When I crossed the bridge from Memphis into Arkansas it was different. The rolling white fenced pastures of Tennessee gave way low lying flat fields of a river delta. The highest elevations were the levees keeping the river out of the fields. There were no more stately plantation houses, just sheet metal silos and a boat and a 4-wheeler in the yard. The fields were lined with irrigation ditches and the fallow rice fields were filled with snow geese getting fat for Christmas.

 I chose to hang close to the river and head north. While looking at the map I noticed that parts of Tennessee bumped into the Arkansas side of the river and vice versa. I had never heard of any border wars over the issue and it looked like each state had gained in one place what it had lost in others. Perhaps they just let things take their course like the river itself.

Eventually I ended up bouncing around the more “steep and twisted” roads of the Ozarks for several days. But while I was at the Mountain Home MacDonald's I remembered my question about the map and the boundary.

  You don’t realize how dependent on the internet and instant access to information you’ve become until you start having it doled out a cup of senior McDonald’s coffee at a time. So I looked up Tennessee and Arkansas border disputes and of course they hadn’t decided it amicably. It was finally decided by the Supreme Court in 1970.

In the meantime, they had been fighting over it for almost 100 years without resolution. In fact, one piece of land sitting on the Arkansas side since the Centennial Avulsion occurred in 1876 had notoriously harbored criminals and bootleggers outside the jurisdiction of Arkansas and on the wrong side of the river from the Tennessee law for years. An avulsion was a dramatic shift in the river as opposed to erosions which acted slowly to change the landscape. Island 37 was created when the river blew through a narrow neck called the Devil’s Elbow. 

This was all very interesting but I had miles to go and pictures to draw and I have capacity for only so much coffee so I put off further research for the next morning.

During the day I visited and drove through places that someone from North Carolina must have named. Dogpatch turned out to be more interesting in the comics. Buffalo City, under towering cliffs, had a sign posting the regulations for trout that made you take notice. Browns and Rainbows had to be 24 inches to be kept. There were also Brookies and Cutthroats to be caught. Flippin not only had fish, it had a casino. Cotter proudly had Trout Central USA painted on a prominent stack on the main drag through town. 

 My evening’s rest was interrupted by the local sheriff who knocked politely and asked if I had permission to be camping next to the power transformer that I had stopped by. After producing some ID and explaining that I had run out of light and didn’t like driving after dark, he ran me through the state’s computers and found out that neither I nor my van existed, so we left it there and I promised to be gone at first light.  Which I was, and I found a MacDonald's to return to my border dispute with my cup of internet.

This time however I was greeted by not only more, but different information. Yesterday’s was supplied by an AI summary and today’s was supplied by the Arkansas Historical Society, which goes to show you that as the sheriff the night before had said, “You just can’t rely on these computers.” 

 What was even more of a shock than my mysterious disappearance  from the police database was — there staring off the laptop screen was someone that looked exactly like me. Well, it looked exactly like a photo of me about 55 years ago on my Danish Merchant Seaman’s Document.

The picture claimed to be of Andy Crum who ran a “blind tiger”, which is a colorful name for a bootlegging operation on Island 37.

An Arkansas sheriff with a posse of Arkansans decided  that jurisdiction or not he was going to clear them out. Unfortunately for the sheriff Andy Crum, my bootlegging entrepreneurial doppelgängershot the sheriff dead. More outraged citizens found Andy hiding in a cotton field and brought him to jail after burning down his home, his place of business, and killing a black gentleman who worked for Andy.

While in jail the state of Tennessee decided they wanted to try Andy Crum, but the Arkansas locals were having none of it. They broke into the jailhouse and shot Andy dead. 

This occurred in 1911 and led to the first Arkansas vs Tennessee Supreme Court decision of 1918. The outcome of what establishes the border carried on until the 1970 Arkansas vs Tennessee  decision, which determined that in the case of avulsions the 1867 thalweg (which is the course that the steamboats used to navigate the Mississippi) would be the border between Arkansas and Tennessee forever.

 Isn’t “thalweg” a great word? It’s such a good word that my computer underlines it in red as if it didn’t exist.  Just like the sheriff said:You just can’t rely on these computers.