Asked to describe the town, he had to stop for a moment and collect his thoughts.
“I’ve never thought about it in that way” he thought to himself.
It’s not like there is much to compare it to as the farthest he traveled from the homestead was a birthday trip to the closest McDonald’s one hour North and the time Uncle Leroy took him up to the Ozarks on a fishing trip.
The town always seemed the same. A ramshackle collection of houses in various states of disrepair and decay. Some moments of excitement when someone bulldozed an old trailer out of the way and parked a semi-new one on the same stop.
The same parade of logging trucks, road crews, trucks towing impossibly huge campers and tourists taking “the scenic route”. No one ever stops to wonder what word would appropriately describe this town.
Heck, no one could even remember why this arrangement of one hundred and fifteen bodies according to the latest census, six competing Baptist churches, one billboard the reads “Hell is Real” and a Dollar Store even came to exist.
Currently, there is nothing here except scratching out a living doing small engine repair, bug spraying, waving traffic flags, or drag racing the lawn tractor down the main street at midnight on the Fourth of July.
Like some of the cousins in town, the history of the town is married to racism. “Horatio was founded in 1895. For several years until at least 1905, Horatio was a sundown town, where African Americans were not allowed to live.
But later apparently realizing the shrinking gene pool was creating too many village idiots town and the town’s main attraction was being in “the middle of nowhere” plus nightcrawlers for sale, the town diversified a bit and Darrell Brown – became the first black football player for the University of Arkansas in 1965. Brown grew up in Horatio and became a prominent lawyer after college.
See even before noticing the lack of cell phone coverage, the wise knew enough to get the hell out of town.
