Page 28 RAIN July/August 1984 Voices of Reinhabitation: The Ozarks Knowledge and awareness bring responsibiliti/. Few bioregional organizations know and practice this principle as the Ozark Area Community Congress (OACC) does. Since 1976, OACC members have educated themselves about their place and its culture and developed the OACC Green Platform from their shared knoivledge. The platform guides the congress and its 10 committees in letter-writing campaigns and other political efforts. The bioregional movement would do well to learn from- this pioneering coalition. —KN by Ruth A. Downen I would like to tell you about a mystical land; a land of hills and valleys covering 55,000 square miles, its outskirts bounded by five major rivers. It is forested and riddled with waterways, abundant with game, and peopled by a unique creature, a being of quick wit but ease of execution. A folk who, for the most part, are gently fierce or fiercely gentle. It has been' called the “Land of the Fifth Season" and you are its inhabitants. Between 1.2 and 1.5 billion years ago, volcanic activity occurred in the Ozarks. Later, below the earth's surface, the hardened lava flows were invaded by a large mass of molten magma, which cooled and solidified underground. A third invasion followed, forcing molten basalt into hardened granite. This entire area was uplifted, faulted, and eroded, creating a series of low hills. Around 525 million years ago these hills became islands protruding from an inland sea. Algal reefs grew, becoming limestone. Sand settled, becoming sandstone. The seas came and went, depositing their sediments until the hills were buried under level layers of rock. Subterranean pressures then uplifted the area several times, the major uplift occurring about 380 million years ago, creating the Ozark dome. For millions of years wind and water have been working a masterpiece. We live on a land that has been literally carved from stone. Where huge granite boulders stand precariously like a backbone of rock! Where rivers boil through shut-ins or are s-wallowed by the earth! This area is home to such diverse flora as river birches, beech trees, lichens, water tupelo, and buttonbush. Deep in our caves rare blind cavefish and blind salamanders coexist. There are more than 3500 species of plants in the Ozarks and better than 160 species of fish. We have one of the largest concentrations of springs in the United States. The nine largest springs produce an average of more than 64 million gallons of water in every 24-hour period. I've heard it said that anyone who drinks of an Ozark spring will always return to these hills. What is the wooing of the hills? What force lured pioneers through fertile lowlands to till rocky slopes and battle the encroaching forest? John Hall wrote, “The mystery of the hills reaches back to a time before there were places, back to the beginning of all things, and forward beyond the parade of man to a time only the wind and the rivers will remember." I propose that the lure of the hills is their timelessness and that the people who have come to love these hills are themselves a timeless breed. They are people who persist with great determination in the present and yet reach with ease through the eternal folds of fime. In the early 1800s the first settlers (most of whom came from the Kentucky and Tennessee Appalachians) found a beautiful, almost uninhabited land. French and American explorers, trappers, and traders wrote of the Ozarks as a “wood lush with wild fruit . .. trees with edible nuts . . . and a wealth of beautiful as well as useful plant life." The social life and developing culture of the early Ozarkers centered around school, church and music. Their doctors were “granny women" whose art was rooted in the practices of the “wise women" of old England interlaced with some herbal cures used by the Indians, The term hillbillies came, apparently, from the Appalachian term hillwillies, an affectionate expression mountain women used for their men. Townsend Godsey wrote of Ozarkers: “Their speech was often lyrical and they had a great store of picturesque sayings and superstitions ... Hillbillies had a great sense of humor, usually humor of character which was often pungent." Their droll style of humor was closely related to the British humor of understatement, although they were very capable at weaving tall tales. They were also notorious for gulling or greening outlanders, but were, for the most part, an honest folk and considered their word final and "binding. Postcard from Home, Sweet Home ______ ■____-jr_________________. '_____: .......
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