Architecture or Entomology

Abstract

THE OZARK MOUNTAINS are an old and diminished range, mostly within Missouri and Arkansas and just beyond the normal reach of Oklahoma’s tornado alley to the west. Topping out short of what most would accept as mountains, these hills and their thin rocky soils aren’t naturally fit for agriculture, though they’ve become fertile ground for trucking companies and poultry and the birth of the new Wal-Mart nation. An ambivalent place, not quite the South or Midwest or West, the region suffers a little from proximity to those regions, taking on aspects of each. Hardwood forests predominate here—red oak and white oak and hickory. Scattered fallow pasturelands covered in white drifts of clover mask the failed efforts of farmers. Chiggers, red bugs, hide in tall grasses, waiting to burrow into the unwary. Prosperity has brought the usual changes and growth, and many more people, but the Ozark region continues to be the sort of place in which one might imagine living as Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.