Lake Norfork

Mountain Home, Arkansas

We're spending a couple of weeks here. Mountain home is not easy to get to, which is one reason I like it. It's in the Ozarks and there are no interstate highways within 200 miles. The signs going into town say that the population is 11,012 but those are the 2000 census numbers.

They have five tennis courts and several movie theaters. They are moving the town library to a new site. There is a meat market that sells excellent steaks. Lake Norfork winds for miles way up into Missouri. We're hoping to catch the Arkansas Chili Cookoff up at Bull Shoals before we leave.


The Wal-Mart is world class. Wal-Mart started here in Arkansas...We have friends here, Paul and Diane. Almost all my friends and all my pets are dead. Paul and Diane have made the cut...it's more about who they are than that they are not dead yet...We used to camp in their compound in the woods, but the new motor home won't negotiate the driveway so we stay on the lake in an Army Corps of Engineers campground. It's only $9 a night with our senior discount.

Paul has given us the key to his pontoon boat, the "Ratty Bastard". We take it out on the lake and swim and float and sleep and read...Someone is siphoning his gas at night...we go out a mile and back and use 8.5 gallons....he's going to put a lock on the tank tank...


This is a place we could stay for a month and watch the leaves change..I play a lot of tennis with Mrs. Phred and have three 6-4 losses....almost my best ever...They are spending stimulus dollars to upgrade the campground...It's somewhat like Roosevelt's CCC program although the workers zoom in and out with big shiny new trucks...

On the One Hand...

Lake Norfork, Arkansas

We're parked on the shore of Lake Norfork. Our campground is provided by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. When they build a dam and create a huge recreational lake, they usually throw in a few nicely engineered campgrounds.


You probably read about the incident in California where an old man punched a health care supporter in the nose and had his little finger bitten off in return. It wasn't me. I'm strictly a nose-biter. Sure...it's true I could have put on a pair of adult diapers and driven 30 hours to the California rally. But I didn't...really.


The old guy didn't like the idea of government being involved in health care. One of the biggest worries of this type is that the wrong kind of people might get treated for illnesses or injuries. Then there is also the concern about "death panels" denying treatment to registered Republicans. The irony is that the the old guy got his finger treated with his Medicare card. The doctors couldn't reattach the pinky because of concerns about bacteria. Medicare will cover a tetanus shot.


The lake is lovely. Paul and Diane loaned us their pontoon boat. We go out every day after tennis and read, picnic and swim in a sheltered cove. We used to be boat owners. Due to a long series of expensive disasters, Mrs. Phred and I really appreciate the concept of "other peoples boats" and feel very lucky to have such generous friends.


The boat is called the "ratty bastard". We are a little disappointed that Paul has removed the tiki torches. It's a long boat, with a turning radius similar to an aircraft carrier. As we try to dock it, Mrs. Phred gives me a stream of shouted instructions. I try to turn the helm over to her, but to no avail.

The prime rib at Keller's cove was excellent, as usual. The tattooed waitress tells us that she had her baby since our last visit. They no longer have karaoke, which is an annoyance since I had seriously rehearsed "Billy the Mountain" by Frank Zappa in preparation for the visit.

Places to eat before you die

Keller’s Kove Restaurant and Bar- Lake Norfork, Arkansas

The restaurant is by invitation only. While this sounds exclusive, don’t overdress. They want you to call in advance because they need to know how much prime rib to cook and because too many biker gangs were showing up and getting into drunken brawls.

The prime rib is very large and tender, rubbed with a thick coating of black pepper. The menu still says the meat is hand cut by John, but this seems improbable since he has moved back to California. You get horseradish sauce without asking.

The restaurant décor is rustic, as befits a fish camp on Lake Norfork. The overworked owner/waitress had a new tattoo on her arm.

Paul and I ate there during the week. We killed two bottles of Merlot at dinner and brought home about half of the huge chunks of tender prime rib that arrived on our plates.

We were looking forward to the blackberry cobbler, but the boomers have been complaining about getting seeds stuck in their dentures so they switched over to cherry cobbler.

The lake is at record levels with all the spring rainfall. It’s been a tough spring with days of downpour and one tornado that carved a record 120 mile swath of devastation between Clinton and Gasville.

I’ve found a really good blog that adds a lot to the racial dialog occurring all over America. It’s called “Stuff White People Like” and includes extensive in depth analysis of this often misunderstood minority. Subjects include old t-shirts, San Francisco, Barrack Obama, whole foods, "The Wire" on TV, St. Patrick’s Day, yoga, expensive sandwiches, hybrid cars, microbreweries, having gay friends and foreign educations (Europe is good, but Tibet trumps everything).

We drove down to Conway yesterday to help Carolyn and Jason get their house ready to sell. I got to drive a big Toro lawn mower. It was pleasing to see the Barrack Obama stickers on the back of Jason's SUV. His friend Chris had one too. We had expensive sandwiches for lunch.

WFD Discovered in Arkansas

Lake Norfork, Arkansas

At 4:45 AM Mrs. Phred and I tiptoed down the driveway to set up our lawn chairs. We drank our coffee and stared up from the deserted country road at Capella in the constellation Aurigid. Venus and the Sun rose at about 6 AM. We find we are a little too far East to catch the meteor shower caused by the long tail of the Comet Kiess. Kiess swung by about 83 B.C and again in 1911. The tail it left behind intersected our orbit this morning at about 4:36 AM PDT. It will not happen again in our lifetimes.


In the morning we had a wood-chipping and garage cleaning session. As we sifted though layers of debris in the three-car garage, we discovered many strange and exotic artifacts.



Water Flotation Devices were spotted deployed in actual use in Lake Norfork, Arkansas yesterday afternoon. The locals refer to these strange objects as "noodles".


I got to go diving in the lake. I was weighted for salt-water diving and didn't bother to reweight for the less buoyant fresh water. I saw a few striped bass. The water got much colder at depth. My 25 year old buoyancy control device blew out while I was 50 feet down and wouldn't retain any air. I didn't want to leave my weights behind, but I was much too heavily weighted to swim up. So I went hand-over-hand along the rocky bottom to the shore, dropped off my weights and swam back to the boat.


They let me drive a jet sky later. I only fell off once, while trying to do a 180 top speed turn on a dime.


Paul's 8-week diet was over, so we all had 2 pound chunks of prime rib, baked potato with butter and sour cream and blueberry cobbler with ice cream in the evening to celebrate. A nice day...time to move on.

Arkansas: Doubtful Paternity

Mountain Home, Arkansas-

Paul and I install greenboard and concrete backerboard in his main bathroom with the big jacuzzi. He approves of my wine. We fish for striped bass in Lake Norfolk and play more tennis.

The drywall 'mud' guy shows up on Saturday. He is alone because it is the beginning of muzzle-loader hunting season so his helpers have run off hunting. He says his dad, Lee, owns the business... or at least he thinks Lee is his dad, it's hard to tell, he says.


Paul's 87 year old mother-in-law makes blueberry pie or blackberry cobbler every night. She gives us crossword puzzles and old Smithsonian magazines for the road.

The Mountain Home 'senior' centre is located near the municipal swimming pool and tennis courts. They send out shuttle buses to collect the old folks who want to play cards or swim. Paul says the local officials are into reality-based management and don't want them driving anywhere, if possible.

There's an interesting local story about a judges daughter, a murder cover-up and many witnesses who have now met with untimely deaths. Marshall, Arkansas may have the highest rate of unsolved murders per capita in the US.

The local police have an occasional big day of stopping pickup trucks to inspect for seat belt violations. This is always on the front page in advance with news about the war on page five or six.

I replace a burned out RV tail-light bulb and clean, tighten and lubricate the motorcycle chain with WD-40 and molybdenum disulfide. It's time to move on. West on Route 66.

We will spend the next six weeks exploring 'the mother road', Route 66. On 13 October, 1984, the last stretch of the legendary road was decommissioned near Williams, Arizona. It was replaced by Interstate 40. About 85% of the old road is still drivable. Many of the ghost towns along I-40 were killed by the bypasses.

I play the 1965 hit 'Ticket to Ride' by the Beatles on the RV CD player and remember a drive the same year along Route 66 in a TR4-A, painted British racing green, with the same companion. Everything we owned was in the trunk.

Not a Man-Eating Catfish

Mountain Home, Arkansas 

 Paul's new house in the deep Arkansas woods is nearly ready to move into after two years in process. His front porch floor is built of salvaged two-inch thick maple bowling alley lanes. He's done almost all the work himself, but has hired workers to mud the drywall this week so he can move in later this month.

Paul loans us his old red 1977 Dodge Ram pickup truck every day to drive into the Mountain Home municipal tennis courts. We pull up to the empty tennis court parking lot in the thundering Ram and jump out in our tennis whites for two hours of free tennis. Mrs Phred wins 6-1, 6-1 each day. The tennis grandmothers ask us if we live here or are just passing though. We disappoint them.

In the evening we take Paul's ancient pontoon boat, The "Ratty Bastard" out on the huge Norfork lake for dinner and wine. He has outfitted the boat with cheap plastic chairs and tacky Tiki torches all around that he lights after nightfall. I swim in the dark with my old black fins in the middle of the lake. No alligators or sharks for a change, but Paul warns me about Volkswagen-sized man-eating catfish. The water feels about 78 degrees F. There are whole towns under the lake which was created when the TVA dammed the river for hydroelectricity.

We drink two bottles of Paul's excellent home-made Bardolinlo on the lake and Paul goes into an angry 'Bush-the-Deserter' rant. We both laugh and discuss how the world would have been much different with a MacArthur/Patton ticket in '52. Paul is concerned that Bush is packing the Supreme Court with ex-corporate attorneys. He tells me to wake up and smell the money. He says it's not about abortion and Roe vs Wade. He tells me we are seeing the masses being distracted by phoney issues like gay marriage while the powers cook up the next massive wealth transfer scheme.

Mountain Home has the World's largest sales volume Wal-Mart. The product variety and prices are amazing. We buy some turkey-and-chicken-thigh mozzarella-garlic smoked sausage to try for breakfast. They also have an eight-pack of Chinese 90-decibel door and window alarms for $5. These are installed by pealing off a paper backing and simply sticking them on a smooth surface.

Property values here in Mountain Home are 'sky-rocketing' and the population is expected to double from the current 20,000 in the next two years as boomers from California and Florida retire to the area. Property that went for $200 an acre five years ago is up to $5,000 an acre... in Tampa ¼ acre building lots are $250,000 or more, so this still sounds pretty cheap.