The Wrong Road Taken

My morning bible verses were Mark 11:23–24.

Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go throw yourself into the sea, and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.’

I’d written a prayer about this to God:

I struggle with praying and believing.  I feel you know all things, and I hesitate to expect you to answer my prayers the way I want you too... Fill my heart with faith and take away my doubt.

The morning had already been filled with work. I’d finished painting our little three room nest in our new vacation spot in the backwoods of northern Arkansas. To get to it, a person has to drive several miles on gravel roads and cross one low-water crossing after another. It sits at the end of its own lane surrounded by a hunting ranch of over 2,000 acres and a smaller family place of the Clarks who live in Batesville. Our place was originally owned by the Clark family.

Already, during our week of working to make Buffalo Bluffs livable, we’d met two of the Clarks who’d stopped by on their way to check up on the home place and a man from down the road who drove a big tractor in to haul away the huge cylinders of baled hay on our place. He wore sweat-stained work clothes and sported a straw hat and a full red beard. We’d been encouraged to hear from the realtor that he and our neighbors down the road, the Petersons, were willing to continue bush hogging our place for the hay they needed. That was a blessing to us as there are several pastures on our 118 acre place, and it would have been an extra hassle to bring our bush hog and tractor from Texas.

Lafferty Creek

After a late breakfast, my Bible study, clearing away the painting mess, and a refreshing shower in the newly-painted bathroom, I decided to go to Mountain View to prowl through the antique and junk shops looking for a few things to make our Izard Hall (for the county in which it is standing) house more comfortable. My list for Wal Mart was also extensive… I fixed sandwiches for our lunch and put John Bob’s in the fridge to wait for him: leftover pork chop sandwiches. Yum!

A couple of days before, JB and I explored the rough road that leads from the highway to our own road. Instead of going back north on Lafferty (named after the creek that borders part of our property), we’d headed out south to find the White River. We drove for twelve miles through beautiful hills and forgotten places.

The road had narrowed towards the end into a one vehicle road near the river, when we saw a man standing outside his 4-wheel drive automobile holding a long rod in his hand and poking at the underbrush. We couldn’t pass his truck, so JB got out to speak to him. He’d killed a Timber rattler and was trying to retrieve it to show his grandkids. They talked a while. The Arkansas people we’d met so far were friendly and enjoyed a visit as much as anybody. We drove on and pulled up on River Road (still only a one lane unpaved road despite its elegant name). After taking photos and enjoying a slow drive we pulled into Guion, AR which has very little but a huge sand plant and the railroad lines to carry away the sand quarried nearby.

Finally, we reached a black topped road and sped on our way to Mountain View through the beautiful hills and valleys and winding turns. After eating supper there (we’d planned to eat lunch…), we headed back home making sure to miss the back roads on which we’d traveled to get there.

So this day I planned to avoid the back road and drive out on the highway. But I programmed Mountain View into the GPS and leaned back to enjoy listening to Freckles by Gene Stratton Porter, a book my mom and dad had loved. It’s about a boy who works in the lumber camps of Indiana in the 1920s guarding valuable Birdseye maple trees and other furniture trees from marauders in the Limberlost swamp. So when the GPS instructed me to turn south (our previous backwoods unpaved route) on Lafferty for a couple of miles, I obeyed. My first mistake.

Well, I knew I could make it through if it didn’t lead me to a paved road soon. We’d been there a couple of days before, and hadn’t we found a paved road home that had taken us a short way on Lafferty? I couldn’t reach the map across the big Toyota Tundra so I trusted the machine… My second mistake…

Driving on, I continued listening about Freckles alone guarding the swamp and wearing waist-high gaiters to protect himself from poisonous snakes. I came to a place where “…two roads diverged…” on an Arkansas back road and took the one that seemed most traveled by. Immediately the GPS began recalculating. It then told me it was only a couple of miles to the road I’d been supposed to turn on from the earlier route. No problem! My third mistake was in not turning around immediately!

My cell phone began shouting that I had cell service on this high road on the top of the hill. Well, that had to be a good sign. And then Bossy Sister (GPS) told me to turn into an even smaller road. After two miles on it, I’d be at the original road… Well I obeyed, and you guessed it: Biggest mistake of all.

As I drove carefully down the narrowing trail, I reached another road decision, and I remember thinking, No way will I take the one less traveled by. But I chose the wrong one. It steadily got worse with a deep ravine close by the driver’s side and a ditch next to a rising slope on the other. Large rocks started jutting up from the ‘road’. I angled around them as best I could; there was no way to turn around. The last straw was when I saw ahead a huge rock outcropping that stretched across the entire road! I got out to scope it out and found it was impassable.

Then I started really thinking about believing prayer. I realized I was probably in the middle of a 2500 acre hunting club. I hadn’t seen an inhabited house in more than a couple of miles. I couldn’t imagine how I could reverse up the steep decline with its jutting rocks, but it seemed my only choice. So I asked God for help and for a faithful, believing heart to be thankful ahead of time for rescue. And climbed back in the pickup. Now this pickup is big, and I could barely see over the toolbox to the road behind in the back window. I tried to do it using the side mirrors and even an open door at times. I kept either getting too close to the slope on my side or running into trailing branches and muddy places on the other. Finally, after inching back only a few yards, I decided to check and see whether the place in front was REALLY impassable.

It was.

Now I was faced with the decision. The GPS insisted it was only 1.1 mile ahead to my turning. I could walk it. So I set out: in shorts and sandals. I kept thinking about snakes and poison ivy and wild pigs and black bears. Now I’m just asking God to protect me. The sun came out, and I sweated and walked over a road (?) that looked more like a dry stream bed. But I kept walking. Isn’t that what God calls us to do? To keep going trusting that, whatever happens. we are not abandoned?

Finally, I reached a trestle bridge which I thought might be the vaunted road. I had to scramble up the side (in my sandals) to find it was a railroad track. My heart sank, but I slid back down considering what would happen if I broke a bone or sprained an ankle. And found more of the road going under the bridge and curving alongside the railroad.

I saw evidence of a building and a mown field and began to think I’d found help. But again my heart plummeted as I saw the building was on the other side of a tall fence and didn’t seem inhabited. What next?

I looked up at the railroad to see a strange sight. It looked like a pickup coming down the tracks. And it was. I flagged it down, and it was two railroad men and two bridge inspectors riding in a truck specially built to convert to ride on the railroad tracks. When I asked the driver for help, he said he didn’t know what they could do. A train was expected soon.

I asked him if he knew where I was and where I could go to call someone for help. (Inside, I’m thinking who would I call? John Bob’s and my phone were mostly out of service unless we were on top of a hill. And I only knew the realtor and a contractor we’d talked with about doing some work for us and some of our neighbors.)

The driver was an Arkansan and pulled out an old flip phone for me to use—after he pulled the truck off the track and converted it to road travel. 

I was flabbergasted to realize I could hardly remember how to place a call on an old phone. And what phone numbers did I know? I pulled out my own No Service phone and checked the recently dialed numbers. There was one in Melbourne, AR. So I called it! A man answered, and I asked, “Who is this?” He could have said that I was the one telephoning, but instead he told me his name, and I realized it was the contractor. (When he was recommended to us, we were told he NEVER answered his phone during the day…)

I told him who I was and asked if he knew the realtor’s number. He knew it and called it out immediately saying, if I couldn’t reach David to call him back and he’d leave his job to come rescue me. In a frightening world, there are good people still around.

I called Dave, and he didn’t know who I was until I mentioned John Bob. He hesitated a minute trying to figure out how to help. “Where are you?” I turned to the railroad man. He began trying to tell me how I was near such and such a place on the so and so road. I handed the phone to him! I heard him telling Dave they’d get me to the little store near the sand plant in Guion if he could pick me up there, and it was set.

The two men in the back seat hopped out and started pulling out all sorts of paraphernalia and piling it in the limited space of the truck bed making room for me. I climbed in the middle between the two bridge inspectors who were in their twenties and NOT railroad men they assured me.

We drove across the railroad on the same road I’d walked out. It was drivable now but slow going. For twenty-five minutes Arkansas (the driver) crept along telling all sorts of stories about where we were passing and when he was around this area last and where he expected I’d bailed out of the truck. Shotgun was quiet, but hailed from Louisiana and remembered coming to San Augustine, TX for his wife’s family reunions. Both men in the front seat were wearing hard hats and railroad uniforms and neon safety vests and were in late middle age, I guessed.

The boys in the back seat were skeptical of Arkansas’ stories and knowledgeable about bridges. As we passed huge concrete railroad culverts, Wisconsin, on my right, called out their date of construction. I’d noticed tagging (spray painting) on the culvert sides but wondered at his knowledge till he pointed out the dates that had been stamped in the wet concrete ages ago: 1938, 1932 and so on. We passed under a bridge the inspectors had not yet inspected and Arkansas offered to set the inspectors down to do their job while he took me on to Guion.

“How far are we from Guion?” asked the red-haired boy from Missouri.

“Oh just a little piece,” Arkansas answered.

Red rolled his eyes showing his understanding of Arkansas and said, “No, we’ll go along with you. I don’t trust we wouldn’t be sitting around waiting for you for hours!”

Sure enough it was thirty minutes later at about 15 miles per hour before we reached Guion along the big White River. I went into the store to buy myself a Diet Coke and offering to buy everyone else a cold drink. The boys refused, and Red muttered, “What did I say about how long Arkansas’ little bit would be?"

They were soon ordering sandwiches made from fresh cut lunch meats. It was a tiny place with one tired-looking woman sweeping the floor and a few empty picnic tables. The cold box reminded me of the grocery in Rosebud in the fifties where Mom sometimes bought fresh sliced Bologna and American cheese. It tasted like a delicacy and not like any Bologna and cheese we’d ever had from a package.

As I turned to go and wait outside, a man came in asking if I was who he was looking for. As I looked closer, I recognized him. He was the older owner/realtor who was always telling John Bob stories about all the people and places in Izard County. He hadn’t paid attention to me, but I was so glad to see him!

We got right in his 4-wheel drive SUV and headed back down the Lafferty Road that JB and I had traveled a couple of days before. He wanted to see if I could recognize the road I’d taken earlier before going to get John Bob and taking us out to find the pickup.

Sure enough I recognized it. I’m not sure he trusted me, but we headed back to Buffalo Bluffs.

I was afraid we’d find John Bob away from the house working on clearing a path to the big creek or walking around naked after a shower. I didn’t want to say much about this likelihood…but asked Dave to honk as we passed the gate…

Sure enough JB was just about to go out exploring when we turned up. Of course since we have no cell service he was a little surprised to see his wife who’d left a couple of hours earlier to shop in Mountain View returning with the realtor from Melbourne. He threw on another t-shirt and shorts after taking off the long pants and long-sleeved shirt suitable for exploring in tick and chigger country.

Back to Lafferty Road we drove and headed up the left hand turn I’d indicated. Dave kept saying, “Does this look familiar?” I had to admit since I’d been listening to Freckles, I hadn’t paid very close attention. I recognized buzzards feasting on dead wildlife. I thought I remembered a derelict house. Surely I hadn’t turned on either of the narrow lanes that were the only possibilities on the road we were traveling? But after going a long way down this road, it was clear that I must have, since this road wasn’t getting rockier.

Dave had to return to his office since he is a diabetic and feared having a flat tire out in the wilderness and being in a bad way. So he turned around and took us about twenty miles to his office and turned over the mud covered 4-wheel drive to us. He had a big Tahoe to head home in. We were told to keep his car overnight. It was after 5 o’clock now and darkening a little as if it might rain again. We headed back to find and rescue the truck before dark.

As we headed for the first turn off, John Bob kept cutting his eyes toward me and asking, “Does this look familiar?”  As we traveled slowly down the first turn off (which seemed the most likely), JB noticed no tire tracks in the muddy spots. I’m sure glad I married an Eagle Scout! We stopped as it worsened and walked a good distance, but decided this was definitely NOT the right road.

We were discussing God’s answers to prayer. Clearly, in retrospect, the railroad men, our contractor who answered the phone, and Dave the realtor were rescuers whose good hearts God employed to answer my prayers. At the time I was looking for help in backing up the truck and rescuing myself. But God, in his wisdom, protected me from wild animals and broken bones and allowed me to meet some interesting and kind people who were willing to go a long way out of their path to be of help.

We returned to the SUV and tried the second turn off. Why in the world would I have taken this unprepossessing path? After traveling in the car a way, I insisted we get out and walk since we didn’t want to be caught again. We came to another road choice: two more paths diverged in a muggy wood and I recalled thinking that I had wanted to figure out the one more traveled by.

John Bob walked down the left and I the right for a short distance until, Voila! John Bob saw fresh tire tracks on this out-of-the-way trail. Now I remembered, the GPS told me to go this way, and I obeyed. Can you believe it?

Walking on down an unconscionably long way, we saw the truck was stopped ahead.  John Bob took pictures. And then with me sitting on the back tailgate as guide, backed that pickup right up the rock strewn trail till he reached a place where he could turn it. He is my most amazing hero! I got back in the pickup, and we headed back to the SUV and returned to our safe nest about 7 pm. What a day!

Izard Hall

Thank you, Father for rescuing me from my folly and introducing me to gentlemen of worth.

The next day when we returned the SUV to Dave, he told us how he and his wife had discussed what might have happened if I’d been injured and unable to walk to the railroad. No one knew I’d gone out Lafferty Road and certainly hadn’t known I took several wrong turnings. These kind people weren’t sure I’d have ever been found in that part of uninhabited backwoods.

And John Bob and I knew it was true. God showed me that praying has less to do with telling Him what to do and more with turning to Him and asking for His help.  It means keeping going forward when the path is not clear, knowing that whatever happens will enrich our lives and lead us to His path.