Crystal Bridges

Did y'all know that Kenny is terrified of spiders??  Well, he shouldn't be of this artistic rendering of one at Crystal Bridges Art Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas...but this metal sculpture does have a creepy nature about it!!

As always, we've been very busy since my last blog post about a month ago...  The boys have done some Scout camping...most recently at Historic Washington State Park, where they helped with a park clean up.  The first half of their trip, the weather was really nice...the second half, it rained.  A lot!  The picture below is of the boys just starting to unwind after taking their camp down before the storms hit:

(That's our newest Boy Scout, Stephen, in the blue on the far left).  Hope and I had joined them on this day.  En route, we drove along a highway that had seen a spectacular tragedy just a couple weeks prior.  A semi loaded with fertilizer had some brake problems--they caught on fire--and the driver had managed to stop along this rural stretch of highway.  He couldn't get the fire out, nor could the responding fire department...they were going to let the fire burn out, and the truck driver had returned to his truck's cab to get or do something--when the truck exploded!  Remember that it was a fertilizer-based bomb that blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City back in the 1990s.  By the time we drove this stretch of road, they had repaired the blacktop, but the adjoining forest will take years to recover:

The force of the explosion broke trees, blasted away the leaves and small branches, drove pieces of the truck many yards into the woods, and shattered windows for miles away.  It is hard to state how much devastation this blast did--I would think the heavily damaged area covered multiple acres!  Fortunately, there were no homes in the immediate vicinity, but imagine if this had happened in a town!

Our boys had fun at the Scout camp, even with the rain--Hope had arranged for some indoor games during the afternoon while the heaviest rain fell:

I spent a long weekend attending the annual Arkansas Historical Association meeting, which was held in a town (Stuttgart) about an hour and a half to the northeast of Monticello.  Stuttgart is square in the middle of the major rice producing part of Arkansas--but the picture below is related to a different part of Arkansas's farm-related outputs:  an aquaculture research facility!

This was a field trip to this research facility, run by a branch of the USDA's Agricultural Research Service (a fellow agency to my own Forest Service).  Many people probably don't realize that Arkansas produces a lot of baitfish, catfish, and other freshwater fish made available to consumers, based in part on the research done at this location.

Of course, with this being the Easter season, we had a lot of kids serving at our church--below, Stephen gets ready for mass:

Spring also means the start of a new season in minor league baseball, so we went one brisk afternoon to watch the Arkansas Travelers play in Little Rock:

The home team won in extra innings:

which didn't matter at all to Beth, as she had her favorite treat--cotton candy!

This past weekend we went to northwestern Arkansas--I was on the committee of a graduate student who was defending his thesis, and the kids had Good Friday off from school.  We took advantage of this trip to get to several bookstores and a visit to Crystal Bridges, a world-class art museum specializing in Americana...such as the Hudson River School painting below (by Thomas Moran):

Beth wasn't into the newer art, but she was happy to pose by the wall-sized art piece below:

(She's always happy to pose!)  Of course, Kenny wasn't happy with the big spider sculpture, but I think they all enjoyed the visit--at least parts of it!  On our way back home yesterday, we swung through a bluegrass festival in a town in the Ozarks a couple hours from Fayetteville.  The kids weren't too impressed with that, but Stephen enjoyed clambering on the rocks in a quarry we stopped at en route:

We have been so wet this winter and spring--the rains hardly seem to stop--that the beautiful weather we've had the last few days has seemed so refreshing.  Today we've tried to catch up on some outdoor activities, but those have been somewhat curtailed by the water-logged yard we've got.  At least we're greening up nicely!