The Ozark Mountains stand as weather-worn headstones to the ancient mountainous past of southern Missouri. Once towering spires that reached for miles into the sky, the mountains are mounds of dolomite and limestone, with pockets of lead and granite perpetually clinging to the hillsides, hillsides that clothe deep caves and aortas of coal. Wind, water and time have gently filed away the robust majesty of the mountains, leaving the subtle and welcoming arms of rolling hills, open glades and mumbling streams that occasionally raise their voices after heavy spring rains. Steep valleys, river shut-ins, blocks of granite and jagged stone outcroppings remain as markings of the past life of mountains.
The Ozark forests teem with trees of the rainbow. Oak, maple, hickory, dogwood, beech, locust, sycamore, walnut, ash and pecan trees furl into streamers of ruby, saffron and orange come October. Thick as a rain forest, the trees stans trunk to trunk and reach to the sky, tickling each otherÕs leaves for sunlight. Birds of the forest—cardinals, bluebirds, robins, sparrows, finches, mourning doves and owls—flaunt colors and trade songs with equal enthusiasm, each taking turns throughout the day. Wildflowers punctuate the vast greens of the meadows. White-tail deer, rabbits and chipmunks wander through the shadows and sunlight. Coyotes and bobcats shy from the sunlight, waiting for the shadows, while coral, copperhead, cottonmouth and rattlesnakes sometimes seek the heat of the sun and sometimes shy from it.
The breezes hiss through the forest, unsettling dried leaves and sticks and juggling blossoms and seed heads into the air. High above, bald eagles and red-tail hawks soar with grace and power in the rising thermal currents. The summer rains come with the heat of the day, wiping away dust and sap. The rain seeps quickly through soil, through the purifying carbon stratums and to the bedrock, where it tables and pools underground, eventually returning to the surface through natural springs, keeping clear the gentle streams that meander through the valleys, conducting the percussive taps of riffles and shoals over smooth and polished stones.
The prevailing mood of the hills holds hands with the gentle wisdom of the people, the ghost stories of the hollows, the soft roll of the hills. Nothing is abrupt or haphazard; all is well-thought and painted like a masterpiece, slowly and purposefully, brushes being handed from one to another. The breeze whispers as a comforting voice, an inviting call to deliberateness, to stillness, to peace, to comfort, like the hand of a grandfather that leads his grandson to a pond of sunfish, or the hand of a grandmother that teaches her granddaughter needlepoint on the swing of the front porch. The mountains-turned-to-hills tell the stories of understanding, confidence and acceptance, told through millions of years of strength and gentle yielding. The hickory tree, the Black River, the three-toed box turtle, the checkered madtom, the purple poppy mallow, the red lacewing, the pink granite shut-ins all are writing the story of the Ozarks, a story told through the crackling and spitting of streams and the humming and whistling of songbirds, a story refined with age.
The Copper River starts from the high rises of the Ozarks near Mendleton, a town of trees, a city square, the railroad and lead mines. The river forces its way through the forest, stripping away particles of the smooth granite boulders that have endured its wrath better than the limestone bedrock has. The river crashes through hills, occasionally catching its breath in short and deep pools lined by great hickories and elms.
The river slows and spreads when it dumps into the flat expanse of the southeast part of the state, the expanse reaching for scores of miles to the Mississippi to the east and south to the Boot Heel. The river loses its purity, turning as thick and brown as gravy as it drags along soil from creeks and drainages, slowing down and dragging even more silt and mud. The river crawls its way into Arkansas, nearly lifeless, the Ozarks and Missouri behind it.
White Americans drained most of the swamp nearly 100 years ago, converting cryptic and ancient bottomland hardwoods—replete with cypress and black gum trees and reptiles and birds of every shape and size—into farmland. In the early part of the century, farmers' shacks dotted the flats, each serving a few alkaline acres of cotton, milo, tobacco, corn or sugar cane in the summer and cabbage, onions, beets and kohlrabi in the spring and fall, depending on the temperament of the frosts. Chickens clucked about the shacks, pecking into the clay for seeds. Children in torn overall and women in torn dresses tended the chickens and the pigs. The men jammed wooden plows into the ground, cursing at the mules that only sometimes seemed motivated to work. A man could buy acres cheap at that time, and hundreds of immigrants moved into the shadeless flats, and fought off mosquitoes, locusts, ticks and chiggers.
They gathered every Sunday at St. Anne's Lutheran Church in the town of Copper, where the Ozarks and the flats meet. The church was built into the side of a hill, just above the river. Parishioners built a small ferry, for the times the river ran too wild for mules or carts. Only the pastor, Fr. Alsace Lyon, who also was a doctor, owned an automobile, and he used it only for emergencies.
For three years after the harvest and between the winter snows, the farmers, with the close direction from the Army Corps of Engineers, dug a lake near the church and rectory. They dug it deep, dragging the heavy clay out by the wheelbarrow and wagon load. When the clay became so hard and impermeable, they used dynamite. The lake took three falls to dig, and was 55 feet deep in parts. They lined parts of the bottom with old Christmas trees to encourage the crappie to spawn. Other parts, especially near the channel and edges, were covered with gravel for the largemouth bass and redear sunfish. Two arms on the south end were kept shallow for carp. For a year, they filled the lake with diversionary water from the Copper River. Finally, the Copper County Community Lake opened. They planted trees, and within a few years they were tall enough for summer shade for church gatherings and weddings.
Lyon reminded his parishioners that God was with them always, and that the economic times would never worsen; that they, like the Israelites before them, ultimately would find the Lord's favor once again. They believed him every Sunday and plodded back to their shacks, with their leaking roofs and cracked windows. Copper grew slowly in size, eventually having its own post office and its own small hospital.
Coarse gravel roads crisscrossed the treeless flats, sometimes wiped out by heavy spring rains. Sometimes late rains would wash away the new crops, but not often. The farmers learned to be patient. Four farmers would share the same silo or barn, and these quartets plowed together, sowed together and reaped together. Even a few acres was too much for a single man. Once their main crops were sown and growing, a few of the farmers tilled extra land for barley, rye and wheat; some used this for livestock feed, while other traded it to the Hill People for whiskey or deer meat. Some planted fruit trees, such as apricot, apple and pear.
As time went by, the Flats People scraped together enough money to buy a tractor, then a second, then a tractor for each man. Eventually, one farmer would buy out the other, simply because there wasnÕt enough work for four men anymore. Eventually, combines, irrigation and better fertilizers would create enough efficiencies to thin the hundreds of farms down to a couple dozen or so.
The Marble Hills are a heavily forested upland that line the east side of the flats, just above the small town of Hawthorne. The first white immigrants who lived there kept to themselves, occasionally riding a mule to town for the trading of stories and purchasing of guns and bullets. For hundreds of years before the white settlers, American Indians lived off the land, as hunters, gatherers and farmers, sewing their own tales into the quilt of the Ozarks. The Hill People told stories of goblins, trolls and the ghosts of Confederate soldiers to their children. They were poorer even than the farmers and worked in the fields during the planting and harvesting seasons, to earn a few extra cents to buy soap, hats and socks.

Bernard Ourth works as a writer, web site manager, and publications editor for the Natrona County School District (Wyoming). He was born in St. Louis, and earned a degree in communcation at Saint Louis University. The two prose pieces in this issue are taken from different sections of his novel, The Counting of Sparrows, set in the Ozarks and Bootheel.

Copyright © 2006. Do not reproduce without permission.

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