Illustration by Harry Tennant
In a landlocked state like Arkansas, lakes become the magnetic north of warm-weather fun. During high school, my friends and I often made the drive from Little Rock to Lake Greers Ferry, where we jumped from the bluffs into the lake. We were children on the cusp of adulthood, old enough to have cars and the freedom to make the hour-plus trip, but still young enough that we had curfews and needed permission to go.
There’s a thrill in jumping from height into deep water. Standing at the precipice, you feel fear at the void between you and the lake’s surface below. Jumping requires momentarily setting that anxiety aside and simply making the leap. The water first approaches slowly, giving you a beat to reconsider what you’d done, but then the lake comes at you with increasing quickness. Finally, there’s the violent, wet crash of striking the water and clawing your way back to the surface for air. As teenagers, I suspect we played at danger because we each secretly believed we were untouchable, immortal.
The Army Corps of Engineers completed the Greers Ferry Dam that created the lake in December 1962. The following October, President Kennedy spoke at the dedication. The ceremony marked his last major public event before he flew to Texas, where he’d be assassinated the next month. Today, that history is a footnote to the lake’s vibrant present, where visitors camp below the dam at John F. Kennedy Park, or delight in the cold-water trout at the nearby Greers Ferry National Fish Hatchery.
Before the dam was complete and water flooded the valley, the town of Higden relocated to higher ground, but there were whispered stories that the ghostly hulks of buildings and abandoned automobiles remained in the murky depths. Hunting them, we bought cheap goggles and explored the underwater cliff face. Ten or 15 feet down, we hit the thermocline, where the water grew colder and much clearer. Sometimes we lugged large rocks to the lake’s edge then plunged down, letting them pull us as deep as we dared.
Once, as I swam along the cliff face, I caught the glint of something metallic through the hazy water. Taking a breath, I dove down, each kick bringing the object into sharper clarity. It became a rectangle and then resolved into a piece of machined metal set into black rubber. A stroke later, I made out the dark outline of a human form, face down on the rock ledge beneath me. For a panicked moment, I was sure I’d found a body, and I swam desperately for the surface even as a part of my brain recognized the air bubbles coming from the shape and realized I’d chanced upon a scuba diver.
By the afternoon’s end, the lake left us pleasantly spent. We spread our towels on the limestone cliffs, letting the warm air dry us before we reluctantly began the drive home. On the way, we laughed and retold stories of the adventures we’d shared, unable to imagine there’d ever be a time when we wouldn’t all be together, an endless summer of leaps before us.
• • •
MARK BARR’s fiction and essays have appeared in Garden & Gun, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. His debut novel, Watershed, received favorable reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist, and was awarded the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction. He lives in Georgia with his wife and sons.
This article appears in the Spring 2026 issue of Southbound.
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Brady Nash
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