Our inner Huck Finn sometimes draws our imagination and wanderlust to river travel. In adulthood we’ve traversed, over the course of a number of trips, the Ouachita River from Remmel Dam at Jones Mills (Hot Spring County) to our river camp south of Tate’s Bluff (Ouachita County). Not that we’d ever be so brave, but we sometimes ponder the adventure of traveling by boat from Arkadelphia to New Orleans — hey, it was a common steam boat route in the 19th century, so surely it’s not out of the realm of possibility today. Using Google Maps in recent days, we mapped the course south until the Ouachita is collected by Louisiana’s Black River, later to be consumed by the Red River. We followed the satellite imagery as the river poured into the Atchafalaya, and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico, discovering that somewhere we’d missed an important turn where Louisiana’s boot juts east and a channel would have swiftly connected us to the mighty Mississippi north of Baton Rouge. We should probably stick to our old splashing grounds, but it’s fun to dream.
Like the Associated Press — whose reporter was suddenly uninvited to a press conference in the Oval Office because AP hasn’t changed its stylebook to meet the president’s demands — we’ll forever call it the Gulf of Mexico. We like to imagine, though, some overall-clad hillbilly making the once-in-a-lifetime trek to the Florida panhandle just to plant his Trump flag in the sand as he gazes across the ocean for the first time and proclaim, proudly and through three teeth, “Wudja look it thar — it’s the Gulf of America, by-gawd!”
By Wednesday morning 1.74 inches of rainfall had been measured at the Arkadelphia airport since Sunday evening. Rain continues to fall Wednesday morning, and even more rain is coming.
Ozzy the Chocolate Chihuahua sez: It’s daze like todaze me and seester refuse to potty outside.
The intersection at North 10th Street and Country Club Road could use a traffic light. Turn-only signals would improve the intersection at 10th and Pine streets. Surely we’re not the only ones.
The first warning of several: April 1 is just a few weeks away.
President’s Day is Monday, Feb. 17. No trash services.
Joel Phelps is editor of arkadelphian.com. Opinions in Bits & Pieces are his own. Contact him at editor@arkadelphian.com.