This could have been a wicked Brick, ripping up Fayetteville’s eighth annual (but it feels like the 240th) Bikes Blues & BBQ that’s going on this weekend. A couple of years ago I had some criticisms about it, and until Thursday night I had nothing new to add so I wasn’t going to. I have mixed feelings about this event: It is a pseudo-event but it’s largely harmless.
Yet I had forgotten the drone. Mayor Coody now has his stronger noise ordinance, but well-tuned, quiet cycles vibrate off the four-lane state highway spur a block from my house Shady Hill when there are sufficient numbers. I had forgotten the nights of BBBBQ. Even at 3 a.m. there’s enough motorbike traffic to force me to shut the windows and turn on the air-conditioning if I want enough quiet to sleep, and I don’t need full silence for that.
So I awoke late Friday morning wondering about the tourist-trapping events Fayetteville’s competitive neighbors should adopt that aren’t done to death elsewhere: How about a tomato-hurling festival for Rogers, borrowed from Bunol, Valencia, Spain. Bentonville could run the bulls around its downtown square. Lowell, now that it has an all-points security videocamera, could hold a non-kiddie Carnival and help the town coffer by selling the film.
After two mugs of Irish breakfast tea, I came round, though. Without tourism, Eureka Springs, where I spent a year managing a bed-and-breakfast in its suburb of Beaver, would have ceased decades ago. The B&B was full during the Jazz and Folk festivals. At the folk fest, My Beloved and I volunteered for lobby duty at The Auditorium and ended up helping sell CDs of Ray Wylie Hubbard at the table run by his wife and their young son. So we got to visit a little with the wry songwriter. Good times.
Eureka also has Volkswagen Beetle and space-alien weekends and maybe a dozen others. They draw enough to keep that community afloat — crowds at the best of these must draw in the high hundreds — though I’d still maintain tourism is an unstable industry, kept afloat artificially.
Then again, as represented by this weekend’s street vibrations, this biker boondoggle draws a real crowd. In the midst of it, the bikers caused jams even heading north out of Fayetteville — a 20-minute drive to Lowell late Friday afternoon took me 65 minutes. I don’t buy the promoters’ 300,000 estimate for this year. If a cycle is about 8 feet long, that times 300,000 equals 454.5 miles.
Where are the bikers going to park?
They can’t. They’re going to drive around all night, keeping me awake. -30-
