Why 40 Hikes before I turn 40:
Part 1 - A Perspective Shift
As strange as it sounds, I was on Martha’s Vineyard when I first realized how much of a treasure I have in my backyard on the trails of Arkansas. A friend had invited me to experience a few child free days in early June of 2018. My son had turned three a few weeks before my trip. I distinctly remember the low key terror that threatened to overwhelm me as I made my way through ticketing and security and onto the plane.
“Leaving your son… going away for so long… this is a bad idea… you’re just going to have to come back… the moment sometime goes sideways you’re going to get a call and figure out how to get back over onto the mainland and take a cab to Boston… lord know you don’t have the money for a three hour can ride… you can’t even really afford this trip… you are literally depending on the kindness of an internet friend you’ve known for six years but have only met in person once… what are you even doing… you are so irresponsible.”
Yeash. My head was not a happy place to be during that time.
So to cope, I wrote. And I walked. And I sank into the kindness of my aforementioned internet friend. She made a mean charcuterie board which we ate on the porch of the house where we stayed (which began my mini-obsession with oat cakes and spicy honey) and she introduced my to tiny fishing villages away from the more well-worn, touristy paths of the island.
It was at a tiny bookshop within one of these fishing towns that I spoke to the bookseller about “where home was”. With the experienced ear of a man who drives across the country from Arizona to Massachusetts and back again with the swing of the seasons, he told me that I didn’t sound like I was from Arkansas. It was with more than a bit of snobbery that I said, “Thank you.”
You see, I’ve never felt comfortable calling Arkansas home. Not really. I have a distinct memory of being a kid in church distinctly wishing that God would have started me off somewhere more grand. Somewhere more special. Somewhere more interesting. New York City, Portland, Martha’s Vineyard maybe?
So when this bookseller told me that I didn’t “sound like Arkansas,” my inner seven year old heard, “He thinks you sound grand, and special, and interesting.”
My inner seven year old also recognized the landscape around me, overgrown and slightly tatty, as familiar. This shook me slightly- Martha’s Vineyard, this highly esteemed vacation destination for those who consider themselves to be grand and special and interesting. But beyond that, this place was prized because of the freedom that comes with “escaping to the countryside”; it allowed itself and its inhabitants to be okay with being showing some wear around the edges. It was as if the island and it’s inhabitants had made a certain peace with the fact that being a two-hundred year old village on an island on the Eastern seaboard comes with a particular set of challenges; if a shingle was missing or the fence had missed the last two coats of paint they would simply consider it “patina” and continue their grand and special and interesting lives.
It was this and/both concept that really stuck with me. What if, like this island that I had come to appreciate, I was able to hold two things to be true at the same time? Martha’s Vineyard had shown me that a place could be both well-worn while being grand and special and interesting.
What if the same could be true about my own home? Perhaps, if I allowed myself to ignore the redneck / hillbilly / uncultured stereotypes I could see my home state of Arkansas more fully for what it was: Rich in natural beauty perhaps still there because it had been ignored so long as a fly-over state. Why didn’t I more fully appreciate that we don’t have the pollution and population problems which other states find themselves dealing?
What if, instead of thinking of it as the state that is too far west to be truly southern and too far east to be a part of the true west, I took an and/both cue from the Federal Writers project in the mid- 30’s who described Arkansan’s to have, “the politeness of the South and the friendliness of the West [which] are both responsible for that personal tone in "Y'awl hurry back."
What if, as writer Erin Dalton suggests below, we both claim the stereotypes and remind ourselves that living a rich life might incorporate things that are much more meaningful than our state’s GDP.
