"There's Something Exhilarating About Failure..."

The next morning I awoke in the driver’s seat to a pounding on my hood. It was Richard, holding a steaming mug of coffee. "Right on time!" I mumbled.
"I told ye I’d give ya a wake-up call!" he giggled.

He left for work and I braved the sulphur showers. It was bad. There were a few times while under the water that I thought I would throw up. I obsessively smelled myself as I dried off, my skin, my hair, my hands, then marinated in perfume. I felt like Mr. Way Too Much Cologne Wearer from the Bud Light commercials, but I’d rather smell like an overpowering lavender bush than rotten eggs. Later on, getting a haircut in the town beauty salon, I asked the nice, large woman if my hair smelled like sulphur.
"No, actually, I was just thinking it smelled very good!" She was so sweet, even sweeter if she was lying.

I did errands, laundry, got the haircut - it was really fun! The sulphur shower had turned my silver ring a tawny shade of tarnish, and I had to spend seven dollars on polish for it. Still, the man at the hardware store was very kind, explaining the differences between the brands, and let me back into the warehouse to polish my ring in the sink, "to make sure it works". I caused a stir at the laundromat as everyone laughed when I opened my laptop. The repairman, there to fix a dryer, asked an old woman, "Hey, where’s your laptop computer?" The stylist at the hair salon told me about her 24-year-old son, how she told him to go out and get him a nice wife and give her some grandbabies. When he came home after spending $5,000 on a bronco horse, she told him, "You got the wrong thing, I said a wife!" He said, "Momma, this was cheaper than a wife!"

After my whirlwind tour of downtown Jasper, I went back to the campsite to be boring and write. While perched at the picnic table, Mr. Ed, Marie’s husband, rode over on a golf cart. He is 81, with a sparse patch of black hair atop his head, and four yellowed teeth spread through the front of his mouth. His smile was so sweet as he stopped the cart and said, "You kin come over an’ visit any time you want. We’re just sittin’ on the porch."
"Okay, thanks! Do you mean right now?"
"Anytime."
As he drove away I marveled again at the kindness of every person I’d met in Arkansas. I decided to stay another night.

I headed over to Ed and Marie’s a few minutes later. They gave me a warm welcome as I walked past the various four-wheelers, careful not to trip on Bailey, their Jack Russell terrier under my feet. "That was fast!" Ed said from an easy chair set on the porch. "You wanna beer?"
"Sure, thank you."

Marie came out onto the porch after hanging laundry on the line. She put an empty cardboard box next to the easy chairs for empty cans. The porch was comfy, if cluttered, with end tables set strategically around stacked with random items - magazines, books, broken blenders. It was as though someone had set up a living room outside. It was awesome! They told me about their little plot of land, how they’d lived here for more than thirty years. I told them about my misconception of Arkansas and how pleasantly surprised I was by every aspect of it.

Their grandson, Ty, was milling around, a sharp kid with a thick Southern accent, white blonde hair and blue eyes. He’s only seven years old and can drive an ATV better than most adults. He has his own mid-size Honda four-wheeler, which he still looks tiny on. He easily chimed in to our conversation every now and then, in between playing with Bailey. Richard popped over after awhile, before leaving to help someone move. It was just like when I was in Indiana with Frank, sitting on the porch with a cooler full of pop-tops at 2 in the afternoon on a Wednesday, cracking one open and saying, "Yup." Just like in ‘King of the Hill’.

Ed and Marie’s son called them at one point. "You’re early," Marie said, looking at the caller ID. Ed leaned over to me. "Our son calls us every day at the same time. I guess he’s early today." I blushed the color of the peonies in the garden when Ed took the phone and told his son, "We got a girl from New York stayin’ in the back and she sho’ is pretty! She’s gonna move to Mill Creek, you just watch! She’s gonna lahk it here so much she’s gonna stay."

I excused myself after about an hour and a half, before the beer made me too sleepy. A couple hours later, deep into a David Isay book and a pot of instant mashed potatoes, Richard and Ty rode up on their ATV’s. "We’s goin’ out ridin’, you wan’ come?" I didn’t go, Ty was antsy and I didn’t want to make him wait while I finished eating and did dishes. I heard shots up the mountain and figured they were shooting at armadillos again. About an hour later they came bounding back down the hill, as I was putting up my tent. "We brought you a present!" Ty shouted, standing up on his four-wheeler, smiling like an imp.
I believed him, like an idiot. "Really, sweetheart? Thank yo—" Then I saw Richard drive up with a huge grin, holding a dead snake with a hole in its head. It had obviously been shot in the face. It was about five feet long, a common black snake.

I was pissed! Black snakes aren’t poisonous, there was no reason to kill it!

"WHY DID YOU DO THAT?! THAT SNAKE IS A GOOD SNAKE!!!!"
They laughed hysterically. "But it was in the middle of the path!"
"SO WHAT?!"
"So! Girls walk back there a lot. And they git scared of snakes."
That made no sense to me. "So! Girls get scared of mice, too, and those snakes eat mice!"
Ty attempted to be the voice of reason. "They’d git more scared of snakes than mice!" His accent made it sound like "mahce".
Richard was still laughing, overjoyed at my reaction. "Get that away from me," I said. "You’re disgusting. I hope that snake haunts you."
He promised to give me another wake up call the next morning before driving back to his cabin.

Later on, he came back to apologize. "Ah’m sorry Ah upset ya. It’s jist what we do here, we hunt. Here, I brought ya some real presents." He handed me a blue mesh trucker hat with a picture of a tractor trailer on it. Blue letters said, "Pittman Hauling", with a phone number. "That’s my business. It’s got mah number on it, case you ever wanna call." He also handed me a large print of an intricate drawing of a barn set in a woodland scene. It was beautiful, and I told him so. "Thank ye. Mah brother drew it, he’s an artist. Well, he’s also a lawyer, but he likes to draw." It was pretty sweet of him to do that, just because I was upset about a snake.
He woke me up like clockwork the next morning, right at 7:00. He gave me a hug and told me to keep in touch.

Mr. Ed rode up on his golf cart as I was finishing loading the car. "You just come on back whenever you want to, alright? Make me a promise."
"Of course I will," I said, giving him a big hug and kiss on the cheek.
He blushed just like I had the day before. "Awww, you’re welcome back anytime. You’re very kind. And sweet." He smiled his big yellow gap-tooth smile that I love and rode back to the breezy spot at the foot of the mountain to read.

I poked my head in to the house to say goodbye to Miss Marie. She was ironing the clothes that had dried on the line the day before. I hugged her as she told me to hurry back to Mill Creek. "Arkansas sure likes you!" she said.
"I sure love it, too."

I got back in the car and staggered up the gravel hill, hugging those same hair pin turns as I made my way into Jasper for breakfast. Jasper had turned out to be so inexpensive - 75 cent washers and dryers, 20 cent ATM fees, and ten-dollar haircuts! - that I figured I could splurge on breakfast at the Ozark café, the little restaurant in town. I got eggs, bacon, toast and coffee for three dollars, it was excellent. Heading up to the register, I made the waitress ad cook go cross-eyed when I told them I’d never had sweet tea. The cook, a sweet lady with blonde hair under a baseball cap, wasted no time in pouring me a small cup. It was so sweet, she didn’t have to do that!

And so it went through Arkansas, all the way into Tennessee. I loved every minute of being there - what’s interesting is that I’ve spoken with a few other people who live outside of Arkansas since then, even friends of mine, and they’ve all said Arkansas is their favorite state. By the time I got to Memphis, however, it was swamp-ass hot. I had tried to look cute but the heat made sure I was a sweaty wreck, bangs sticking to my forehead and my jeans pasted to my legs from inside. I also checked my account balance - I had $306.76. To last me til god knows when. Suddenly, the trip wasn’t fun anymore.

Knowing my funds were that low made me absolutely panic. I skipped dinner, figuring I had filled the tank and that was the only money I could spend. I couldn’t find a campground and I ended up locked in a cheap motel room in Bolivar, TN, crying my eyes out and cursing myself for spending those five extra dollars on breakfast, or springing for the motel room in Kansas or whatever other stupid money I had spent stupidly. I could only beat my own ass for punishment by making myself do the advanced, 1-hour segment of my work out DVD three times.

The next day was a little better. I felt a little more in control having slept on the fear of failure through the night. A Patton Oswalt quote kept running through my head: "There’s something exhilarating about failure because, for a second, you were shooting for just that." It’s true - I was shooting for this. I was banking on waking up in a cold sweat, knowing that I would have to choose between filling my tummy or my gas tank... I just didn’t know it would be this hard.