This older article doesn't have anything to do with Holly Grove, but it is about the surrounding area and I thought people would be interested in reading it. This article was published on Sunday, August 2, 1998
SPECIAL REPORT: On the Lower White Last of the River Rats JUDD SLIVKA ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
IT IS 6:55 A.M. on a day that will, with the rising sun, get hot, very hot, Arkansas road-buckling hot, and N.W. Priest knows this. That is why he is out on the river at 6:55 a.m. Priest climbs into his old, aluminum fishing boat with the 25-horsepower motor and putt-putts out to check the nets on one of his trotlines. He plunges a hand into the water and finds a needle-nose gar, the ugliest fish God put in the White River, and he looks at it with mild resignation and more than a little distaste and throws it back. He plunges his hand in again, and when the net comes out of the river, there is ... nothing. "Last year was the worst year until this year, of all the years I've seen," Priest says later, rocking back and forth in a flaking white rocking chair on his fading front porch in DeValls Bluff. "If I didn't love this fishing, I'd to have quit. I haven't even made my expenses this year." Less than a mile from where he rocks, past the chipped white shed where he stores the random acquisitions of his 86 years -- antlers from the bucks he's shot, pictures of the fish he's caught, Indian grindstones from Peckerwood Lake, salvaged bits of an 1870s steamboat wreck downstream -- the White River is rising between its muddy banks, almost 12 feet higher than it usually is in the early summer. It is raining in the Midwest, and all that water is spilling down the Mississippi River, and the Mississippi is forcing its water up the White. The higher Mississippi corks the White's waters, forcing its own water up the White, which causes water to overrun the White's alluvial bottom lands, a phenomenon known as backwater flooding. When the rivers do that too much, as they did in the great flood of 1927, when thousands of square miles near the confluence of the White, the Arkansas and the Mississippi rivers were entirely underwater, the levees burst. In 1927, when the White River broke through in two places at Clarendon, people steered their motorboats through the first floor of the Monroe County courthouse. It took three weeks for the water to recede, years for the damage to be repaired. It will not take quite as long for the waters to fall this time, because though the Mississippi is full, it is far from bursting. But there is a lot of water coursing down the White because the Army Corps of Engineers is releasing water from the Bull Shoals Lake dam to make more power for hot people and their air conditioners. The water the Corps releases moves past Priest's home and will make its way 75 miles downstream to where Jesse Bradbury sits in an old lawn chair and looks at his hoop nets. The nets are not in the river. They're behind his trailer, because the river is rising and the fishing is awful. All along the lower White River -- from Batesville, south -- things are changing. Houseboats that once lined the shores are gone, the fish aren't swimming the way they used to, and civilization is slowly but surely encroaching on the river's culture. This is the way life is on the White: The river that has changed its course thousands of times over thousands of years is being changed by man. And the life the river nurtured is changing with it. The White starts innocuously enough in Northwest Arkansas, where three streams come together in Washington County. It flows north and east into Missouri, where it has been dammed to form Beaver Lake and Table Rock Lake and Lake Taneycomo, before wandering back into Arkansas as Bull Shoals Lake. At Batesville, the river changes. The cold, clear, trout-filled mountain waters give way to a muddy, meandering commercial highway. For years, people hunted and fished and dove for mussels on the lower White River -- living off it with little regard for the conventions of civilization beyond the levees, and too poor to live in the city. And it was a living -- one historian notes that in 20 months of the 1920s, the river's fishermen shipped almost 4 million pounds of fish to the markets at Rosedale, Miss. There were mussels to harvest and timber to cut and, if the mood struck you, moonshine to make in stills hidden deep in the hardwood forests. People along the White's banks lived by an old river maxim: "If you're coming down the river and are hungry or thirsty, stop in someone's boat and have all you want. Just don't take a damn thing when you leave." Fifty years ago and nearly 300 winding miles from where the river changes at Batesville, a woman named Birdie Jenkins stood on her houseboat in Little Island Chute and berated a visitor from the city for belittling the "river rats" living in their floating tar-paper shacks and eating whatever the river and its bottom land provided. "There are only two kinds of people on this river," Jenkins said to her visitor. "River rats and sonsabitches. And which one are you?"
Clarendon: The Last Houseboat on the Cache John Ward is a river rat, or used to be, until his wife's rheumatoid "arth-a-ritis" got too bad and it was dangerous for her to be walking around the houseboat, especially since she couldn't swim a lick, even after living on the river much of her life. Ward was born on a houseboat in 1938, stayed on the river until he was 10, and lived on the river another 22 of his 59 years. Until Pearleen's arthritis kicked in two years ago, the Wards lived on a houseboat tied up just inside the mouth of the Cache River, a skip over the sandbar from where the Cache meets the bigger White, just north of Clarendon. "It was just a poor, welfare way of living," he says. Now he sits in his front yard at Clarendon, a yard littered with chairs and lamps and odd bits and rusty ends of things. Ward has left the river and become a flea market dealer. He pauses to sip some coffee, looks over at a lamp he'll be selling in Pine Bluff later this day and says it again. "It was just a poor welfare way of living for the very few people who couldn't afford to live uptown, so they lived out on the river where they could live free. They couldn't afford to pay rent or utilities or taxes in the city, so they went out to the river where they could be free and go to the bathroom behind any tree you could find." Ward's daddy was a commercial fisherman and a mussel diver, and running the rivers was a family affair for folks too poor to own a boat with a motor. Ward and his brothers would get up at 3 a.m. and paddle upstream three or four miles to remove the previous night's catch from the trotlines, then paddle back downstream to the floating fish market at Clarendon, where they got 15 cents a pound for catfish. Then they'd run to the grocery store for oleo and a bottle of molasses. After school, they'd paddle back up the river to bait the trotlines all over again. Ward returned to this life, over and over again. Even when he was living in Leslie and guiding tours on the Buffalo River, his thoughts kept turning to the White. "They say that once you get a taste of White River water, you'll always return," Ward says. "I guess I got it in my blood." And, as if to prove that, later in the day he will bend over the side of his boat and scoop up the river's water in his hands and drink it deeply and contentedly and smile. "You wouldn't do that for all the money in the world," he says to the two sonsabitches in his boat. "You'd think you'd get some kind of bac-teer-i-a." Ward confides that he only left the river because of Pearleen's arth-a-ritis, prompting a yell from inside the house -- "I told you you can go back anytime you feel like it, John" -- and he leans forward to elaborate, "Given the choice between being out on the river or taking care of my wife, I choose taking care of her." He allows that winning $104,000 at Caribbean stud poker in a Mississippi casino two years ago made the move easier, but he's conflicted about what money can do. After all, it's changing the river he can no longer be on. "Money talks," he says. "Money rules this world. When these large companies want something done, they go to Washington. Next thing you know, they're out here doing something. Who's getting the money? Who's getting the benefit? Not Arkansans. It's the barge industry." The government has been busy on the lower White. Army Corps of Engineers dredge boats go up and down the river, sucking the silt from the bottom and depositing it on a sandbar, where it will wash back into the river again when the water gets high. The role of the Corps on the river has been major; the Corps' effect on the river has been debatable. Depending on who is speaking, the river has more fish or fewer fish, and the Corps has or has not contributed to that. The mussels at the bottom of the river are no longer reproducing because the divers have picked them all away, or because the Corps has dredged them out or dredged them over. This is what is known: People are not catching as many fish as they used to. Priest can't meet his expenses; Bradbury's nets are behind his trailer; and Ward has a brother whose trotlines have two fish in them despite being out for the better part of a week. This much is known, too: There are far fewer commercial fishermen on the river today then there were 10 years ago. Is it because dams upstream make the water too cold, keeping the fish, especially the alligator gar, from spawning? Or is it that poachers have advanced beyond putting old hand-crank telephones into the water to electrocute fish? Now they have "Skoal boxes," pocket-size machines made from empty snuff boxes and $10 in hardware-store parts -- transistors and wires that can paralyze 2,000 pounds of fish a night. And what happened to the mussel trade, which is gone now, too? Buttons used to be stamped out of mussel shells -- the poorest part of Newport was known as Buttoncutters' Row for many years. But zippers and plastic killed that industry in the 1940s. The mussel trade had a brief resurgence in the early 1990s, when Japanese companies began buying shells to use as seeds for cultured pearls -- oysters took better to pieces of mussel shell than to sand. But when the mussel supply disappeared, that brief boom ended, too. Its passing is marked by the piles of broken mussel shells that still line the streets near Clarendon's landing. Economics, at least, explains the demise of the button trade, if not the disappearance of the mussels. And the development of catfish farms suggests why there is little demand for river-grown catfish, and thus, fewer fishermen. But no one has answers about what happened to life on the river, only opinions and guesses based on folk sense. This much is known: In the 1930s, an estimated 500 people lived full time along the river from Clarendon to the mouth. The best estimates for 1998 put that number at no more than five. Why? "Air conditioning," laughs Charlie Dixon, one of Bradbury's neighbors at the White River National Wildlife Refuge. "There were a bunch of people who just homesteaded and then found a better life, so they left. "You can't legal-fish on this river anymore and hope to make a living." Up the river at Clarendon, Ward has backed his fishing boat into the water. He guns the engine, pushing back into the channel before doing two exuberant figure eights in front of the landing. He is heading to the mouth of the Cache, where he still keeps the houseboat he and Pearleen left in 1996, after her arthritis got too bad. On the way, he motors to the White's east bank and stops in front of a clearing scattered with blackened mussel shells. "This used to be called 'Red Ward's Landing.' That was my father. We used to work here." And he goes on to describe how his mother would tie strings to her sons and let them go out into the river shallows and pick up as many mussels as they could hold and put them in the boat to be transported to Red Ward's Landing, where they would be opened and sold to button companies. Then his eye catches on the end of a rusty scoop, half thrust into the bank. "I remember this," he says, washing the shovel off in the river. "I must've scooped a million pounds of mussels with this." Then he is quiet, like the river. "John," the river-rat-turned-flea-market junk dealer says to himself, "you haven't got a bit of use in the world for this thing. Don't bring it home." And Ward lets it go into the river where it sinks into the brown water, without sound or bubbles.
Benzal Bridge: Who runs the banks? There was still snow on the river's banks back in the '60s, when the White's bottom gave up Johnny Wade from wherever it had been hiding him. The river rat had been missing since the fall. His body floated past Leo George's boat. George mentions this casually, as if he were discussing someone dropping a plate of catfish on the floor of the local store and restaurant, the Wild Goose. Truth is, not much fazes Leo George. He is 65 now, and he has seen too much with his deep brown eyes. He's seen waves from barges racing upriver that nearly swamped his houseboat -- made the fixtures rattle and the plates jangle in the cabinets. He's seen the Benzal Bridge on fire in the middle of the night when someone -- no one in the river bottoms will say who -- set the span on fire in a river-rat protest against everything new. This gray morning -- it is raining and finally cool, and the sky is ugly with monochrome clouds -- he looks with those seen-enough-to-know-he's-seen-too-much eyes from the river to his kitchen table, with its arrangement of salt and pepper shakers, Cajun seasoning for catfish (and for steak when he can afford it), insulin and needles for wife Maxine's diabetes, eye medications for Maxine's glaucoma. It is a hard life for George, who was born on a bend in Indian Bay, where his father had lived so long that it had come to be called "Frank George's Pocket." George left the river only twice, returning once when he determined that California had too much concrete for a country boy like him and again when the Mohawk Rubber Co. factory in Helena closed. He cannot read or write, his wife can barely see, and the houseboat they live on is under attack from nature and the federal and state governments. This is what George's eyes see on this monochrome morning: That though he has lived in his houseboat for more than 20 years, he is not long for the river. "I've enjoyed life on this river," he says over a plate of fried eggs and pork-sausage patties, cathead biscuits and cigarette smoke. "I haven't made any money from it, but I've enjoyed living on it. I like it best when I hear this ... " He falls silent with a forkful of eggs halfway between plate and mouth and looks out the window over the river. Only a buzzing from the kitchen light breaks the quiet. George owns one of the two houseboats still on the lower river full-time. They're within a half-mile of each other and within a quarter-mile of the Benzal Bridge, an old Missouri-Pacific Railroad span the state's Department of Parks and Tourism acquired in a federal program that allows dormant track beds to be used by states at minimal cost. There are rumors that Union Pacific will acquire the track bed to ease load problems throughout the state. If not, the state plans to turn the bridge into part of a walking and biking trail, Delta Heritage Trail State Park. George does not care about the state park, though he does want to see someone bicycle across the bridge, which is 175 feet above the river and has several old railroad ties missing. He wants to be left alone, and in this he does not stand out among houseboat owners, all of whom are finding it increasingly difficult to find places to moor. The White River National Wildlife Refuge controls more than 150,000 acres, and the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge places another 19,000 acres under federal control. Nearly all of the land on one or both sides of the river from Clarendon to the mouth is owned by the White River refuge. The government has been trying to regulate houseboat usage since the early 1960s, but in the 1970s, then-U.S. Rep. Bill Alexander interceded on the houseboaters' behalf. By order of Congress, the houseboats were allowed to stay on the refuge, but only until their owners died. Their permits cost $300 a year. Then, in 1994, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service settled a lawsuit brought by the Audubon Society and other environmental groups over "non-compliant" use of refuge lands around the country. The settlement specified that wildlife refuges were for the protection and development of wildlife, not for water-skiing or commercial grazing. Among the activities specifically prohibited by the settlement are: mining of selenite crystals at Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma; cabin rentals at North Platte National Wildlife Refuge in Nebraska; and houseboat mooring at the White River refuge. "Personal use of public land is just not allowed in the settlement," says refuge superintendent Larry Mallard. "It's not just our rule. It's the law." Since the lawsuit, the Fish and Wildlife Service has taken a harder line with houseboaters. When the refuge became legally closed to boats not grandfathered in, the houseboaters found other places to go, like Arkansas Game and Fish Commission land or Arkansas State Parks land. That isn't working out. Houseboat owners tied up on Game and Fish land at Felsenthal Lock and Dam have been booted by a federal court, and the one boat owner tied on state parks land beneath the Benzal Bridge is in an acrimonious battle with that agency. Some houseboaters have gone to Corps of Engineers land near Aberdeen. That land, however, is supposed to be turned over to the refuge, and Mallard has told the Corps it must get rid of the houseboats before he will accept it. A federal lawsuit has been filed against George and 15 other houseboat owners -- the others are part-timers who use their boats as hunting camps and weekend getaways -- on Fish and Wildlife land at the Benzal Bridge or farther upstream at Jack's Bay. The suit also names the First Electric Cooperative, the utility that provides power to the houseboats. The case has been assigned to Judge George Howard Jr., the same judge who ruled that houseboats couldn't tie up to state land beneath Felsenthal Lock and Dam. As the government buys land for the refuge, the land adjacent to it becomes more valuable. Now private landowners, once sympathetic to the houseboaters, have begun to turn against them. This spring, one part-time houseboater who refused to relinquish his mooring to private land near Preston Ferry returned one day to find his power pole chopped down. Where can the houseboats go? "If it was somethin' that I should pay rent for, I would have paid rent," says George. "Well, $300 a year ain't much rent. But what am I payin' rent for? The free water that runs beneath the boat?" George's world is most of the time limited to his brown-paneled houseboat with its stitched Last Supper tapestry and its spice rack full of pill bottles. From here, what he sees is a government taking away its citizens' rights. "Take this canal up there," he says, looking past his breakfast upstream toward Lock and Dam No. 1. "The government built it. And if they told you not to build a cabin boat in it, well, I'd understand it. But they had nothing to do with the building of this river. It belongs to all of us." There is then an uncomfortable silence, and George looks at Maxine, putting her breakfast dishes away in the sink. His eyes have no life in them. "Me and her," he says, gesturing to Maxine at the sink, "We been talkin' about it. We're both gettin' sick, and we're going to have to move to town. "But still they're taking our rights away." Maxine turns around. "Where are we going to go?" she rasps. "Where are you going to go when you don't have money enough -- when you're barely getting by now? "Where are we going to go?"
Big Island: A Love Story Right after deer season was always the best time, Callie Wargo says now, more than seven years after her husband's death. That was when she and Tim would take down the electric fence around their garden so the deer would have something to feed during the winter. Callie and Tim could sit on their porch, look toward the garden and watch the deer eat in the late afternoon, and enjoy holding hands and being together in the bleak December light, while their four dogs -- Leroy, Dusty, Bruce and Bo -- sniffed around the front steps. Callie had just wanted to talk to him that winter afternoon he died, and she had turned on the television to wake him up gentle from his after-lunch nap. As Oprah got louder and Tim slept on, she walked over to him. As soon as she touched him, she knew he was gone. His family took Tim Wargo's body off Big Island by boat that day, before the sun set. Callie Wargo has gone back only once since then, just to gather some things. "I couldn't go back," she says now, 88 years old and alone in an apartment in Dumas. "I'd be looking for him." Big Island is not really an island, not until the waters on the Arkansas and the White get high and make it one. It is the last tip of land on the White River, surrounded by the Arkansas to the south, the Mississippi to the east and the White to the north. Its 26,000 acres have some of America's last remaining bottom-land hardwoods. Some environmentalists claim it is as important as the Florida Everglades and Georgia's Okenfenokee Swamp. But something at the tip of the island is rising, the way that nothing does in the Everglades or the Okenfenokee: Montgomery Point Lock and Dam, estimated to cost $242 million. In the name of Montgomery Point, the Corps has cleared nearly 200 acres at the tip of Big Island. But Callie Wargo does not know this, because she is in Dumas, miles away. Her apartment is neat, unremarkable, decorated with pictures of grandchildren and of Tim. There is Tim sitting in the Jeep, pipe clenched in his teeth. And on the wall, a sunset over the Arkansas River that Tim photographed from their front porch. Tucked into a book near her coffee table is a picture of Tim and a buck he shot -- 10 points, with a 22-inch interior spread. Tim is smiling in that picture. When Callie pulls the picture out of the book, she smiles, too. For Callie Wargo, Big Island was Tim, and Tim was Big Island. For 22 years, they were the island's sole full-time occupants. And the hardships -- generating their own electricity, having only a two-way radio for communication with the outside world -- didn't matter. "Why would I want to go back?" she says. "Why would I want to go back without Tim?"
The River's Mouth: An Epilogue On the landing at Clarendon, dwarfed by the river in front of him and the levee behind him, Stan Ward fumes. He is mildly perturbed at his wife, Carolyn, for not wanting to go crappie fishing with him this 98-degree day, though he has her walking through the river's shallows dragging a net for minnows while he stands dry on the landing. He is furious at the river. Like his older brother John -- the river-rat-turned-flea-market dealer -- Stan Ward was born and raised on a houseboat, then moved to dry land. Now he lives in Clarendon, works for Riceland Foods and comes out to the river when he gets a chance, usually each of his four days off in the four-on, four-off schedule he works. "There's no commercial fishing left on this river," he says. "Oh, the fish are here. But the rise of catfish farms ended commercial fishing on this river. If you tried to make a living on the river, you'd better have a welfare check to live off of." "Oh, brother," Ward's wife says, rolling her eyes, because Carolyn Ward has heard Stan's song before. With his older brother, Stan Ward paddled upstream in the dark hours of the morning to fetch the night's haul of river fish. Like his older brother, he hogged mussel shells with his fingers, then made a homemade diving rig out of the top of a water heater, a garden hose and an old air compressor so he could go down on the river bottom blind and feel his way to mussel shells. And like his brother, there is a hurt running through him, because though he has his theories like everyone else does, Stan and John Ward do not know what is happening to the life along the White River they grew up with. "People stopped searching for mussels because even if you could get someone to buy them, you couldn't find them in the river any more," Stan Ward sneers. He still fishes the river, even though he stays angry at it and at the forces changing it: upstream dams, Corps of Engineers dredges, people who no longer trust the river's products. This is how it is on the lower White River: Big business or big government owns the banks, the fish aren't biting, there is a dam being built downstream, a highway might cross Big Island, and the land is being changed -- in earnest, now, not by accident. Callie Wargo is alone, and Leo George is fighting to keep his houseboat where it is, a battle he is guaranteed to lose. The river has changed its course a thousand times over a thousand years. Now man is changing it and being changed along with it, and it is up to John Ward, pulling his old boat onto an trailer after a rare day out on the river, to eulogize the river. "I want to be out here so damned much," he says, not with anger like his brother, but with bitter, bitter remorse. "But I know I can't be out here, and that hurts me so much. I dread coming out here now. "I just dread it."
