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Mountain — places especially good for raising vegetables — are the result of years of feculence left by millions of roosting passenger pigeons (this, of course, before humanity exterminated the last of the species within living memory). Once, the number of wood, or wild, pigeons (think not of a dismal city-bird but a mourning dove decorating itself in handsome red feathering) may have been greater than all other American species combined, and the sizes of their roosting grounds defy easy comprehension. In Kentucky, John James Audubon wrote about one that was three miles wide and forty miles long, and said the excreta covered the ground like snow. He described the arrival of the birds at sundown as sounding “like a gale passing through the rigging of a close-reefed vessel” and causing a mighty air current as they passed.
    The Ouachitas are unusual in America because their trend lies latitudinally in forested ridges, striking a course east and west to create a lateral topography like the Uintas of Colorado and Utah and unlike the great longitudinals of the Appalachians and Rockies on the interior and the Cascade and the Coastal mountains farther west. At two-hundred miles, the length of the Ouachitas makes them the largest latitudinal range in the Lower 48.
    A half-billion years ago, when northern Arkansas lay beneath a shallow sea, a deeper basin to the south, called the Ouachita Trough, accumulated sand and clay sediments almost six miles thick. Even farther south, creeping ominously north, was Llanoria, a mass of land that would eventually collide with the trough and compress 120 miles of sea sediments into only sixty, creating the Ouachita Mountains. Imagine a bulldozer pushing a 1960s Buick up against a huge and unyielding stone-wall until the long hood crumples into lateral folds. If you drive road-cuts through the Ouachitas, you often can see the tortured crumplings of that terrific compression. The rate of uplift, however, has been more or less commensurate with erosion, so the height of the Ouachitas today is similar to much of the Appalachians but modest compared to that of the younger Rockies.
    From the air, these foldings appear like the half-drawn bellows of an accordion and are the major reason that Interstate 35, on its course directly south from the western shore of Lake Superior, shies off halfway down at Kansas City to make for the gentler eastern edge of the Great Plains to end up not in New Orleans, where it rightfully should — given its original bearing — but five-hundred miles farther west in Laredo, Texas. The resulting broad gap between the big bend of the Missouri River at Kansas City and the Red River at Shreveport, Louisiana, is by far the largest area lacking a longitudinal interstate highway in the eastern half of the United States. Thank you, Ouachitas.
    You might suppose, then, they are mighty mountains, and perhaps they are, although their greatest elevation, Mount Magazine, said to be the highest point between the Appalachians and the Rockies, rises only a couple of thousand feet above its valley floor. Still, a few physiographers, seeing them as mere outliers of the larger Ozark Plateau, talk as if they are not truly mountains at all. How many of those professors have hiked them north to south or driven
across
them in snow season, I don’t know, but I’m sure such an undertaking would rid the debate of a certain fussy academicism, as would a reading not of a textbook but of an Arkansas FAA aeronautical chart: because the top of Rich Mountain can become veiled in clouds, it carries the label HIGH FATALITY AREA. The Ouachitas are mountains enough.
    In years past, I’ve always come into that planetary washboard athwart, and on two of those occasions I’ve had to stop along one of the twisting, transverse routes for a passenger to leave her breakfast along the roadside for the possums, a consequence of transit not unlike that in a boat sailing a short sea. It’s as if the