“It will come to you, this love of the land. There's no gettin' away from it.”

            Where I live currently is NE Arkansas Delta farm country, home of cotton, corn, and soybeans. I watch as farmers agonize over the weather, whether it rains or doesn’t.  I listen to discussions of costs, prices, and water tables. Those enormous John Deere tractors and other devises roam the fields like prehistoric monsters. I’ve seen the pictures of St. Francis River swamp land that was bought and drained to provide excellent farm land in Clay County. Young men continue to enter family farm enterprises, beginning with the 40 acres, less the mule.
              Pine trees populate south Arkansas, my growing-up home land, and threaten to overtake the landscape, covering small towns that are now practically abandoned. With their prickly green needles and healthy cones contributing mustard-yellow pollen to decorate driveways, roof tops, and cars, these pine are those that shelter the city of Camden. They drop needles, provide mulch to protect the city’s azalea plants and enable recess architects to design multi-room houses. In south Arkansas, I watched my father tend to timber business in cultivating a pine-tree farm on 640 acres. I heard plans and dreams and watched as they dissolved in economically troubled family dynamics.  The timber business is lucrative, but slow. A windfall profit seemed preferable.
                 Camden also enjoyed the benefits of the Oil Boom in south Arkansas.  Several prominent businessmen opened wildcat wells in Smackover (Union County), and the resulting inflow of money into all of south Arkansas fueled a major swell in the economy. Our family had informational ties to some wildcatters and bought mineral rights to various small properties as the wildcat wells were drilled. All you needed was one well to come in.
                The family timberlands were sold, but we retain oil (mineral) rights for a number of land holdings in south Ouachita County and north Union County.   While the sale of Auntie’s Place (timberlands) in Union County devastated my father, it pained us most to see this land go into the hands of a conglomerate timber company.  Daddy had wanted to leave something of lasting value, land, a pine tree farm, to his family, and my brother had planned to manage the operation someday.  Land is the only thing that lasts, according to Gerald O’Hara and Goss Dansby.
               Interest in Arkansas oil has renewed. The drilling experts are offering oil leases in Union County, part of Auntie’s Place, part of the Smackover Brown-Dense, Shale.  Oil leases, however, are not the same as Land, Katie Scarlett.  We are not the surface owners, so these mineral rights and monthly/quarterly interest checks can be here today and gone tomorrow, if the owner does not keep up with the taxes.  We encountered Jonas Wilkerson roaming around south Arkansas, buying up pieces of Tara for unpaid taxes.
                  This oil baroness business is nothing to be sneezed at.  It does not pay worth a flip, but it’s all we have left of the family land, and Land is the only thing that lasts. ~
            You might enjoy the companion piece, posted on More Than A Bracelet.