BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… WATER, INK, & STONE. The early rains came down again, like they always do this time of year. The grass greens. The daffodil blooms, reminder that no matter the crazy outrage of the day, there is solace in new life, again, and again. It seems the world begins anew each year with water running over stone.
I am playing again in the water at the little culvert under the driveway. The little pool that formed was shaded by watchful black locust trees and friendly honeysuckle and yet still the pool was within sight of the big 1960s-era living room windows of our 1960s-era ranch-style house so I could take my flotilla of boats down and play in the water as little boys are wont to do. The fresh-running water of spring, the black-barked trees, the newly green honeysuckle, all were magic in the day’s dying light.
From further down, near what we called The Water Hole, came a fox’s cry. A wild scream, like that of a witch, and my sister and I took off running back to the warmth and light and cheese macaroni and meatloaf of the Tuesday evening’s supper table. Scary magic was exciting in such times.
The Water Hole was strange and dangerous, the place where the big under-the-highway culvert emptied into a deep ravine which ran through our forest. The culvert was a dank, cavernous thing through which a grown man could walk without stooping. A strange space between spaces, echoey, littered with debris, and more than a little scary. The Water Hole was the one place I was forbidden to go to alone when I was young and I never disobeyed. “Water’s runnin’,” my mom would laconically note after the big storms had passed through and indeed she was right. You could hear the water’s roar from the front porch.
Spring rains brought torrents through the Water Hole, water rising three, then four, sometimes six feet above normal levels as the creek pooled, hemmed in by steep earthen bluffs. Tall grasses flattened. Great rocks would move. The ravine floor — an otherwise normal playground for me — would completely reshape every couple years. Sudsy river foam rose above the roar, the flood the color of chocolate milk. The water was powerful and also magical. My natural world teemed with unseen personalities.
“Nice tattoos. Do they mean anything?” I hear that pretty often these days, at least when I wear shorts.
I lie on the table, staring up at the gray tin-type ceiling, slowly enduring another session of line work and color, endorphins kicking in but never quite fast enough. Dustin Burkett is speaking calmly — I asked his opinion on the Federalist Papers — and his voice is helping me navigate the stinging pain as he etches a forest scene on my side.
I’ve known Dustin a long time now. He’s been my tattoo artist for years. He is a longtime StateoftheOzarks member and has proven himself a brilliant artist and craftsman but also an extraordinarily principled thinker. I always learn things of value from Dustin, and my time on the tattoo table has translated to Dustin becoming associate editor of the StateoftheOzarks print magazine, the first issue of which is due out later this month. Appropriately, Dustin hand-created the cover art.
In some circles, tattoos are still subversive, still edgy, still dangerous-seeming. Fine by me, but I’m not using my tattoos to invoke ancient deities or to insult your delicate sensibilities. Instead, my tattoos memorialize a past that was taken from me, sometimes taken simply by the too-fast passage of time.
The forest seasons of my boyhood — trillium, May apple, strawberries, wild rabbits watching from beneath overhanging grass, twilight fireflies, the plum thickets of late summer — form art stretching from ankle to torso. I can, of course, still cover them for professional meetings but the tattoos bring me joy and sadness, a spiritual and emotional memorial that simply cannot be taken from me. In a world of transience, the mortal permanence of the thing brings me comfort and strength.
I type the last, final paragraphs of the Winter/Spring 2006 edition of the StateoftheOzarks Magazine, finalize the last of the advertisers’ artwork, complete the last touches of the layout. There is magic in the printed word, a strange permanence unable to be found online. Work on the magazine these past several months has changed me in subtle ways. I am more aware of the transience of our news cycle, our fresh morning outrage, our materialism, our unwillingness to accept magic or grace. Our ignorance of simple principles of civilization, our readiness to outsource our humanity to others’ dogmas and doctrines.
Yes, building the magazine has been a challenge, yet indeed most worthwhile. To take ink to paper, to take paper to press, to make something enduring, even, finally at the 11th hour, to draw a line in the sand of our culture and say, “Here, but no more,” while yet ever with an eye to our future generations’ needs, and perhaps even chart a new course. There is magic there indeed, always, ever, in water, ink and stone.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2026
