Some of the least-likely-sounding places in Arkansas are as real as Pickles Gap, Possum Grape and Meemaw's mayhaw jelly.
Pickles Gap is just north of Conway. Possum Grape is between Bald Knob and Newport, and El Dorado has a mayhaw festival in the spring. The fruit looks like an impossible apple the size of a berry. But real and imaginary have a way of slipping back and forth.
The old Spanish legend of El Dorado imagined a "lost city of gold." The story inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write about the once gallant knight who tried to find the place:
[He] fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.
Tough luck for him, but Arkansans can find their own spot of El Dorado in Union County, near the state's southern edge.
REALLY?
Here is a test to show how hard it can be to tell the actual from the merely circumstantial. One of the places in the list below is make-believe. The rest are actual locations in Arkansas. Which one is the ringer? --
Snowball, the setting of writer Sandra D. Bricker's 2009 romance novel, Love Finds You in Snowball, Arkansas. City girl Lucy goes fishin' for kissin' in the Ozarks.
Texarkana. Oh, sure -- right there in Miller County. But how real could it be when 400-pound trucker Buford Hollis claims to hail from Texarkana? Hollis wears a baggy pig's head get-up to fight crime as a Marvel Comics hero, and once teamed up with Spider-Man.
Devil's Hole, the Boone County lair of the monstrous green gowrow, a 20-foot-long lizard with tusks. Arkansas poet Mark Spitzer claims to have found the location thanks to Google Earth. But it was just a "sinkhole" full of junk, he writes in his 2013 collection of monster tales, Crypto-Arkansas.
Arlen, the town where Hank Hill sells propane on the TV cartoon series King of the Hill. The show sent a fact-finding team of cartoonists to Arlen -- east of Pansy, north of Pocahontas -- to sketch the actual locations that appear on screen.
East Calico District: the remains of a cotton gin, grocery store, city jail and other ghost-town relics. Calico Rock in Izard County claims East Calico is the only ghost town inside a community of nearly 1,000 live souls.
NOT REALLY
The fake spot is 4. Arlen is a make-believe town in Texas. But some people believe Texas is real.
Style on 06/08/2014