors park their cars in the gravel lot and then are driven in buses to an embarkation spot -- a flat and sloping bank created by the slow movement of the river’s course over time. The long open bend floods in the spring when the water is high and rushing with snow melt and runoff from the surrounding Ozarks but in the depths of August it is exposed as the diminished Illinois River gently winds its way southeast -- across Oklahoma, through Arkansas and Tennessee, down through Mississippi and Louisiana, changing names along its wending path until it finally empties out into the Gulf of Mexico, after a wash through the delta that lays by New Orleans.
My partner Anastasia, my twelve-year-old daughter Rue, and I were on a little driving tour of the Midwest – leaving from New York we crossed New Jersey and Pennsylvania before arriving in Columbus, Ohio. We stayed at Anastasia’s mother’s house in Ohio for a week – taking in the Ohio State Fair and lounging in the pool of the suburban condominium complex. One afternoon I dragged Rue to visit a Native American mound site in Newark, about an hour outside of Columbus. As we drove east a big rolling storm thundered past us, great dark clouds surging across the sky, flashing with lightning and kicking up powerful gusts that shook the car as we drove. The storm moved quickly east, passing completely by the time we arrived at the mounds.
From about 100 BC to about 500 AD there was a mound building culture in that part of Ohio that constructed large ceremonial earthworks aligned with the path of the moon and the stars that served as great gathering places for the peoples who lived in the area at the time. There are scattered sites of mound-building cultures all over the Midwest; the largest in the region is at Cahokia, outside of St. Louis, Illinois, where there was an enormous earthwork and city that in 1250 AD had a larger population than contemporaneous London, England
. These earthworks were built by indigenous populations to serve as early ceremonial centers and hubs of economic exchange, influenced by the burgeoning urban cultures of Mesoamerica.
We arrived right after the storm had passed and the site was essentially a nice sized park, bracketed by houses on one side and a highway on the other. The mounds were about eight feet high and arranged in a great circle that defines what was once a ceremonial plaza or market. The gentle green hills were not very impressive without some imaginative effort, and Rue, appropriate for her age, grumbled at me again for dragging her there. The grass was green and vibrant, almost palpably humming with satisfaction after the great downpour it had just enjoyed. As we walked around, one of the first things we noticed was the trees that were planted throughout the park, huge majestic oaks over forty feet tall, a number of them snapped at the trunk or with enormous limbs ripped clear off. I realized that it must have been the storm that roared over us that had torn those hard old oak trees to bits and there was something I found hugely evocative about the moment - surrounded by those enormous earthworks perfectly aligned with the movement of the heavenly bodies, arriving right after a turbulent storm to see the physical remnants of its great and indiscriminate force.
After leaving Columbus we made our way to Arkansas in an 80 mile an hour blaze, buzzing along I-70 from Columbus to cross through the heart of Ohio, skirting southern Illinois, Indiana and Missouri, where we could track the northern range of the Armadillo at the point where we first started to see them as road kill, their little round ears, and odd football shaped bodies distinguishable in all of their post-mortem glory. The armadillo is a funny little creature, and I have always had a great affection for them, I think that it might be their pointed snouts that have a light fur on them, or the scaly banded plates that armor their tubby little bodies, allowing them the defensive technique of curling up neatly into a ball to avoid a predator’s probing teeth. Up until the 1850s armadillos couldn’t be found north of the Rio Grande, but after crossing that formidable natural barrier they have been on a slow but inexorable tramp north, ambling through the underbrush of the American landscape, having extended their range to the southern reaches of Illinois. Armadillos are notable for their rapid expansion across the United States, pushing their range five to eight miles a year, omnivorously consuming grubs, beetles and roadkill along the way. Armadillos are tenacious and remarkable creatures - they are polyembrionic, meaning a pregnant female can hold an embryo for up to thirty two months after it is fertilized, giving birth when they are in a propitious environment, and they are adept at crossing impeding waterways: they can hold their breath for up to six minutes as they stride across the bottom of a lake or river, or they can fill their bodies with air like a bladder and float across.
We launched into the river with little problem, by that time of summer the current was gentle and the river was at its lowest point. In places the water was so low that we had to get out of the rafts to drag them, a delicate procedure as the bottom of the river was in some places a sharp gravel that stabbed at tender feet like needles. Whenever I didn’t have to do the dragging I tried to float on the few inches of water available, stretching out my limbs and breathing in short shallow breaths to try to stay afloat and wash past the low areas like a weathered log making a long and ambling journey with the current. With my ears just below the water I could hear the tumble of the rocks, shifting and knocking with a mineral reverberation.
As we were drifting I noticed a couple of local boys who were wading in some of the deep spots of the river, walking laboriously in the current, their hands holding a net with weights along its edges, I figured looking for fish. They had the appearance of firm intent about them, serious in their pursuit of a catch, looking at the frivolous floaters drifting by with unperturbed and uninterested glances as they kept their eyes peeled for the dart of a fish in the water. Northeastern Oklahoma was the final terminus for the great Cherokee nation in the mid-19th Century and those boys were the descendants of those sixteen thousand strong who survived the wretched march across their homeland of Tennessee and through the plains and hills of Arkansas, wading about in the shallows looking to bag a juicy slow-moving channel catfish for the soup pots at home.
The story of the Cherokee is an amazing tale of adaptability, accommodation and resistance to the unrelenting and single-minded march across the continent by first colonial then “American” settlers. Hernando De Soto, fresh from his conquests in Peru, was the first European to encounter the
Tsalagi, Chalaque in Spanish, rendered as “Cherokee” in English. De Soto, in his three year march across the south-eastern swathe of the continent, came to the lower foothills of the Appalachia and the Cherokee heartland, and remarked that the people there were civilized, wearing clothes and shoes. The Cherokee were a settled and populous people; upon approaching towns in Cherokee country, which was nearly the size of England in its expanse, De Soto described vast fields of maize that ringed each town, providing ample stores for a prosperous nation. The Cherokee made a city at Etowah, a little South of present-day Atlanta, Georgia, where they built the second highest pyramid outside of Mesoamerica and diverted the course of the Etowah River to flow through the center of town.
For the next three hundred years the Cherokee simultaneously resisted and accommodated the European population’s incessant hunger for land, their numbers drastically reduced by incessant waves of microbes that spread ahead of the European expansion -- common influenza and other viruses ravished the untrained Cherokee immune system and cut through vast swathes of the population. The Cherokee signed treaty after treaty with the English. In 1768 they allowed the English into their Eastern hunting grounds, but it was barely a year before Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett violated the limits of expansion established in the treaty by leading settlers through the Cumberland Gap into the Cherokee heartland of central Tennessee. The Cherokee did not take the encroachments lightly or accept them without serious deliberation. The Little Carpenter was a great statesman who once visited England as an official of the Cherokee Nation, where he met the Queen and sat for portraits in faux Indian garb concocted by the portraitist. In 1775 the Little Carpenter signed a treaty that traded most of Kentucky and Tennessee for ten thousand pounds in trade goods, and his own son, Dragging Canoe, rejected the terms and made war on the encroaching Americans for over twenty years.
By 1820 the Cherokee had settled on the project of constructing a modern Indian nation: George Guess, or Sequoyah, was a partly lame Cherokee silversmith who didn’t speak or read English but nonetheless became obsessed with the idea of writing, launched a concerted attempt to craft a written language for Cherokee, employing and abandoning pictographic and ideographic characters until he finally realized an entirely new phonetic written language for Cherokee, completing in the course of a decade what it took other civilizations generations to develop. In the Cherokee Nation capital of New Echota, the Cherokee Phoenix was published, a daily newspaper written in Cherokee, distributed amongst the stately houses and wide lanes that lived in uneasy parity with the expanding United States, its editorial pages trumpeting the goal of an independent and self-sustaining Cherokee nation.
Unfortunately for the Cherokee, their efforts to be a modern nation with all the trappings of nationhood -- a written language, a press, modern agriculture and trading, did not dissuade the expansionist ache of the Americans, or the feverish racism of Andrew Jackson, and they were finally forced out of their homeland in the summer of 1838. Twenty thousand people were divested of their homes and businesses, uprooted from their ancestral homeland and forced to march westward, taking with them only what they could carry or cart, four thousand of them dying along the Trail of Tears to Northeastern Oklahoma where a trickle of Cherokee had gone to settle in previous decades. It was considered a crime to have bartered away the Cherokee homeland and several of the architects of the Treaty agreement were assassinated in the years after their arrival.
Today the Cherokee are a recognized sovereign Indian nation with headquarters at Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
In the deep hollows in the river there were a variety of riverine creatures, darting minnows swimming in synchronized schools, and catfish floating serenely below, pushing slowly and deliberately in the current, lazily swishing their tails as the shadow of the rafts moved overhead, undisturbed at the splashing and flailing limbs at the surface until someone dove near them -- then they would dart away, quick and sure. The catfish were greenish-brown in the cool water, blending with the earthen sparkle of the granite gravel at the bottom of the riverbed, their signature whiskers lending their faces a benign expression as they performed their muscular drift against the current. When we stopped to pull our rafts up and make sandwiches I saw a small green turtle at the bank of the river, snapping and scuttling along to avoid my grasp, no bigger than my palm. The current was not strong but it maintained a steady and insistent flow, the water was clear and lovely.
I learned a little about floating when I recently took a course in scuba diving: one of the most challenging things I found about it, besides the gear and the need to overcome a natural hesitation to let your body sink deep into the water, was the struggle to maintain buoyancy. Being a land-creature one is unaccustomed to the simple control of breath and intake of air necessary to maintain a basic neutral buoyancy under water: each inhale from the aluminum air tank filled with compressed air expands the lungs like a bladder and the body rises, each exhale and it sinks. In the cramped confines of the training pool a deep inhale can lead to rising uncontrollably to the surface, arms flailing, a forceful exhale to a quick sink to the bottom of the pool. The exercise for buoyancy is to float at a forty-five degree angle from the bottom of the pool, fins touching the floor and head angled towards the surface; the demonstration of competency in buoyancy is to be able to float there for a few minutes. With a controlled breath and a firm grasp of buoyancy a scuba diver can float in that position, the body swaying only slightly as a trail of bubbles surges to the surface.
Towards the second half of the day I became aware of the passage of time; it was the concrete experience of feeling the bake of the sun on my skin, noticing a measure of exhaustion after the long day of swimming, floating and paddling, and a little worry at realizing that our friend was not enjoying her self so much: her shoulder was in pain before she started the day and she had been thrown from the raft in a brief moment of current, scraping her leg against a low hanging branch. Finally our party rounded the last bend and saw that we had arrived at the camp from where we had started, and I thought about the strange of experience of time that was compressed into that little day. Merleau-Ponty a writer associated with the phenomenologists, a group of philosophers who minutely observed time and consciousness, stressed that time is structured not just through the static function of our mind’s perception but by the act of our bodies moving in time and space, through action.
A ten minute bus ride in the morning, travelling on a road that followed the bends of the river at perhaps forty miles an hour, brought us to the embarkation spot where we first set off to enjoy an eight hour float, drifting with the current along the river that shaped the turns of the road next to it; the day full of reverie: a picnic, struggles against the current, social observation, a little flirtation between the kids, animal life, the traverse of the sun through the sky, and the flow of thousands of gallons of water in a measured pace from one place to the other in constant hydrological cycle.
Cherokee cavaliers; forty years of Cherokee history as told in the correspondence of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot family, by Edward Everett Dale & Gaston Litton, Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 1939
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