These lines men draw to distinguish political subdivisions: What do they know about natural separations?
Hints of Arkansas appear in Oklahoma, but only hints. Cross the border and you know something is different, something natural, something that no imaginary line can dictate. Except for rivers and mountains, boundary lines weren't drawn by men on the basis of natural separations, but something is afoot here.
In the early 1960s, on a family drive from our home in Eufaula, Oklahoma, we approached the Arkansas border. The kids said let's cross the line to say that we've been to another state. It was only a few more miles, so the parents said why not.
The incursion was brief--I swear we saw a wild pig rooting by the side of the road--but even at that age I could see that something was different about Arkansas. Eureka!
Not long after, my father and other Corps of Engineers employees in Eufaula were transferred to the Corps' nascent office in De Queen. We would be Arkansans for as long as it lasted.
It didn't last long enough.
Corps families were frequently transferred as the employees acquired land condemned for lakes. Eufaula was home because Lake Eufaula was being built. De Queen was home because several dams were planned in the area.
Later, other places would be home, but none of them could hold a patch to a town in southwestern Arkansas, hard by the Oklahoma border with its ugly state-line beer joints wetting the throats of a dry county.
The move came in the summer of 1962. We quickly settled and placed membership in the First Baptist Church. I enrolled in the fourth grade. Something got a hold of me that summer and it hasn't let go after 53 years.
We didn't just live in De Queen. In the words of the great Wendell Berry, we were members of a community. We were embraced. It was like being the last piece in a jigsaw puzzle that needed us as much as we needed it.
We went to every high school football game, not just the home ones. We ate fried catfish and hushpuppies at the Hob Nob Café, picked peaches in Nashville, swam at Johnson's Bridge on the Rolling Fork River. We socialized like never before. I blossomed.
My preteen temerity wrote the fiction that we were helping Arkansas by being there. During our time, the state got its first Miss America and the Razorbacks began their march to an undefeated, championship season with two wins over teams from ... Oklahoma.
This was no Camelot, I now know. At a discount store in Texarkana, I saw for the first time separate restrooms and drinking fountains for "coloreds." There were blacks in De Queen, but I rarely saw them. Eufaula was the same way; the town that sent the Selmon Brothers to college and professional football had no place for them then in my grade school.
In downtown Texarkana, we were introduced to the splendors of Bryce's Cafeteria. On State Line Avenue in 1964, we saw Lyndon Johnson on a campaign swing after dedicating the dam at Lake Eufaula.
LBJ's predecessor figures in my De Queen story as well. It was there in a fifth-grade classroom that I heard the news about JFK. I was a carrier for the local newspaper; alone among my cadre of paper boys, I actually read the damn thing.
An intense interest in politics carried me downriver to a lifelong career in journalism. Its headwaters may have been in Oklahoma, but the braided stream of my varied vocational interests came together in Arkansas.
Not long after LBJ's whistle-stop in Texarkana, the buying of land from the De Queen Corps office was done. We were done with Arkansas. It wasn't done with me.
Next stop was another city in Oklahoma made famous by Merle Haggard. It was a dirty, scary place. Most likely, I would have sung that tune about any town after De Queen. My entire family lamented the loss of our De Queen membership.
While attending college in Texas, I heard of an outdoor music festival planned for Memorial Day weekend of 1973, in Eureka Springs. I was there and drove through what would become the latest of so many "hometowns."
Five years later, the wife and I honeymooned in Eureka Springs. For 37 years of marriage, the town has invited us to cross the border for a visit. And every time we did, I noticed the quickening of natural change at the border.
The joke about Oklahoma is that it's a nice place to live but you wouldn't want to visit there. Arkansas? Nice place to visit. Even better place to establish a membership.
Fifty years on, I once again have an Arkansas membership card. This time, no transfers loom around the next bend, no unnatural separations.
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James McReynolds retired in February as opinion editor of The Oklahoman. He and his wife Mary, a novelist, moved to Eureka Springs in March.
Editorial on 05/29/2015