COLOR OF THE OZARKS

(09-16) 04:00 PDT Eureka Springs, Ark. -- This village carved into the Ozark mountains is a remarkable microcosm of San Francisco - except that it lives in the shadow of a 7-story-high statue of Jesus.

In the interest of full disclosure, there are a few other distinctions between the two. Only in Eureka Springs can visitors feast at the Roadkill Cafe, purchase T-shirts proclaiming "There's a place for all God's creatures ... right next to the potatoes and gravy!", attend a jamboree hoedown or watch a local cast of 200 re-enact the crucifixion and resurrection nightly.

But anyone who journeys to Eureka Springs expecting a hillbilly outpost is in for a surprise: It's a romantic bohemia that seems about as out of place in this state as a New Age crystal pendant dangling round the neck of an Arkansas razorback hog.

At every corner, Eureka Springs evokes my adopted home of San Francisco. No, really.

Tourist trolleys clamber up its steep streets, so crooked that they form the letter "V" 51 times, the letter "S" 13 times and the letter "O" seven times. Along the way they pass art galleries and "painted lady" Victorians, many of them bed-and-breakfasts, so stately that the National Trust for Historic Preservation once named Eureka Springs one of its Dozen Distinctive Destinations.

The town even boasts its own Golden Gate, a one-lane wooden suspension bridge over the White River, obligingly painted yellow gold. When the Arkansas highway department tried to bulldoze it in the interest of modernization, the citizenry got the state to back off by threatening a mass jump-off protest.

While lovers leave their hearts in San Francisco, they unite them in holy matrimony in Eureka Springs. With two dozen wedding chapels and 339 ordained ministers of every flavor, the town ranks as the third most popular U.S. wedding destination - and annually marries about twice as many people as its own population of 2,600. It also just became about the only place in Dixie to recognize domestic partnerships.

It's quaint. It's quirky. And where else but Eureka Springs can you eat organic buffalo?

"If you'd have told me I'd move out of San Francisco and into some little town in Arkansas, I would have cried. I would have had a fit. But I visited here and fell in love with it," said painter Carol Peacock, swirling a brush over canvas in her studio overlooking Main Street.

"This place has a definite spiritual pull. And it's a well-kept secret."

Well, not exactly. About 880,000 visitors come every year. They savor the natural beauty of northwest Arkansas. They peruse the myriad of boutiques along Main Street and Spring Street, including Frog Fantasies, an entire building filled with so many collectible frogs it's noted in the Guinness Book of World Records. They get pampered at dozens of spas offering herbal massage, reflexology or "Reiki energy balancing."

Many take in a live show, be it a hoedown on the highway or a concert at the downtown Auditorium, where John Phillips Sousa opened and Ray Charles made one of his last appearance. A festival sashays through town almost every weekend - bluegrass, jazz, gospel, blues, arts and crafts. There's an annual UFO conference, clergy appreciation weekend and two diversity pride celebrations (The drag show at the Tiki Torch packs fans in so tightly the locals say you can't get in with a straight needle.)

Today pungent incense wafts over the sidewalk as I make my way toward the Mud Street Cafe. Long ago, mud slides buried the first floor of buildings along Main Street, prompting the locals to nickname it Mud Street. Technically, this limestone-walled cafe is underground.

A 20-something waitress plunks a piece of homemade turtle pie down with a smile and says, "Here you go, sweetie."

I fortify myself with the sugar, then set off to scale the labyrinth of mossy stone and rickety wood staircases leading to spectacular views of the town and surrounding woods. My goal is to reach the town's crest and St. Elizabeth's Catholic Church, built into a sheer cliff - making it the only church in America that is entered through its belfry.

When I grow too weary to go vertical, I move horizontally, seeking out markers for several of the 63 mineral springs gurgling up out of the limestone cliff to which Eureka Springs clings. Basin Springs, clutched inside a shady park with a band shell. Sweet Springs, named for its tasty water. Laundry Springs, the only place townspeople could do their weekly wash.

Native Americans once whispered about the "healing spirits" in these springs. That caught the attention of a local doctor named Alvah Jackson, who declared that water from Basin Spring cured his son's granulated eyelids, and began bottling the elixir. By 1879, a judge spread the claim that "Dr. Jackson's Eye Water" had cured his crippling "red skin" disease.

Almost overnight, Eureka Springs swelled to 10,000 people - affluent, ailing and desperate - who covered the hollow with sheds and tents, then cottages and spas, then manors and luxury hotels.

The advent of modern medicine pulled the plug on the town's prosperity, and the Great Depression almost did it in. But Eureka Springs lingered as if preserved in amber, waiting to be rediscovered by a new generation of tourists.

Virtually the entire downtown now is on the National Register of Historical Places.

You still can get a mineral soak and eucalyptus steam cabinet at the 1901 Palace Hotel and Bath House. Or you can check into the 1907 Basin Park Hotel (with its rooftop billiard parlor) or the 1886 Crescent Hotel and Spa (once a hospital operated by a quack whose "corn silk and amputation method" of curing cancer supposedly killed many patients whose ghosts now haunt the hotel; its poltergeists have appeared on the Sci-Fi channel).

But visitors can choose from lots of bed-and-breakfast options - lovely rooms and suites that charge from $50 to $150 per night. Innkeepers have transformed even the old Texaco station into a lodge, where the door knobs are gas pump handles.

The most lavish lodgings are under construction outside of town, overlooking its Golden Gate Bridge.

Artisan Smith Treuer, who in his hippie days lived out of a school bus parked alongside the Sausalito harbor, says he has circled the globe five times collecting inspiration. Then he dynamited into an Ozark bluff to lay the foundation for a spire-crowned castle and groundskeepers abode modeled on medieval cathedrals. A suite will rent for up to $750.

The locals joke that Eureka Springs is the place where misfits fit. But perhaps the oddest thing is how the vegans and the hunters, the wiccans and the Christian fundamentalists, the gays and the rednecks, seem to co-exist in some sort of harmonic convergence.

"I've got to have both Bud Light and New Belgium Fat Tire on draft," said Ruth Goodwin-Hager, co-proprietor of local favorite Sparky's Roadhouse Cafe, a bowling-motif diner operated out of a renovated Highway 62 car wash.

"In here we get the vegans wanting organic arugula and the guys who eat burgers and onion rings every night, and they all hang out together."

The further I venture from the radius of Eureka Springs, the more it feels like Arkansas. Along the highway that rims town, the Pine Mountain Jamboree opens with gospel and closes with "a heartfelt patriotic salute to veterans and America." A similarly Branson-esque Ozark Mountain Hoe-Down stars a banjo-picking hillbilly doofus named P Nutt.

But for sheer pageantry, nothing competes with the Passion Play, which for four decades has enthralled an amphitheater audience of as many as 4,100 each night with its reenactment of the final days in the life of Jesus. (The show is dark Sundays and Wednesdays, when its target audience is in church.)

A flock of sheep and live camels join the locals who pantomime to a recorded script, which has been revised over the years after complaints of anti-Semitism.

Walking out of earshot of the Passion Play, I follow the squelch of crickets out to the base of the spotlit Christ of the Ozarks statue, its arms outstretched 65 feet across, shimmering in the moonlight. Resident Travis Walls explains how workers covered the steel frame and mortar Jesus with a reflective agate coating.

Peering upward, he observes, "Kinda looks like a milk carton, doesn't he?

"The original plan was for him to be 147 feet tall, but the FAA said it would interfere with air space and they'd have to put a blinking light up there. Well as you can imagine, folks around here weren't going to put any red blinking light on the top of Jesus' head.

"So they made him shorter, stunted. They made accommodations."

There it is, the essence of Eureka Springs today: folks making accommodations. Accommodations to a seemingly inhospitable mountain, and to one another.

A sign outside the Eureka Spring Assembly of God Church on Highway 23 ruefully asks: "Christian Friend, Have You Prayed for Eureka Today?" Down the road, a 23-foot-tall tuned wind chime, the largest of its kind anywhere, reverberates, its soulful melody soaring into the star-sequined sky.