Date of Visit: 21 October 2023
Mountain View, AR
65º and sunny
Unique among Arkansas’ state parks, The Ozark Folk Center serves as a place both educational and recreational and draws crowds of people together to experience the legacy of highland Ozark Mountain crafts and music. Having heard of the park for years, especially about the famous Ozark Highlands Theater via their radio show, I thought I understood what to expect. However, after visiting the previous 11 parks where I wandered and hiked solo (even at Prairie Grove Battlefield’s museum, I was alone as I toured both the outdoor and the indoor exhibits), it took me about a half an hour to adjust to this quite different experience. Confined to a relatively small space, the Craft Village gave my recovering knee a good break at the end of my three-day set of parks. Still, I felt awkward for much of the day as I passed in and out of shops and bumped up against other visitors.
Entering the Craft Village, I let my ears dictate my first stop: the Blacksmith Stage. As promised, the village featured live music all day and made the $15 entrance fee well worth it. Lucky for me, a local group of three women known as Sweet Jam performed on my visit. I fell hard for this music and these women, who were generous enough to talk with those in the audience about their instruments (banjo, dulcimer, and fiddle), the music, and their own journeys to becoming performers. When they revealed that they had all taken up their instruments after retirement and none of them had known how to play anything until then, I about fell onto the wooden floor. I am always telling myself that it is too late to learn an instrument because, like a foreign language, music takes a young person’s mind. Sweet Jam proved me wrong. They played instrumental-only versions of traditional folk music, like “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” which Civil War generals banned from being played at night because men would get homesick for their beloveds and go AWOL, or so the legend goes. My trip didn’t extend to any evening music in the theater, but Sweet Jam provided such a great experience that I didn’t miss it.
I visited every shop open that day and saw lots and lots of beautiful work, even getting in some early Christmas shopping and getting to talk to the people who had created what I purchased. However, after Sweet Jam, my second most favorite part of the day was taking a Picnic Swing ride courtesy of a 17-year-old donkey named Whiskey, whose sibling is named Tango. The two switch out powerhouse duties. I believe this swing is authentic to its era, and I’m kicking myself for not writing down what Whiskey’s owner Tina Marie Wilcox (also the village’s herbalist) said about that. Regardless, I enjoyed climbing into the wooden slat bucket seat and hearing Wilcox talk of how Whiskey powering the swing replicated how grist mills worked. Of course, I also jumped (down) at the chance to talk to Whiskey one-on-one at the end of the ride and reward him with a good scratch between the ears.
I’m not sure where the poem will go on this one, but I bet it features Sweet Jam and Whiskey, and maybe a sense of the community created each day between the visitors and park & village staff.
Next up: Lake Dardanelle
