Naked Ladies Cavorting

I saw several groups of naked ladies on the Buffalo River just last week, down at Gilbert, Arkansas. It seems awfully late in the year for naked ladies to be out, but there they were, only a little ways from the river. Most of the naked ladies I see around my area are pink, but these were bright crimson, maybe due to the cooler nights.

Oh, in case you have the wrong picture, ‘naked ladies’ are a type of flower, sometimes called ‘naked lilies’, blooms growing on a long stalk, which has no green chlorophyll, and no leaves.  I have never seen them in October, and I have never seen red ones. Mother Nature gets all confused at times, with mild fall temperatures. There are some white lilacs blooming up here on Lightnin’ Ridge this morning, and one big bright red rose.

If you have never seen the Buffalo River and the country around it, you have missed something. Now might be the best time to go, because the fall colors will be at their best over the next three weeks. The river is spectacular, and it isn’t crowded at all in October, because the chaos-and-capsize-canoers, which like to drink beer and get wet, are gone.  People who see the river in October are a bit different, a quieter and more reverent type. There is some fairly good fishing now, because the river has lots of smallmouth bass.

To the southeast of the Buffalo River is a large tract of National Forestland, spectacular in beauty and wildness. Thirty years ago I explored much of it for the state’s Natural Heritage Commission and it is rough and wild. Right now, it is difficult country for hikers to navigate because of the ice storm that hit the area two years ago.


In 1971, a year before the Buffalo River was turned over to the National Park Service; I was just out of college, and a very young Chief Naturalist for Arkansas State Parks. Their best park was on the Buffalo River just 14 miles south of Yellville, a place known today as Buffalo Point. That spring, I had about a dozen newly-hired college student-seasonal naturalists meeting at Buffalo River and we got an invitation to go visit a big cave over to the east of the park.  It was northwest of Mt. View, Arkansas in a Forest Service recreation area. They were just starting to develop it, known as Blanchard Springs Caverns. 


We toured it with headlamps, seeing the very beginning of developed trails through huge rooms of spectacular formations. A year or so later they found a skeleton of a prehistoric man determined to have fallen and died there 800 years before, only a few yards from where we were. But that day we experienced what is now the Blanchard Springs Caverns, and if you haven’t seen the caverns and surrounding area, spend a day there when you visit Buffalo River Country. There are a couple of tours through the caverns, they aren’t expensive, and you won’t believe your eyes when you see the inside of that huge cave with all the different formations. Only a few miles away there are Forest Service campgrounds, Barkshead and Gunner Pool, and miles and miles of hiking trails, bike trails, and horseback riding. Sylamore Creek flows through it, (yes, Sylamore) and below the cave there are campgrounds available as well.  The huge roaring cold springs which flow from the caverns from beneath a high rock bluff have been an attraction for decades, and the Civilian Conservation Corps did some fantastic work there on walls, walkways and bridges back in the 1930’s. A dam they built below the springs backs up a small lake just above an old mill, and Val Davenport Matty tells me her parents go there often and catch trout which are stocked there. They say the fishing is great.   

Val was there that day in 1971 when all those state park naturalists met for breakfast before taking a bus to Blanchard Springs. She was a 16-year-old waitress for her mother, who operated the park restaurant.  I spent a couple of hours talking to her the other evening, at her home just outside the park. Val loves the area, and knows it all as well as anyone, since she grew up there. We talked about one of the old timers who worked at the park back then, by the name of Rufus Still.   Rufus had a gift Ozark hill people talked about often back then. He could make warts go away. Val might have doubted it if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes.

“I was in college and came home for the summer, and had developed warts on my hands and forehead,” she said.  Daddy told me to go see Rufus, and if he couldn’t make them go away he would take me to see a dermatologist in the city.  I didn’t believe for a minute it would work, but he touched each wart with a needle and told me to go home and forget about them.  He said that in a couple of weeks I would be putting on my socks some morning and I would think about them and they would be gone.  And that’s exactly what happened.

Rufus was one of many of the old hill people or river people whom I talked to and got to know and respected so much. Modern society looks at them as backwards and uneducated people, but they were not. They had something special, and they had a different kind of education that comes from being so close to the land, so in tune with a spiritual existence modern culture knows so little of. They are all gone now, and I miss them. They were special people, and I can’t be there without feeling a bond with them, driving back roads and seeing old cabins and places on the river which are still like it was back then, fifty years ago, or a hundred and fifty years ago.

If you go to see the Buffalo, or Blanchard Springs, go see Val. She owns and rents log cabins with fireplaces there only a short distance from the Buffalo River, a great place to spend the night and feel like you are a part of the river the way it was a hundred years or more ago.  She can also help you get a canoe to float the river, and have someone pick you up at the end of the day. And she can tell you special places to see that you might otherwise miss. Her phone number is 870-404-4987. Tell her an old naturalist sent you.
   
Our Swap Meet held on October 9, was a huge success, and we raised a great deal of money to use this winter to buy coats and shoes for needy grade school children. Thirty-eight people donated $670 that day, and I sold $430 worth of books and magazines. Folks at the Arcola, Missouri Christian Church donated $383 more last Sunday, so we have just short of $1500 in that fund. I’ll continue to let readers know where the money is going and how many children will benefit from it, between now and Christmas. I want to thank the Brighton Assembly of God congregation for making their gymnasium available to us at no cost, and pitching in to help in so many ways.

See my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.  The e-mail address is lightninridge@windstream.net.