Not many people know about Mill Creek Mountain (at least, we didn’t think they did, but I’ll get to that). I wouldn’t know it myself were it not for Don and Bo Sosebee, for Vesta Baptist Church in the valley below it, and for Jared, who took me there.
Jared and I took a drive up the Mountain one afternoon when we were first dating, when I was still in the early stages of imagining his world. I’d seen his home, his bee yard, the tennis courts where he’d taken lessons, but I had not seen the church where he pastored. I remember how much I loved it, the stained glass, the wood pews, the kitchen in the fellowship hall with the squeaky, yellow oven, the view—oh, I loved the view. I’ve been visiting Vesta for over a year now, and I still like to sit on the steps outside while Jared is setting up for Bible study. I could look at that pasture and watch the cows flicking their tails in the evening light for a long time.
After he’d shown my family and I his church (and we’d gotten our picture out by the marquee), Jared drove me up the Mountain. It was April, and the earth was golden and green. As we climbed, the land fell back behind us into a valley until it washed like a sea back up the distant mountains. I thought I had never seen such a place. It’s not that I’d never seen beautiful places, but this was not like the Rocky Mountains or Yosemite Valley, because this place hadn’t been seen by many people. And by the looks of the big trees, full ponds, and neat fences, the folks who had seen it had seen to it.
Our relationship was still new, and Jared and I hadn’t talked about where our home would be once we got married. I’m not sure we’d even talked about being married. But I knew he wanted to move to Charleston, Arkansas (the town nearest Vesta), and I was pretty sure he wasn’t driving me up Mill Creek Mountain for nothing. Without saying it, he seemed to be asking, Well? Could you live here? Do you love it?
I had my head out the truck window and was silently saying yes, I could.
Last Thursday, Jared drove me up the Mountain again. It was October, and the land had taken on a different look—one of rest and shedding and harvest. We turned off onto a gravel drive that curved as if it had the trees in mind, skirting kindly around them. We drove up to the Sosebee place. The image that met me first is one I have kept in my mind:
Don Sosebee, 82-years-old, standing in the doorway of his tack room wearing a cowboy hat and a back brace over his Wrangler button-down, two farm horses tied to the post outside, another mare tied to a tree in front of the house. Wendell Berry wrote about land where, “Everything there seemed to belong where it was,” and on Mill Creek Mountain, Don belonged.
I’d been greatly honored one Sunday morning when Don came up to me and asked if I was a horse person. I said no, but that I wouldn’t mind becoming one, and you would have thought I’d made him a pot of his favorite squirrel stew. He asked if I would ever care to come riding at his and Bo’s place, maybe even to check on the cattle. I tried to explain that I would without looking like I could fly through the ceiling.
Jared and I didn’t go riding with Don last Thursday; we first learned how to ride from Don. We are greenhorns. While he stood in the middle of his corral, talking commands to Jared who was trotting around him, I sat back in my saddle and talked to Bo. I asked where her garden was, and she pointed to a long rectangle of corn that had given up the ghost for the year. She said Don plowed her garden behind his horse, that he did everything from his horse. She used to ride, she said, but nowadays, I think she uses her own two legs more often. It’s hard to get running water up the Mountain, so in the thick of summer, Bo hauls buckets from their pond back to the garden to water it.
“There aren’t many people left who live like Don and Bo Sosebee,” their daughter, Shannon, said to me as we watched Don tie the horses back up. He’d taken their halters off and was leading one just by the sound of his voice.
It may seem like Don and Bo are the last of their kind. But when I talk to Shannon and hear the warmth in her voice when she talks about the Mountain she grew up on, I am not concerned. The Mountain will be in good hands.
But what does concern me is something that happened last week—something that has the whole town of Charleston and the folks on Mill Creek Mountain in an uproar, and rightly so. Right under their noses, the State of Arkansas bought 815 acres to build a prison right on top of Mill Creek Mountain. It cost $2,950,000 and will contain 3,000 beds. It will border Don and Bo’s land.
It is hard to know what to say to this, because I do not live on the Mountain myself. I don’t live in Charleston, and not yet even in Arkansas. But my own grandpa turned 89 this year and has cultivated his few acres for the last 50 years, so I understand what it’s like, not just to own a place, but to belong to it. I’m writing on behalf of those who do belong on the Mountain, raise their cattle there, grow their food there, take their grandchildren there on horseback and roam the land that will one day belong to them. I’m writing as someone who loves the Mountain, the church in the valley, and who would like to raise my own children somewhere nearby.
I know the Lord is sovereign over every hill and mountain. I know that in our broken world, there must be a place where a prison belongs, but I’m afraid Mill Creek Mountain is not it. Today, I’m thinking about the folks to whom it may concern the most—folks like Don and Bo. They’re folks who have seen the Mountain and seen to the Mountain, yet who haven’t been given a say in what will happen on that Mountain in the years to come. Today, I’m writing — and praying — on their behalf.
May God grant them strength to stand and a deep assurance that “The LORD is good, and his mercy is over all that he has made” (Ps. 145:9).
News source: Bailey, Spencer. “Gov. Sanders: State prison planned to be built in Franklin County” 5 News, 31 Oct, 2024. Web: https://www.5newsonline.com/article/news/local/sanders-prison-arkansas-charleston-franklin-county/527-829745d9-f3f6-4b58-a4bb-7f7b958d4a4d
Photo Credit: Shannon Sosebee McChristian
bethanyjlincks.com 
One thing I’ve learned when advocating to government officials is to take them stories of real people and the impact that official decisions will have on them. When they see the faces and hear their stories, sometimes it makes a difference. You’ve done a good job of doing that in your descriptions of these good folks, and I pray that your words reach the hearts of the right people!
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One thing I’ve learned when advocating to government officials is to take them stories of real people and the impact that official decisions will have on them. When they see the faces and hear their stories, sometimes it makes a difference. You’ve done a good job of doing that in your descriptions of these good folks, and I pray that your words reach the hearts of the right people!
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Thank you!
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