SCENIC ROUTE: Our road trip issue takes you north, south, east and west, so get yourself a window seat.
By Stephanie Smittle
With
9 THE FRONT
Q&A: Writer Jennifer Case exposes the underbelly of motherhood. Aw, Snap!: Shirley you’ll want a trim from a barbershop as charming as Cherokee Charlie’s. Inconsequential News Quiz.
15 THE TO-DO LIST
FreshGrass at The Momentary, Bonnie Raitt at Robinson Center, Alison Krauss at First Security Amphitheater, Steve H. Broadnax III’s “Me and the Devil” at The Rep, Patterson Hood at the White Water Tavern and more.
22
Faux populists pass laws to slash people power in the 2025 legislative session.
By Benjamin Hardy
Rev. Jeff Hood takes his ministry to death row.
By Dan Marsh
Buy your weed with a credit card? You’ve got Dan Roda to thank.
By Tricia Larson
Bill, Ted and sundae shopping memories that made us cry.
PUBLISHER Alan Leveritt
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Austin Gelder
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Mandy Keener
MANAGING EDITOR Benjamin Hardy
PRINT EDITOR Daniel Grear
FOOD EDITOR Rhett Brinkley
CANNABIZ EDITOR Griffin Coop
CULTURE EDITOR Dan Marsh
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER Matt Campbell
AGRI AND ENVIRONMENT REPORTER Phillip Powell
REPORTER Milo Strain
VIBE CHECKER Stephanie Smittle
EDITOR EMERITUS Max Brantley
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Mara Leveritt
PHOTOGRAPHER Brian Chilson
DIGITAL MARKETING MANAGER Madeline Chosich
DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT Wythe Walker
ADVERTISING ART DIRECTOR Mike Spain
GRAPHIC DESIGNER Katie Hassell
DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING/ SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS PUBLISHER Brooke Wallace ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES
Terrell Jacob, Kaitlyn Looney and Evan Ethridge
ADVERTISING TRAFFIC MANAGER Roland R. Gladden
SPECIAL SECTION MANAGING EDITOR Caleb Patton
EVENTS DIRECTOR Donavan Suitt
DIRECTOR OF CANNABIS SALES AND MARKETING Lee Major IT DIRECTOR Robert Curfman
CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Anitra Lovelace
CONTROLLER Weldon Wilson
BILLING/COLLECTIONS Charlotte Key CHAIR MAN Lindsey Millar
Writing and motherhood, both huge time sucks on their own, become especially daunting when one tries to undertake them simultaneously. Ask Jennifer Case, she knows! In her book “We Are Animals,” published last fall, the 39-yearold creative writing instructor and mother of two sorts through the nearly impossible feats moms accomplish daily, and the societal infrastructure that makes it all so hard to pull off. Case penciled in some time to talk about it on a recent Tuesday morning when both kids were at school and she had a few free minutes from her teaching job at the University of Central Arkansas.
“We Are Animals” captures a few different phases of life, from when you were considering having your first child up until years later, when you were weaning your second. When did you have the chance to write it all down?
I wrote it over a series of years. A couple of the essays I wrote when my daughter was young, before I got pregnant with my son. The majority are from after he was born, from 2017 to 2019. So he was 1 to 3 years old, my daughter was 5 to 7. Now, they’re 8 and 12.
WHAT ARE YOU READING NOW?
Christina Rivera’s collection, “My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women”
WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING: “Severance.” Some of it feels unsettlingly real.
What made you decide to write a book? I think I didn’t have a choice. I’ve always been a writer and have always used writing to understand the world and life around me. And motherhood raised such large questions for me that I needed to find answers, or at least explore the questions. Writing was the only means I had to do so. Writing has always been the most useful practice to me, to understand what I think and feel.
really realizing why they’re struggling.
What’s at the root of the struggle here? I’m fascinated by evolutionary biology. Throughout history, parenting took place in communities. It was a community activity more than just an individual activity or something that took place within a nuclear family. Our bodies are designed to experience parenthood in those communities, but we don’t live in those communities.
WHAT ELSE DO YOU LIKE TO DO? I love to hike, so I enjoy spending time in Arkansas state parks with my kids. Also book arts and bookbinding.
Let’s talk logistics. How did you pull it off? When I was working on the essays most heavily, I was able to protect Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I had an hour or two both of those days to work on the project. And in the summer my kids were still in daycare, so I was able to have a little more time then when I wasn’t teaching courses. The irony was that I had those two days a week to write, and inevitably those two nights were the nights my son would sleep most poorly. It was a slow project because I had to just be patient with all the unexpected interruptions that happen when you have young kids who come down with every virus imaginable.
But you mustered through! Why was it important to you to keep working? I think as a society we don’t talk about what that experience of early motherhood is — physically, psychologically and emotionally. We ignore the changes and the physical impacts and just leave mothers with young children to navigate those changes on their own in a society that doesn’t offer substantial support. I wrote the book to reach out to other young mothers who feel isolated, who are struggling without
What most surprised you about motherhood? I don’t think I expected how isolating it would be, how much time it would just be me at home with my children. I remember talking to my mom when my daughter went to daycare and got sick all the time. I told her, “No one told me it would be like this!” It was cold after cold after cold after stomach bug. Nobody told me just how exhausting early motherhood could be and how much time could go toward just tending a sick infant or myself when I’m sick because I caught something, or when I’m just kind of navigating the delirium of sleep deprivation. At one point I realized I had gone a full year without sleeping through the night.
One of the tensions I explore in the book is that message I’d grown up with that I could do it all. But the truth was, as a mother of young children, I couldn’t! My body was using so much of my resources to grow this infant, to nurse and breastfeed, and then when you’re working with sleep deprivation, I couldn’t do it all.
WHAT ARE SOME POLICY CHANGES YOU THINK MIGHT HELP? The biological tolls of motherhood are used to imply that women shouldn’t be in the workplace. I don’t agree with that, but the truth is, our capacities and our priorities and what energy we have available are different in that period. I would advocate for policies that give mothers space to take the time they need, and support to make the choices they know would serve them and meet their needs. We need better parental leave for women, but for both parents, too. Saying that you can take six months off of work but you’re not going to get paid isn’t actually parental leave.
YOU MENTION PAY. THE FINANCIALS ON HAVING KIDS ARE DAUNTING. I certainly know people who decide to have fewer children than they wanted because of the lack of social support and how difficult it is financially. I talk to my students, and Gen Z seems concerned for a number of reasons. There’s the financial and environmental uncertainty, combined with a lack of support systems in place for young families.
—Austin Gelder
SIT RIGHT DOWN
On a recent drive past a row of antique stores in Shirley, photographer Brian Chilson couldn’t help but snap a picture of Cherokee Charlie’s Family Haircutters, which doubles as a collecting point for stray animals. “I saw a group of kids and a cat visiting proprietor Charlie Bunch,” Chilson said. “When I pointed the camera, the kids scattered, but Charlie and the cat stayed.”
“I
was important?
THOU SHALT PLAY ALONG WE COMMAND THEE TO ANSWER!
Isurvived the andtornado allI got was thislousy T-shirt
4. It’s been a little over two years since Little Rock suffered a devastating tornado on March 31, 2023. How did the city of Little Rock mark the occasion?
A. Giving out T-shirts with the phrase “I survived the tornado and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”
A. Ivermectin is the new penicillin
B. Honey, lemon and ivermectin is great for a sore throat
C. If it’s good enough for horses, it’s good enough for people
D. Because it’s dangerous to take large doses of ivermectin developed for cows and horses
2. The local chapter of the National Association of Letter Carriers held a protest at the Arkansas State Capitol in late March. What was the group’s concern?
A. Dogs on the mail route
B. The phrase “going postal”
C. A proposal to allow the purchase of stamps with cryptocurrency
D. A plan by the Trump administration to reorganize the Postal Service and cut thousands of jobs
3. A group of resisters has spent multiple Thursdays rallying along North University Avenue outside the office of Rep. French Hill. Why?
A. To catch a glimpse of Hill’s car called “Old Blue”
B. To give Hill a copy of a documentary about his 2018 opponent, state Rep. Clarke Tucker
C. To watch Hill lick President Trump’s boots
D. To ask Hill to hold a town hall meeting
B. Providing free disaster preparedness kits that include a copy of “The Wizard of Oz”
C. Deploying kites to determine wind speed and tornado risk
D. Opening a new fire station in the impacted area
5. At a Carroll County Quorum Court meeting in March, elected officials placed a moratorium on new commercial solar and wind projects. What were their concerns?
A. If wind gets used for energy, there won’t be enough air to breathe
B. When the sun burns out, solar power won’t be profitable
C. Turbines generate wind and create tornadoes
D. Property damage, deforestation, disruption of water resources and impacts on wildlife
6. Evanescence, the rock band founded in Little Rock, recently released their first new song since 2021, which is part of the soundtrack for a new animated Netflix series called “Devil May Cry.” What is the name of the song?
A. “Gimme That Pitchfork”
B. “The Devil’s in the Details”
C. “Lake of Fire”
D. “Afterlife”
7. Bob Dylan played at Little Rock’s Robinson Center in March. What song did he open the show with?
A. “Thunderstruck”
B. “Highway to Hell”
C. “Back in Black”
D. “All Along the Watchtower”
8. Little Rock writer Viktoria Capek recently announced the September publication of her book analyzing the intersection of classic novels and the lyrics of a popular musician. Who’s the artist?
A. New Kids on the Block
B. Vanilla Ice
C. Nickelback
D. Taylor Swift
9. Arkansas legislators passed a bill that would require a well-known document to be posted in public school classrooms. What’s the text?
A. A list of all NASCAR tracks
B. Razorback football roster
C. Deer season opening dates
D. A version of the Ten Commandments
10. In April, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced a plan to bar spending SNAP benefits on candy and soda, and to add one new item to the allowed list. What is it?
A. Raw donkey milk
B. Beef tallow fries
C. Deer meat tacos
D. Rotisserie chicken
LET THE FEAST BEGIN!
BY DAN MARSH, DANIEL GREAR AND OMAYA JONES
ALISON KRAUSS & UNION STATION
MONDAY 5/12. FIRST SECURITY AMPHITHEATER. 7:30 P.M. $49-$160.
“Looks Like the End of the Road,” the first single off “Arcadia,” the latest album from Alison Krauss & Union Station, is the first of their songs I’ve paid any real attention to. It’s a stunner. A bluegrassadjacent ballad about letting go, the track sounds almost whimsical thanks to the band’s minor-key phrasings and, most importantly, Krauss’ delicately precise vocal performance. “Isolate in the darkest of nights / And I’m down to the wire / Surrounded by fire,” she sings, her lyrics taking on a spooky intimacy. Krauss and her legendary band, which includes world-class dobro player Jerry Douglas, have been racking up praise and Grammy awards and nominations for decades (she has also cut a couple of exceedingly popular roots albums with Robert Plant). “Arcadia,” the groupʼs first album since 2011’s “Paper Airplane,” was praised by folkalley.com for its “glimmering instrumentation” and “shimmering vocals,” with the publication deeming the record “a little slice of perfection.” Audiences at First Security Amphitheater can expect the same. Get tickets at ticketmaster.com. DM
RANDEE ST. NICHOLAS
SAL VULCANO
FRIDAY 5/16. ROBINSON CENTER. 7 P.M. $40-$103.
Before the pandemic, Sal Vulcano was one quarter of the comedy troupe known as the Impractical Jokers, who played silly pranks on one another (usually in public, often on New York City streets) on the insanely popular TruTV series of the same name. Today, Vulcano is one third of the Jokers, following the departure of series regular and co-founder Joe Gatto, who as of late March faces allegations of sexual assault and grooming. OK, maybe that’s not the best lead-in for Vulcano, whose “Everything Is Fine” tour lands at Robinson Center this month. But I mostly enjoyed “Impractical Jokers,” a remarkably crude “reality” show where you can’t quite believe that human beings would do this to each other. Vulcano’s wit and seeming reluctance to take things as far as Gatto made him slightly more appealing than his colleagues. I can’t vouch for his standup routine, but if “Impractical Jokers” was a kinder, gentler version of “Jackass,” then Vulcano was the kindest, gentlest joker. His solo act should be intriguing (and funny). Get tickets at ticketmaster.com. DM
When I was 19, back in the good old days of 1989, Bonnie Raitt released her comeback album, “Nick of Time,” a Grammy-winning smash for the veteran blues, rock, country and folk singer. Think about that! At only age 39, Raitt needed a “comeback” after building a solid reputation and garnering mostly strong reviews for her nine previous albums. For “Nick of Time,” she joined with producer Don Was to record a popcountry album that was more of a rejuvenation than a true comeback. It was my first exposure to Raitt’s silky vocals and bluesy guitar prowess. I also enjoyed her subsequent releases, “Luck of the Draw” (1991) and “Longing in Their Hearts” (1994), even though both were more commercially oriented and perhaps a bit too slickly produced. (Call it the trappings of success.) We should all be excited about Raitt, now 75, bringing her 2025 tour to Robinson Center on May 7. Here’s hoping for a setlist that includes such classics as “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” “The Road’s My Middle Name,” “Love Sneakin’ Up on You” and deeper cuts from pre-“Nick of Time” albums like “Sweet Forgiveness” and “Streetlights.” Get tickets (while you can) at ticketmaster.com. DM
MARINA CHAVEZ
‘THE LOST WEEKEND — THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF MAY PANG’
FRIDAY 5/2-SUNDAY 5/4. M2 GALLERY. FREE.
Candid images of rock stars are a favorite genre of mine, perhaps best captured by the legendary Annie Leibovitz, who’s sort of the Ansel Adams of celebrity photography. So I’m interested in this show at the M2 Gallery, which visualizes May Pang’s “18-month-long romance” with John Lennon from 1973 to 1975. According to her website, Pang was a personal assistant to Lennon and Yoko Ono when their marriage began to fracture: “Yoko convinced their young (i.e., easy to control) assistant that she was the safest bet to date a newly single John.” Thus began what the former Beatle would call his “Lost Weekend” with Pang. The exhibit (and its accompanying documentary, an official 2022 selection at the Tribeca Film Festival) tells the story of their relationship through Pang's images. Pang will appear at the exhibit, which is free to the public and will be viewable on Friday from 5-8 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and Sunday from noon-4 p.m. Tickets aren’t necessary. DM
PATTERSON HOOD
FRIDAY 5/2-SATURDAY 5/3. WHITE WATER TAVERN. 8:30 P.M. $40.
Alt-country rockers Drive-By Truckers are the rare band with two distinct lead vocalists — Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood — and come May, Central Arkansas will have had the chance to witness both singer-songwriters perform solo (each a two-night stand!) at the White Water Tavern, where Cooley took the stage in December. Hood, the more prolific of the pair, is fresh off the February release of “Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams,” which Pitchfork called his “most adventurous and surprising, and his best” solo album. Quieter and more personal than the often outward-looking storytelling he’s known for, the new record sees Hood excavating poignant memories, from being a wallflower at holiday gettogethers in “The Van Pelt Parties” (“Intellectuals and artists and socialites / Grownups getting wasted and eating appetizers / And me, I was maybe 8 years old”) to the hometown natural disaster in “Exploding Trees” (“Like fireworks in the ice storm, I still hear the sound”) to recollections of a long-suffering family friend in “Miss Coldiron’s Oldsmobile” (“Anne Coldiron never married and she lives alone / With emphysema and Shirley Temple dolls”). Get tickets at whitewatertavern.com. DG
TURNOVER
MONDAY 5/5. THE HALL. 8 P.M. $39.50-$69.50.
If you’ve been following the post-aughts trajectory of emo music, there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with “Peripheral Vision,” the dreamily heart-rending fan-favorite LP from Virginia band Turnover that features a track likening the pain of a breakup to “cutting my fingers off.” With a promise to play the beloved album in full in honor of its 10th anniversary (it came out literally a decade and a day before this show at The Hall), there’s no better opportunity to don a baseball cap and flannel, conjure your fondest (or dreariest) memory of a long-lost ex, and get your angst on in the company of other regret addicts. The equally moody and no-less-talented groups Balance and Composure, and Horse Jumper of Love, are set to open. Get tickets at littlerockhall.com. DG
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” takes place in West Germany some months after the 1972 Munich Massacre. Emmi, a 60-year-old German widow, walks into a bar where Ali, a much younger migrant worker from Morocco, is goaded into asking her for a dance. The unlikely friendship they form blossoms into a romance that strains the relationships between Emmi and her children and Ali and the Moroccan community. There’s a direct line between this film and Douglas Sirk’s “All that Heaven Allows,” a 1955 melodrama about the limitations imposed by society on relationships that threaten the social order. Fassbinder considered remaking the Sirk film but made “Ali” instead as a vehicle to explore social and generational issues. It went on to become “one of the high-water marks in German New Wave cinema,” according to the critics' consensus on Rotten Tomatoes. Get tickets at riverdale10.com. OJ
The Arkansas Repertory Theatre is back for another five-production summertime season, opening with a show co-written by Little Rock native, newly minted artistic director for The Rep and Arkansas Black Hall of Fame inductee Steve H. Broadnax III. Set in a Southeast Arkansas juke joint, “Me and the Devil,” a “play with music,” concerns itinerant blues singer Robert Johnson who, according to lore almost as mythic as Arthur plucking the sword from the stone, sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for mad guitar skills. The play was well reviewed upon its 2021 virtual debut, with the Wall Street Journal calling it “first-class in every way.” Their review praised the acting, Broadnax’s direction (he’ll be directing this time around as well) and the production design. I’ve always been fascinated by Johnson’s story. This rendering, in which Johnson faces his satanic persecutor in a hellish jury trial, promises an interesting take. Get tickets at therep.org. DM
FRESHGRASS FESTIVAL
FRIDAY 5/16-SATURDAY 5/17. THE MOMENTARY, BENTONVILLE. $168-$395 WEEKEND PASS; $89-$118 PER DAY.
May will be a great time for folk lovers in Arkansas when the 2025 iteration of the FreshGrass festival returns to The Momentary in Bentonville. Headliners include Lukas Nelson, Shakey Graves, husband-and-wife duo Rosanne Cash and John Leventhal, and a trio of banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck, “Birdman” composer and percussionist Antonio Sánchez and Colombian harpist Edmar Castañeda. Arkansans of note include Jesse Welles, a folk singer from Ozark whose protest songs recently went viral on social media; Jude Brothers, a masterful singer-songwriter from Fayetteville who often adds in the wandering plucks of a Celtic harp; and Willi Carlisle, a formerly Northwest Arkansas-based singer-songwriter whose 2024 album “Critterland” landed on year-end lists from Paste Magazine, Bandcamp and Stereogum. Carlisle will perform new music commissioned for the festival. Other announced performers include Seun Kuti & Egypt 80, Waylon Wyatt, La Doña, Alison Brown, Sister Sadie, AJ Lee & Blue Summit, Lost Bayou Ramblers and The Langan Band. Get tickets at themomentary.org. DM
IN THE VANGUARD OF SOMETHING OR OTHER
ASSESSING THE 2025 LEGISLATIVE SESSION.
BY BENJAMIN HARDY
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON
The Arkansas Legislature wrapped up its biennial spasm of lawmaking last week, and those of us who’ve been watching from the cheap seats these past three months couldn’t be more thrilled to see them go.
As I followed the session this year, I kept thinking back to something Gov. Sarah Sanders said in mid-January at her State of the State address. She touted the victories of her first legislative session as governor, in 2023, and promised this year’s would be similarly “transformational.” And she framed the moment in terms of national politics: “Over the past two years, Arkansas has been the vanguard of a national conservative revolution, which in just six days will put President Trump back in the White House,” Sanders said.
Arkansas is a backwater no longer, Sanders seemed to be saying. We’re the tip of the spear, the vanguard of the vibe shift. We’re young, we’re vibrant, we’re the future.
This sort of flattery is well-worn political rhetoric in Arkansas, a state with perennial self-image issues. In reality, of course, Arkansas remains a minor outpost of MAGA-world. If you’re searching for the future of conservative politics, go look in Texas or Florida.
And yet, silly as Sanders’ claim might be, there’s a grain of truth to it.
Right now, GOP power in Arkansas is about as airtight as it gets. Republicans hold large supermajorities in both the House and Senate. They control the governor’s office and every other statewide post, and have a steadfast ally in the nominally nonpartisan Arkansas
Supreme Court. On the federal level, our allGOP congressional delegation holds some of the most influential committee chairmanships around and generally have been innovators in the Republicans’ race to the bottom to ingratiate themselves with Donald Trump. Republicans hold all the cards in Arkansas. The state is theirs to remake how they see fit. So if we really are the vanguard of the “conservative revolution,” what’s the grand plan? Beyond banning abortions and beating up on trans people, what does the future of MAGA governance look like at the state level? What do Republicans really want? For clues, let’s take a look at a few of their accomplishments this legislative session.
POWER TO THE POLITICIANS
The most obvious answer is hoarding power for power’s sake. It seemed like the Legislature’s first order of business in 2025 was to make it harder for Arkansans to pass new laws at the ballot box by circulating petitions — the one political lever that Republicans don’t control.
Lawmakers passed two bills that give Attorney General Tim Griffin more ways to reject constitutional amendments before petition groups even begin gathering signatures. One, by Rep. Ryan Rose (R-Van Buren), requires all citizen-initiated ballot titles to be written at a reading level of eighth grade or below, a standard that might well be impossible when combined with other legal requirements. The standard will emphatically not apply to ballot measures referred to the people by the
Legislature, though — lawmakers can make those as complicated and confusing as they want them to be. The other, by Rep. David Ray (R-Maumelle), requires the AG to make sure ballot measures don’t conflict with the U.S. Constitution or federal law. Democrats raised the objection that federal courts, not state officials, are the only ones empowered to make binding decisions about federal law. They were ignored.
An ugly package of five bills from Sen. Kim Hammer (R-Benton) will make it more tedious and difficult to gather signatures and give the secretary of state more power to toss out signatures at the drop of a hat. They include requirements that people show ID before signing a petition and that canvassers read ballot titles aloud to potential signers. Check out the length of the title on last year’s Arkansas Abortion Amendment to see just how burdensome that will be.
At least the worst two ballot measure bills didn’t pass. Another Hammer bill, which failed to make it out of committee, would have given the secretary of state his or her own internal police force to investigate supposed “fraud.” Hammer himself plans to run for secretary of state in 2026. The current secretary of state, Cole Jester, supported Hammer’s bills and claimed without evidence that the petition process was rife with fraud.
Then there was the bill by Sen. Jim Dotson (R-Bentonville) and Rep. Jimmy Gazaway (R-Paragould) that would have nuked the whole ballot measure process: It aimed to impose a 67% voter threshold to pass future
ACCESS 101: Education Secretary Jacob Oliva, Rep. Matthew Shepherd and Sen. Jonathan Dismang present the governor’s bill on higher education, which combined anti-woke blather with technocratic changes.
constitutional amendments and asserted the Legislature’s authority to change or repeal any amendment as lawmakers see fit. The Senate, thankfully, voted it down.
Sanders clearly supported the ballot measure bills, or at least most of them. At a victory lap press conference on April 16, the governor rattled off a list of “powerful special interests” that Arkansas Republicans had stood up against, including shadowy “far left” forces that “threaten our elections with petition fraud.” But she generally downplayed the issue. She didn’t so much as mention ballot measures in the January address outlining her priorities, nor were the bills included in a post-session graphic celebrating 10 “big wins” of her administration.
The takeaway: Shutting down direct democracy in Arkansas is at the top of the to-do list for Sanders and other Republicans. But they’re well aware of how bad it sounds, especially alongside their populist pretensions. Just three years ago, in 2022, Arkansans soundly rejected a constitutional amendment authored by Rep. Ray that would have required a 60% vote to pass future amendments at the ballot. Arkansans don’t want to give up the power to change their own laws, and Sanders and company know it.
REPUBLICAN REVOLT
Maybe the most dramatic twist of the 2025 session was the repeated failure of a $750 million spending bill to build a massive new prison near Charleston, in rural Franklin County. At 3,000 beds, it would be the state’s largest.
this session, when Sen. Jonathan Dismang (R-Searcy) filed a bill that would have appropriated $750 million for the project. That, plus an additional $75 million previously set aside under former Gov. Asa Hutchinson, would add up to $825 million, a figure that the state Department of Correction said in March was the new estimated cost.
Most Senate Republicans lined up behind
end. After five tries, the prison appropriation maxed out at 21 votes — nowhere near the 27 it needed to pass the 35-member Senate.
Dismang and Senate President Pro Tem Bart Hester (R-Cave Springs), a close ally of Sanders, downplayed the loss. They said the $75 million that the correction department already has in hand will be enough to get rolling on the project between now and the 2026 fiscal session. The safe money is on Sanders eventually getting her prison. But the episode was reminiscent of the Republican rebellion against Sanders’ plan to gut the state Freedom of Information Act in a 2023 special session, in which lawmakers eventually forced the governor to compromise.
The prison is a cornerstone of Sanders’ agenda, but many locals are fiercely resisting the project and say they were blindsided by the state’s stealth purchase of the land last fall. Questions abound about staffing, the impact on local infrastructure and whether the state needs a new prison of that scale at all. Arkansas’s incarceration rate is already among the highest in the country.
Legislators opposed to the prison have focused on the price tag. When Sanders began talking about a new prison in 2023, she said it would cost around $470 million — but emails uncovered by a public records request later showed an architectural firm initially gave an estimate of $1.2 billion. State officials repeatedly refused to give a revised estimate until
Dismang and the governor, but a handful were firmly opposed. The problem for Sanders was that appropriations require a three-fourths vote of each chamber, meaning a small bloc of legislators can hold up a spending bill if they’re sufficiently committed.
The six-member Democratic minority in the Senate is so small it can’t block an appropriation bill on its own, but this time Dems were joined by Republicans like Sen. Bryan King of Green Forest, the most vociferous critic of the Franklin County prison, and Sen. Jimmy Hickey of Texarkana, who has clashed with Sanders on other issues. Though Democrats were rumored to be considering a deal with Sanders allies to win concessions, they held firm in the
The prison bill wasn’t the only example of a contingent of Republicans daring to break with the governor. There was also the bill by Sen. Blake Johnson (R-Corning) and Rep. DeAnn Vaught (R-Horatio) that sought to curtail state regulators’ ability to protect bodies of water from industrial hog farming. Environmentalists feared it would be used to dismantle long-standing moratoriums on large-scale farming operations in the watersheds of Lake Maumelle and the Buffalo River.
On this particular fight, Sanders was on the right side: She and her husband, Bryan, have dreams of amping up Arkansas’s reputation as an outdoor tourist destination. Letting the farm lobby have its way with the Buffalo wouldn’t quite jibe with that vision. The bill initially stalled out in committee, but toward the end of the session it reappeared and easily passed the Senate with support from most Republicans. After it cleared a House committee as well, Sanders struck a compromise with the sponsors to amend the bill and grandfather in the farming moratoriums on the Buffalo and Lake Maumelle, avoiding the public spectacle of a veto fight with her own party.
EDUCATION
At the outset of the session, Sanders said her top priority was a higher education bill that would build on the momentum of Arkansas LEARNS, the K-12 school law she championed in 2023. The result was Arkansas ACCESS, a sprawling, 123-page bill that bans “indoctrination” on college campuses, makes it easier to fire tenured professors, changes the state’s funding formula for colleges and universities,
REQUEST DENIED: Danielle Wright (top), who lost her insurance 60 days after an emergency C-section, urged legislators to extend Medicaid for new moms. Gov. Sanders (at bottom, seated) opposed the change, and the bill failed.
CIVICS LESSON: Little Rock Central High students wait their turn to speak against Arkansas ACCESS, which aimed to tamp down campus protests and “attempts to influence legislation” by students.
puts more money toward scholarships, and much more.
The piece of ACCESS that got the most attention was a provision to dampen student protest and political participation in high school and beyond. The original bill would have banned public and charter schools from giving students excused absences to attend protests, walkouts or advocacy of all kinds, including “attempts to influence legislation or other governmental policymaking.” (Of course, that mandate didn’t extend to private schools, despite the fact many of them now receive large sums of state money in the form of vouchers under Arkansas LEARNS.)
A bevy of Little Rock Central High School students spoke against ACCESS in committee, pointing out that their testimony might well be prohibited if the bill would pass. That prompted its sponsors, Sen. Dismang and Rep. Matthew Shephard (R-El Dorado), to amend the bill to allow some excused absences at the K-12 level with parental approval.
Some of ACCESS is good. Much of it is obnoxious. But the most striking thing about the bill is the fact that it tinkers around the edges of the higher ed system, rather than overhauling it.
Like it or hate it, LEARNS was ambitious. Its voucher program, which gives about $7,000 in taxpayer funds per student to private school and homeschool families every year, really was a massive change in the social contract; it will cost the state up to $277 million in the coming year, according to the budget that lawmakers approved this month. Compare that to ACCESS, which will bump up scholarships by about $23 million next year. The biggest change is to the Arkansas Academic Challenge award, which will increase from $1,000 to $2,000 for eligible students in their freshman year only. It’s welcome enough, but hardly a sea change.
In her State of the State address, Sanders hyped the value of higher education (even as she took vague potshots at four-year degree programs and “woke” professors). Considering the record-setting budget surpluses Arkansas has racked up in recent years, the question
is: Why not do more?
Speaking of LEARNS, the Legislature also tweaked the 2023 education law to restrict how homeschool families spend their vouchers. Along with academics, LEARNS vouchers can be used to pay for supplies, transportation and activities from gym memberships to horseback riding lessons. The bill that passed this session, which was sponsored by the same Republicans behind LEARNS itself, would limit families to spending only 25% of the voucher amount on transportation and 25% on “extracurricular activities, physical education activities, or education field trips.”
That’s small comfort to voucher critics, who are watching with alarm as the program’s budget explodes, along with enrollment. Several bills by Rep. Jim Wooten (R-Beebe) aimed to make private schools that accept vouchers follow the same requirements as public schools when it comes to testing and reporting. But despite some bipartisan support, Wooten’s bills died in committee. Sanders and most Republicans remain utterly committed to the universal voucher experiment, which is also playing out in many other red states.
To her credit, Sanders also supported at least two bipartisan bills this session that will be positive for kids in public schools. The first is a bill sponsored by Sen. Dismang and Sen. Clarke Tucker (D-Little Rock), among others, that will give free breakfast to all public school students and pay for it with medical marijuana tax revenue. It’s a rare example of state Republicans putting their money where their mouth is in terms of crafting pro-child public policy, even as they’ve generally made it harder for families to get and keep benefits.
The other is the Bell to Bell, No Cell Act, a ban on student phone use during school hours. States from California to Texas are now pursuing similar policies. As with most school bills, it’s frustrating that the ban applies to public and charter schools but not private schools that take public funds, but it’s nonetheless a good step.
HEALTH AND MORE
Arkansas has the worst maternal and infant
mortality statistics in the country, and Sanders promised to address the issue this session. In February, she championed the Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies Act to make it easier for pregnant women to apply for Medicaid and guarantee coverage of certain services. A closer look reveals the bill mainly benefits providers, boosting the money the safety-net program pays to doctors and hospitals for deliveries and other maternal care by $45 million (mostly paid by the federal government). It also shortens the statute of limitations for lawsuits brought on behalf of children who suffered medical injuries during birth — another boon to doctors.
But the Healthy Moms bill didn’t include perhaps the most obvious policy change: Letting women keep Medicaid coverage for a full year after giving birth. All but two states in the country now do this, one of which is Arkansas. Here, new moms are kicked off Medicaid just 60 days postpartum.
For reasons that remain unclear, Sanders has always opposed a 12-month postpartum extension. She’s said it’s unnecessary and “duplicative,” because new mothers can already get coverage through other means, such as ARHOME, the state’s Medicaid expansion program for low-income adults. The problem with that argument is that the income threshold for pregnancy Medicaid is higher than the one for ARHOME. State data indicates that thousands of women in Arkansas every year qualify for pregnancy Medicaid but make a little too much money to qualify for ARHOME, leaving them without coverage options (or at least scrambling to sign up for new insurance) just two months after giving birth.
At the end of the session, Rep. Aaron Pilkington (R-Knoxville), one of the sponsors of the Healthy Moms bill, pushed forward a separate bill to extend postpartum Medicaid to 12 months. It was co-sponsored by Sen. Breanne Davis (R-Russellville), who’s generally seen as a Sanders loyalist. The bill easily passed the House but stalled in a Senate committee after state Department of Human Services officials — presumably at the behest of Sanders — testified against it. The DHS officials told senators the bill might end up helping women who were “undocumented or not U.S. citizens,” giving Republicans the excuse they needed to vote “no.”
The fact that Pilkington’s bill got as far as it did perhaps showed another small crack in Sanders’ grip on legislative Republicans. Its demise suggests the governor remains intent on maintaining that level of control and can’t abide legislative freelancing on issues she’s staked out as her turf. And though the governor’s Healthy Moms bill is good on net, it’s telling that she’s less interested in helping poor women secure health care than she is in helping providers collect more money.
One can see similar priorities at play in a bill
Sanders signed on the last day of the session that targets pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs — middleman companies that handle drug claims and negotiate rates on behalf of insurers. The nation’s three largest PBMs are owned by huge health care conglomerates that also run their own in-house pharmacies, including CVS and Express Scripts. But the bill would ban PBMs from holding pharmacy licenses in the state beginning in January, which could mean the closure of two dozen CVS locations in the state and disruptions to online pharmacies that deliver prescriptions by mail.
The Arkansas Pharmacists Association, which has been warring with PBMs for some time, is behind the bill. Independent pharmacists say it’s inherently unfair for a PBM to also run a pharmacy, and they have a point. In fact, there’s a bipartisan effort in Congress by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) to ban PBM ownership of pharmacies.
That makes sense on the federal level, but it’s unlikely Arkansas’s law on its own will make CVS — the sixth-largest company in the U.S. — change its fundamental business model. And the short-term effects may well hurt consumers if stores and mail-order pharmacies close down. It’s not clear the bill will help the average Arkansan. It will, however, help the average Arkansas pharmacist.
CVS launched an advertising blitz in the last week of the session urging Sanders to veto it. Though she hadn’t weighed in on the issue up until that point, she came out swinging with a statement as she signed the bill on the last day of the session. “These massive corporations are attacking our state because we will be the first in the country to hold them accountable for their anticompetitive actions, but Arkansas has never been afraid to be a conservative leader for America,” the governor said. Is it conservative to intervene in the free market on behalf of specific business interests? Are “massive corporations” the enemy, at least sometimes? Those are among the
questions national Republicans are grappling with as they try to work out what their party stands for in the Trump era (aside from cultish fealty to the president himself).
In the PBM fight, Sanders appears to be taking a page from figures like Hawley, who both embrace the MAGA movement’s most toxic elements and experiment with economic populism of a sort that would be unthinkable in the GOP of a couple decades ago. The other example is Sanders’ jousting with “big tech” in the form of the school cellphone ban and a measure authorizing lawsuits against social media platforms for exposing kids to harmful content, like videos promoting suicide.
But as with Hawley, or Vice President JD Vance, the Arkansas governor’s forays against big business seem awfully selective. Tech and pharma interests headquartered in distant states make convenient political foils for Sanders, but there’s little sign of her criticizing corporate interests closer to home, such as Walmart or Tyson Foods. In Arkansas and nationally, Republicans’ top economic priorities remain much the same as they have for years: cutting taxes for the well-off and squeezing benefits for the poor.
Consider another one of Sanders’ achievements this session: the repeal of the state’s grocery tax. She hyped the plan in her State of the State address, held a press conference to announce the bill’s introduction, and celebrated its passage at the end of the session. But the state grocery tax had already been reduced down to just 1/8th of a cent on the dollar (0.125%) in past years thanks to former Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe; it generates about $10 million in revenue annually in a state budget of more than $6 billion. Removing the final sliver of tax means that an Arkansas household that spends $400 on groceries each month can expect to save a whole 50 cents.
It’s a fine thing to do. But to make that a major plank in one’s legislative agenda suggests a lack of larger vision — or just a cynical bait and switch. The populist talk sounds a lot more hollow when you compare the grocery tax to the three large income tax breaks from Republicans in the past two years, which mostly benefit higher-income households and corporations. Or the bill passed this session that will let power companies charge Arkansas consumers higher electric bills to pay for capital investments. Or the new Medicaid work requirement being pursued by Sanders, which will take health insurance from the poor — including, inevitably, some of the new moms she claims to be looking out for. The most striking thing about the 2025 session just might be the mismatch between Sanders’ brawling Trumpist rhetoric and the smallness of the policy solutions she has to offer most Arkansans.
For much more on the 2025 session and its aftermath, check out our daily reporting at arktimes.com.
ROLL OUT
YOUR GUIDE TO THE NATURAL STATE AND MORE.
From our monuments and mountains to our rivers and flatlands, there’s always something to do in Arkansas. If you’re looking for the outdoorsperson’s dream, whether it’s climbing, kayaking, canoeing, cycling, fishing or water sports, Hot Springs, Bella Vista, Gaston’s White River Resort and Blue Spring Heritage Center have you covered.
Next door in Missouri, there’s so much to offer in just a few hours' drive. Johnny Morris’ Wonders of Wildlife National Museum & Aquarium has the largest immersive wildlife attraction in the world, and Dogwood Canyon Nature Park features 10,000 acres of natural beauty offering hiking, biking, wildlife tours and more amongst towering bluffs, waterfalls, creek beds and wildlife of the Ozark Mountains
Adventure and exploration extend well beyond the borders of Arkansas, so it's only natural to travel over to Mississippi and find all of the wonder and beauty they have to offer. If you’re headed east of the Mississippi River, you can find yourself in Greenwood, MS, where good food, great culture and the smooth sounds of the southern Blues welcome all travelers.
If air-conditioned adventures are your thing, we have world-renowned museums like Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.
Art lovers will love this museum and its always-free permanent collection that spans five centuries of American artworks, from early American to the present. You might like to explore the five miles of sculpture and walking trails that link the museum’s 134-acre park to downtown Bentonville. The Museum of Discovery in Little Rock is a children’s paradise. The MOD has always ignited a passion for science, technology, engineering, arts and math (S.T.E.A.M.) in a dynamic and interactive environment for all ages. Whether you want to explore the 90 hands-on exhibits, the Guinness World Record musical bi-polar Tesla coil, the six-and-under gallery or the Tornado Alley Theater, there’s something for everyone! They also house live animals such as hedgehogs, snakes, opossums, spiders and others. More of a history buff? The National Cold War Center at Eaker Air Force Base (BAFB) in Blytheville provides an immersive and authoritative experience in informing, interpreting and honoring the legacy of the Cold War. With so many options, it’s hard to choose, but you can’t forget to plan your rest stops. Beechwood Hospitality has several hotels from which to choose across the state in El Dorado, Jonesboro, Arkadelphia and Bentonville, and the Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa is always a great option in Hot Springs!
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Are We There Yet?
While the destination of a road trip holds promise, the hours spent in transit often stretch before travelers, begging for ways to alleviate the monotony. Fear not, fellow adventurers, for the open road offers a canvas for a multitude of engaging pastimes beyond simply watching the miles tick by. Here are three of our top suggestions to pass the time:
PODCASTS
For the intellectually curious, a road trip presents a golden opportunity to delve into the world of audiobooks and podcasts. Lose yourself in a gripping thriller, expand your knowledge with a historical account, or learn a new skill through an educational podcast. The format allows drivers to remain focused on the road while passengers can close their eyes and fully immerse themselves in the narrative or discussion. Libraries and streaming services offer vast catalogs, ensuring a diverse selection to suit any taste.
CONVERSATION
Often overlooked in our digitally saturated lives, it flourishes within the confines of the car. Engage fellow travelers in thoughtful discussions, reminisce about shared memories or dive into stories that spark creativity and laughter. The absence of typical distractions fosters a unique environment for connection and strengthens bonds between companions. Consider preparing conversation starters beforehand to avoid lulls and encourage deeper engagement.
CAR GAMES
Engaging with the world outside the window offers another avenue for entertainment. Play spotting games, challenging each other to find specific types of vehicles, license plates from different states or unique roadside attractions. Download a stargazing app and identify constellations during nighttime stretches. Observe the subtle shifts in landscape, from rolling hills to towering mountains, and appreciate the diverse geography of the region.
Ultimately, the best way to pass the time on a road trip lies in embracing the journey itself. Slow down, observe the world around you, connect with your companions and allow the open road to unfold its own unique rhythm. By engaging your senses and your mind, the hours spent traveling transform from mere transit into an integral and enjoyable part of the adventure.
ThiS or That?
Every adventurer, passenger princess and road tripper is different, so it’s always helpful to find out just what your riding partners’ preferences are before you put the pedal to the metal. Use the list below to find out what your best plan of action should be:
Your Hilltop HideawaY
Just above downtown, Osage Creek Lodge puts you close to everything that makes Eureka Springs one of our most beloved weekend getaways From parades and live music to food fests, car shows, and art walks, there’ s always something happening here.
We’ re proud to support local in more ways than one We host seasonal markets right onsite and offer room add-ons featuring goods from some of Eureka’ s favorite makers. Think chocolatedipped strawberries, handmade snacks, and fresh floral bundles —all locally sourced to personalize your stay.
Need space for a gathering?
Our business center is available to book for meetings, retreats, and small events. Check our website and socials for market dates, add-on options, and seasonal offers.
No matter the destination or distance, when you’re planning a road trip, there are a few essential items you should never forget, just in case you find yourself enjoying the journey more than the final stop. Here’s a list of what we think everyone should have on hand when planning their next road trip:
COMFORT
• All of your favorite snacks and drinks
• A large bottle of water (per person)
• A small cooler to keep everything chilled
• Headphones
• Sunglasses, chapstick and hand sanitizer
• An easy-to-pack blanket and pillow
TECH
• A charging cable
• A spare power bank to keep things charged
• A secondary form of travel assistance (atlas, GPS, etc.)
• Travel apps for hiking, biking and more
• Camera to capture memories
EMERGENCY GEAR
• A well-stocked, refreshed firstaid kit
• Medications
• Cash
• Jumper Cables
• Hazard cones in case of a flat tire
• A spare tire to fix the flat
ONE TICKET. TONS OF FUN.
Make the most of your summer with an unforgettable Ozarks outing — featuring one ticket to two world-class destinations. The Ozarks Outing ticket offers access to both Dogwood Canyon Nature Park and Wonders of Wildlife National Museum & Aquarium, two of southwest Missouri’s premier conservation attractions. Located just miles from northern Arkansas, these destinations deliver immersive, one-of-a-kind experiences that celebrate the natural beauty and wild spirit of the Ozarks.
Start your adventure in Springfield, Missouri, at Wonders of Wildlife National Museum & Aquarium, voted America’s Best Aquarium by USA Today readers a record six times. This immersive, award-winning attraction features more than 1.5 miles of exhibits, thousands of live animals and countless ways to connect with the natural world.
Venture through the Wildlife Galleries, home to breathtaking dioramas that transport you to the African savanna, arctic wilderness and beyond. Next, explore the Aquarium Adventure, where you’ll come face-to-face with sharks, sea turtles, jellyfish and colorful reef fish. More than just an aquarium or museum,
Wonders of Wildlife tells the powerful story of conservation while honoring the unsung heroes working to protect wildlife and wild places for future generations. With interactive exhibits and family-friendly experiences throughout, it’s a place where wonder meets purpose.
Just a short scenic drive south, Dogwood Canyon Nature Park awaits. Nestled in the Ozark Mountains, this 10,000-acre natural paradise offers stunning landscapes, abundant wildlife, and peaceful moments of outdoor exploration. Enjoy access to miles of paved trails and choose how you want to explore: walk, bike or hop aboard a guided tram tour. Along the way, you’ll encounter cascading waterfalls, towering bluffs, crystal-clear streams and native wildlife. Other activities like trout fishing, horseback riding and scenic dining at the park’s rustic Mill & Canyon Grill make Dogwood Canyon a full-day outdoor experience.
Whether you’re gazing at sea life in a stateof-the-art aquarium or pedaling past waterfalls in a limestone canyon, this dual-attraction experience is designed to inspire curiosity, spark connection and celebrate the incredible biodiversity of the Ozarks.
The Ozarks Outing ticket makes it easy to discover the best of Missouri’s great outdoors and world-renowned conservation efforts — all in one trip. Perfect for families, couples, travelers and locals alike, this summer experience is one you won’t want to miss.
Choose your own adventure Choose your own adventure
If there’s anything we’ve learned from embarking on yet another year of vacation scouting around The Natural State on behalf of our readers, it’s that Arkansas (and slightly beyond) keeps finding ways to surprise us.
Bored with the Buffalo? Contemplate a spill down the less traveled and more treacherous waters of the Mississippi River, where, led by legendary guide John Ruskey of Quapaw Canoe Company, writer Phillip Powell had "one of the greatest outdoor adventures of my life.”
Wanting to explore western Arkansas but aren’t sure where to start?
Get in the car with Stephanie Smittle, who trekked to Mena and found unforgettable hiking via the Ouachita Mountains and a “sleepy little mountain town with a cute brewery, panoramic sunset views and more bakeries than perhaps the population warrants.”
For those with indulgence on their mind, consider a trip across the border and into the open arms of southwest Missouri, where Matt Campbell dipped his toe into a bit of everything: the existential tourist trappings of Branson Landing, Jeep-ushered spelunking in Springfield, unexpectedly good Italian food in Hollister and much more.
And if all of those options sound a little too involved, consult our staff-wide roundup of restaurant-specific romps within two hours of Central Arkansas, spanning from the highclass spectacle of DONS Southern Social in Hot Springs to the down-home cooking of Marianna’s Jones Bar-B-Q Diner, the “oldest continuously operated Black-owned restaurant in the South.”
on Ouachita
ROAD TRIP TO THE MOUNTAINS? WE’RE A-MENA-BLE.
STORY
AND PHOTOGRAPHY
BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE
“With goldenrod and reindeer lichen Twist flowers in bloom There's just no place I'd rather waste my afternoons Than high on Ouachita” —Dylan Earl
If a sleepy little mountain town with a cute brewery, panoramic sunset views and more bakeries than perhaps the population warrants sounds like your idea of a terrible time, keep scrolling. But if you’re someone whose knowledge of Mena comes exclusively from watching Tom Cruise’s high-flying, double-crossing, drug smuggling exploits in the 2017 film “American Made,” consider giving the town a closer look over a long weekend sometime. We’ve mapped out a few high points here, outdoorsy and otherwise.
ON THE WAY
The lovely thing about this drive — from Little Rock, at any rate — is that about three-quarters of it is off of the state’s major highways, sparing you from Applebee’s-Walmart-Home Depot homogeneity and offering up sheer rural weirdness instead. Along the way, you’ll spot idyllic century farms, rock shops extolling the healing powers of quartz crystals, dusty antique malls and testimonies to the area’s religious and political pockets, among them a beguiling sign bearing the words “Rich Mountain Primitive Baptist Association” with an arrow to a side road and lots of “Don’t Tread on Me” flags.
PATTY’S DOWN THE ROAD
102 Bear Valley Drive, Royal
Unless you’re road tripping on a Monday or a Tuesday, travelers heading southwest from the Little Rock area are likely to pass by Patty’s Down the Road when its doors are open. Grab a slice of pie to go from the diner’s counter, a Cheeseburger Omelet for breakfast or one of their hand-breaded chicken fried chicken platters for supper on the way home.
BURL’S SMOKEHOUSE
10176 Albert Pike Road, Royal
This little general store and smokehouse looks like something straight outta Dogpatch, and has been serving up smoked meats and jerkies since the ’80s. If your road snack stash is noticeably bereft of a giant hunk of summer sausage, here’s your pit stop.
SHANGRI-LA RESORT
987 Shangri-La Drive, Mount Ida
This is the only pit stop we’ve listed that’s more than a few feet off the road, but it’s worth the 2.5-mile jaunt to grab a slice of pie or two for your cooler from the marina resort’s kitchen.
DAIRYETTE
717 Highway 270 East, Mount Ida
This classic roadside diner’s been around since 1958, and the parking lot’s always full, which is telltale stuff about what’s being served up inside. Highly recommend ordering a cherry shake at the walk-up window and taking a photo with the vintage soft-serve ice cream cone sign while you wait.
ARKANSAS ROCKS! MINERAL AND MINING TRAIL SCENIC DRIVE
Across southwest Arkansas, along U.S. Highway 270 and Arkansas Highway 88
Driving from Little Rock to Mena means you’re traversing a portion of the Arkansas Rocks! Mineral and Mining Trail Scenic Drive, a route designated by the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism in 2023 to highlight the state’s “Diamond Lakes” region, which includes the cinnabar mines along Lake Greeson, the Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro, the mineral water-enthusiastic city of Hot Springs and the dubiously named DeSoto Bluff, around which indigenous Caddo people farmed the area’s river valleys before colonizers forced them westward into Oklahoma.
MOUNT IDA, ALRIGHTA: (Clockwise from left) Catch a Ouachita sunset; Embrace some sheer rural weirdness; The journey is part of the destination on the trip from Little Rock to Mena.
WHERE TO EAT IN MENA
THE OUACHITAS
821 Mena St.
A stylishly airy pizzeria, coffeehouse and brewery in Mena’s historic downtown district, The Ouachitas is sleek and modern, outfitted in chestnut browns and golden blonde woodwork, with seemingly every kind of seating under the sun: coffee bar, family-style tables, two-tops, couches and barstools aplenty. The staff is ridiculously warm, their merch is super cute and the pace is as unrushed as you want it to be. Also, youʼve got no reason to fritter away your precious attention on a domestic: The Ouachitas brews an impressively wide span of beers and hard seltzers, and the samples we tried were all winners — a cloudy bock, a nutty red ale, a light lager and our fave, a cotton candy-flavored hard seltzer. If I lived in Mena, Iʼd be here all the time. Get the chicken wings.
AMERICAN ARTISANS EATERY & GALLERY
615 Mena St.
If somehow the Cross Creek Sandwich Shop in Conway did a mashup with an art museum gift shop, it might look something like this. Selling stellar sandwiches out of a 100-year-old building with exposed brick walls covered in pop art, American Artisans will sell you a piece of couture woodwork along with your chicken salad wrap, or some handcrafted earrings along with your tomato bisque. Somehow, it all works. Whatever you do, don’t skip the sweet potato chips.
SASSAFRAS BAKEHOUSE
207 Mena St.
When you’re only open one day a week and you’ve been in business since 2011, you’re doing something right. Sassafras Bakehouse operates out of a tiny house in Mena’s downtown area, and while it’s hard to catch during their scant business hours — from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Fridays only — they do sell their goods wholesale to various spots around town, including The Ouachitas. They also do the occasional pop-up sale; follow them on Instagram for times and locations.
SKYLINE CAFE
618 Mena St.
One of Arkansas’s oldest restaurants (founded either in 1921 or 1922, depending on your source) and certainly one with a devoted crowd of regulars, the Skyline Cafe is as unfussy as it gets. It’s cash-only and serves breakfast all day, every day until 2 p.m. at a Polk County pace; consider going elsewhere if you’re in a terrible hurry. Peep the customizable “Coffee Rules” posted on the wall, a playful sliding scale depending on how long you intend to sip.
MENA HIBACHI & SUSHI
410 Sherwood Ave., Suite 3
Those acquainted with the charms of Bamboo Hibachi and its various outposts across Central Arkansas will know this formula well: a takeaway-centric spot offering up workaday sushi for landlocked sashimi lovers alongside some unobjectionable hibachi combinations of steak, chicken and shrimp for the red-blooded, raw-fish averse. Top it all off with liberal amounts of Yum Yum Sauce and devour. Mena Hibachi (also called Rieki Hibachi & Sushi) follows the same model, DoorDashing takeout from a brightly lit little diner tucked strangely in the far reaches of an antiquated mini mall (surely among the last of its kind), next to a tattoo parlor and a vape shop. When we visited, a large family of regulars was coming in to celebrate a birthday, the front of house staff exclaiming at the eldest daughter’s new shoulder-length bob. Reliable and unfussy, the house hibachi combo is easily enough for two meals, and reheats like a champ. Pair with a Stillwell lager from The Ouachitas’ takeaway cooler.
TRAIL MIX: (Clockwise from top)
Spotty phone service means it's a good idea to screenshot your route to the trailhead; Libations and snacks at The Ouachitas pizzeria and brewery; Old-school maps at the East End Visitor Center; and sweet potato chips at American Artisans.
GO OUTSIDE
The bikers, the backpackers and the retirees in RVs are already hip to this, so you should be, too: The Ouachita Mountains are where it’s at, nature-wise, blanketed in black oak, mockernut hickory, red maple and shortleaf pine. Here, ranked in order from “barely have to leave your car” to long-distance thru-hike, are but a few ways to soak up the peaks and forests in the Mena area.
A QUICK SUNSET (OR SUNRISE) DRIVE
Rich Mountain/ Queen Wilhelmina State Park 3877 Arkansas Highway 88, Mena Pop quiz: What’s Arkansas’s second-highest peak? If you guessed Rich Mountain, you’re aces; this ridge in the Ouachitas loses the contest to Mount Magazine by only about 70 feet. The entire 54-mile span of the nationally designated Talimena Scenic Byway, much of which is in Oklahoma, is destination driving for the motorcycle crowds, but there’s a scenery-saturated stretch along Rich Mountain’s spine. Not only are the handful of overlooks all fairly close together, but they’re situated on different sides of the mountain so you can catch sunrise, sunset or both. Also, driving that hunk of highway just makes me feel like I'm a kid again, fingers clasping the side doors of a Hot Wheels car and launching it down an orange plastic track. (While we’re on the topic, these roads are steep; keep it between the lines, yʼall, and look out for deer!) Get there by pointing your GPS to Grand View Vista in Mena on Skyline Drive, or if in doubt, just head to Queen Wilhelmina State Park and head east down Arkansas Highway 88 from there. Donʼt underestimate the high winds, especially if you want to take your time snapping photos. Bring a jacket.
AN ACCESSIBLE 45-MINUTE LOOP WALK ON A PAVED PATH
Orchard Trail, Talimena Scenic Byway East End Information Center Near Mena at coordinates 34.601078, -94.243223
If time is limited, or if a member of your traveling party would enjoy an accessible trail, this half-mile loop winds on a gentle grade atop a paved path through a short-leaf pine forest just behind the Talimena Scenic Byway’s East End Visitor Information Center just outside of Mena. The center is entirely staffed by volunteers and houses one of the most extensive collections of 8.5-by-11-inch trail maps we’ve seen at a visitor center anywhere in the state.
A ONE-HOUR CLIMB WITH A REWARDING VIEW
Lover’s Leap Trail, Queen Wilhelmina State Park 3877 Arkansas Highway 88, Mena
If you don’t have all day but are looking for a stunning view and a chance to get your heart rate up, the Lover’s Leap Trail at Queen Wilhelmina State Park is your best bet. You’ll start
at the sign near the park lodge across from the railroad tracks, stroll a smooth one-third mile out to a wooden viewing platform built for photo opps, then continue past the overlook and veer to the right to make the climb back up to the lodge.
A RIGOROUS FULL-DAY HIKE
Black Fork Mountain Trail, 1562-1586 US-270, Mena
This out-and-back trail covers the greatest hits of Rich Mountain scenery for those who wanna pack a lunch and a day pack and spend the day outside. It’s 11.3 miles roundtrip and features panoramic views on all sides, letting you peer all the way into Oklahoma. Note: The trailhead’s marked in Google Maps, but cell service can be spotty in this area, so it’s a good idea to screenshot your route to the trailhead ahead of time. Also, you’re hiking on high ground in a wilderness area without consistent access to the Ouachita River, so pack plenty of water.
A LONG WEEKEND BACKPACKING TRAIL
Eagle Rock Loop Near Langley
This wildly varied 27-mile loop trail is actually a combination of three different trails — the peak-laden Athens-Big Fork Trail, the low-lying Viles Branch Horse Trail and the river-hugging Little Missouri Trail. Experienced hikers take it on in two days; I did it slowly across three days and have zero regrets, despite taking my boots off approximately 1,000 times to tackle the loops’ many water crossings. There’s good reason the loop’s trailhead parking areas are always filled with license plates from far beyond state lines; the scenery is incredible and water is plentiful.
A LONG-DISTANCE, BUCKET LIST BACKPACKING TRAIL
Ouachita Trail
Arkansas, Oklahoma
That would be the 223-mile behemoth, the Ouachita Trail, stretching from Talimena State Park in Oklahoma to Pinnacle Mountain State Park here in Arkansas. Doing just the section that passes through the Queen Wilhelmina/Rich Mountain area would be highly rewarding and a great ramp-up for tackling the whole shebang. When it comes to planning such a venture, I’d suggest marrying the digital (GPX files and other resources from friendsoftheouachita.org) with the analog (a copy of Tim Ernst’s “Ouachita Trail Guide”).
Let's go, Branson! UNIRONIC FUN IN THE BALDKNOBBERS’ BACKYARD.
BY MATT CAMPBELL PHOTOGRAPHY BY JESS MILLER
I’ve long had a love-hate relationship with Branson, Missouri, and the surrounding area. Being born and raised in southwest Missouri, it’s tempting to chalk this ambivalence up to proximity, a vestige of the adolescent ennui that makes every teen think, at least for a time, that wherever he grew up is inherently lame.
While my own geographic biases surely play a role, the root cause of my complicated relationship with Branson goes deeper: Branson simply does not know what it wants to be, so it keeps trying to reinvent itself, with mixed results.
In the mid-1980s, Branson was little more than some mid-century motels and a heavy dose of hillbilly culture, both faux
and real. Attractions consisted mainly of the Baldknobbers, Presleys’ Mountain Music Jubilee and a small theme park based on the 1907 novel “The Shepherd of the Hills.” Silver Dollar City, 10 miles to the west, felt completely detached from Branson proper.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Branson had become a place for aging country artists to relocate, open a theater and play easy daily shows to packed houses. In 1991, CBS’s “60 Minutes” ran a feature declaring Branson “the live music capital of the entire universe.” The cultural high-water mark came in 2002, when playing fiddle in Branson was a plot on “King of the Hill.”
As the aughts rolled around and aging
country stars found other places to retire, megachurches began buying up the now-empty theaters. While the area had always been religious — “The Shepherd of the Hills,” which originally put Branson on the map, is essentially a story about forgiveness and atonement — the megachurches turned that up to 11. Much of the charm and character of the hamlet was stripped in favor of veneered smiles and Bush-era Republicanism.
Eventually, even the 24/7 revivals ran out of steam and the large churches left (though the conservatism stayed). Branson Landing opened and took its spot as king of the strip malls, and multiple Tea Party-themed stores, which have since become MAGA-themed stores, dotted Mis-
souri Highway 76.
This current version does not seem to be going anywhere any time soon. As long as Branson Landing remains viable enough to entice your Guys Fieri and your Paulas Deen, and as long as Silver Dollar City continues morphing into Disney World if the South had won the war, those parts of Branson will continue to draw tourists, almost regardless of what happens to the rest.
Which is kind of a shame because the rest of the area definitely has stuff worth traveling for.
Stick the Landing
We arrived in Branson on a sunny, very windy Thursday in late March. As it was barely 1 p.m., we couldn’t check in at our motel for another two hours, so my co-pilot, Jess, and I decided to visit Branson Landing and grab a bite to eat.
It was my first time at the Landing, a sprawling eating, shopping and entertainment district that opened in 2006 in downtown Branson on the banks of Lake Taneycomo. I was immediately struck by the uncanny valley-ness of the place: Branson Landing looks like a quaint, walkable city center full of mixed-use buildings, with all manner of shopping and restaurants at ground level topped by multiple floors of apartments. If you squint a bit, it almost pulls this off.
When you take a step back and gander more closely, though, the facade crumbles. There are no grocery stores or post offices or gas stations in the Landing. The “apartments” above the shops are all hotel rooms or Airbnbs, the latter of which all appeared empty during our visit. Essentially, the whole place is a fake 15-minute city designed to attract the kind of people who believe that 15-minute cities are part of a New World Order plot to take over America.
But whatever. When in Rome, right? At least that’s what I was telling myself as we walked into Guy Fieri’s Branson Kitchen + Bar for a quick lunch.
I won’t belabor the review here. The place is chock-full of Fieri’s spiky-haired visage,
with pictures and caricatures of the Mayor of Flavortown seemingly filling every available space. The menu is a bunch of items unironically named “Dragon’s Breath Chili” and “Mac Daddy Buffalo Chicken.” We opted to split an order of “Trash Can BBQ Nachos,” which arrived tableside in what appeared to be an old coffee can with both ends cut off.
Our server lifted the can, revealing … a stack of nachos. They were fine, if underwhelming and a bit on the sweet side due to Fieri’s namesake barbeque sauce. The star of the show was the pile of pickled onions on top, which helped to brighten the otherwise heavy dish.
After lunch, we spent a couple of hours checking out the various stores at the Landing, then headed to the Best Western Plus just west of the Landing to check in. At the front desk, the receptionist asked if we were in town to see any shows.
“Not sure,” I said. “Are there any you would recommend?”
“Well, you probably won’t be able to get tickets to ‘DAVID’ if you don’t already have them,” she said, referring to the religious story of the fella who killed Goliath with a rock, playing nightly at Sight & Sound Theatres.
We stared at each other for a couple more seconds before I realized that “DAVID” was as far as she was going to take her recommendations. (While tickets were in fact available — I know, I was as shocked as you — we did not try to go see “DAVID.”)
A 10 for Downing Street
A couple of hours later, it was time to get out and do some stuff. We started by heading to Hollister, a tiny town located about 5 minutes from downtown Branson.
I can’t stress enough how unusual (in a good way) Hollister is. Downing Street, which faces a city park and the defunct train station, is lined with buildings built in an English Tudor style. Unique shops fill most of the spaces, where you can buy anything from imported wines and cheeses to a trucker hat that declares you an “Outlaw Woman.”
Ye Olde English Inn, tucked amongst the
KARTS, CAVES, COCKTAILS, 'CAKES: (Opposite page) Go-karts on the road course at Track 4; (top left) Fantastic Caverns offers one of the most unique spelunking experiences anywhere; (top right) grapefruit gin gimlet and Pourhouse Punch at Downing Street Pour House; (bottom) the pancakes at Billy Gail’s are absurdly large.
shops on Downing, is an old Tudor-andstone hotel built in 1912 that still rents out rooms. On the first floor is the Downing St. Pour House, an English pub-style restaurant where we decided to have drinks and dinner.
I started with a grapefruit gin gimlet, a fairly self-explanatory drink, while Jess got the Pourhouse Punch, a concoction of coconut rum, vodka, peach schnapps and cranberry-pineapple juice. Both drinks were excellent.
When it came time to order dinner, we split a large soft pretzel for an appetizer. The pretzel was made in-house and came with brown mustard and (for some reason) a thing of ranch. It was the kind of pretzel that would go better with a beer than a gin cocktail, but it was delicious just the same.
For my entree, I opted for fish and chips and was not disappointed. Two large cod fillets were breaded and fried perfectly, and the fries were crunchy on the outside while pillowy soft in the middle. No notes.
Jess ordered a sandwich of shaved smoked bologna and cheese, with chips on top. It was tremendous. We wound up taking most of that back to the motel because it was so filling, but it made for a delicious late-night snack.
As luck would have it, it was a Thursday in late March, so the NCAA men’s basketball tournament was in full swing. We just needed to find a decent bar with multiple televisions. While that wouldn’t be a problem in most cities, Branson is not exactly heavy on bars and nightlife. Thankfully, we located Crazy Craig’s Cheeky Monkey Bar, and enjoyed a few tiki-adjacent drinks while watching both of our brackets crumble.
The Missouri Underground Friday morning, the plan was to hit up some go-kart tracks and miniature golf courses along 76. Unfortunately, Mother Nature had other ideas, and we awoke Friday to a
steady rain. So, we pivoted north to do some light spelunking.
Breakfast before was a no-brainer: Billy Gail’s. I got chicken-fried steak, two eggs and hashbrowns. The steak was roughly the size of my hand with fingers spread out, and everything was perfectly cooked, though I could barely finish half of it. Jess ordered the pancake and eggs. The pancake is singular because each one at Billy Gail’s is about 15 inches in diameter, hanging off the edges of the plate in every direction. It’s ridiculous, but also delicious.
Our bellies full, it was cave time
Fantastic Caverns is located about an hour north of Branson on Missouri Highway 13, just on the other side of Springfield. It’s also the only cave system in North America with a completely ride-thru tour, taking visitors on the 55-minute loop through the cave via Jeepdrawn tram.
The history of how it came to be discovered is fascinating, involving an enthusiastic hound dog, a man who didn’t want Union or Confederate troops raiding the cave for bat droppings to make gunpowder during the Civil War, and 12 women from Springfield answering a newspaper ad to be the first to explore the cave. The cave’s uses through the years — KKK meeting room in the early 1900s, speakeasy during Prohibition, live music and radio broadcast locale in the latter half of the 20th century — are also covered during the tour.
I last visited Fantastic Caverns when I was maybe 14, but I remembered most of the details of the tour. Jess, however, had never been, and seeing her experience it for the first time was very cool. I’m not entirely sure what she was expecting when we started, but by the end, she was a fan.
“More people need to know about this place,” she said as we got back to the car. “That was AMAZING.” I couldn’t disagree.
On the way back to Branson, we decided to stop at the original Bass Pro Shop in Springfield. If you’ve never been to Bass Pro, or even if you’ve only ever been to other Bass Pros and not the first one, you simply can’t have a real sense of the over-the-top scale of the building at the corner of Sunshine Street and Campbell Avenue. The best way I can explain it is thusly: We got there at 1 p.m., did zero shopping and only toured the various museums located entirely within the store (so not even counting the world-class aquarium onsite). It was nearly 3:30 pm by the time we got done, and it didn’t cost us a dime.
Over those two-plus hours, we toured a replica of the Brown Derby Liquor Store where Bass Pro started as a little bait shop tucked in the back, saw art made for Bass
Pro founder and owner Johnny Morris, and looked at dozens of real race cars sponsored by Bass Pro through the years (including the actual car in which Missouri native Jamie McMurray won the 2010 Daytona 500). We toured the National Sporting Arms Museum, which houses more than 900 firearms from the 1600s to present, as well as the Archery Hall of Fame. And we did all of that without ever leaving the footprint of the store.
Buon appetito at Mr. Gilberti's
We got back to Branson a little after 4 p.m. and decided to eat an early dinner because we’d skipped lunch. When Jess found an Italian place in Hollister that a few people on
GET OUTTA TOWN!:
(Clockwise from top left) Fog on Lake Taneycomo; Mr. Gilberti’s eponymous specialty pizza; the original Bass Pro in Springfield is full of free, fun museums; The 113-year-old Ye Olde English Inn in Hollister houses Downing Street Pour House.
there was a wait of nearly an hour for anyone who didn’t have a reservation. Once we tasted the food, it was easy to see why.
The toasted raviolis were easily the best I’ve ever had outside of St. Louis. The marinara for dipping was bright and fresh, with a strong garlic note. For our main dish, we shared a medium Mr. Gilberti’s Speciality, their version of a supreme pizza. It came topped with Italian sausage, pepperoni, Canadian bacon, black olives, mushrooms, marinated green peppers and red onions. The same sauce that accompanied the raviolis was on the pizza, along with fresh buffalo mozzarella, and the whole thing was genuinely terrific. If there was one place that we ate on the entire trip that I would magically
“Dammit … nice move” as I got underneath him in turn 6. Over the next 10 laps, I passed another 13 karts, and I did not get passed by anyone at any point. For 20 minutes on a damp Branson evening, I was Dale Earnhardt, laying down the single greatest round of go-kart driving I’ve ever had.
We rounded out our Friday night at the one late-night spot in town, watching a bachelorette party, a group of girlfriends on spring break and some overzealous locals sing karaoke. About the time one of the spring breakers decided it would be a good idea to sing the unedited version of Childish Gambino’s “Bonfire,” we took it as a good sign to head out. Saturday morning came and it was time to head home. But first, breakfast at the Belgian
Reddit spoke highly of, we decided to give it a shot.
Mr. Gilberti’s Place should not work, especially in a town the size of Hollister. It’s located in a neighborhood about 10 minutes outside of downtown. More than once on the drive over there, I assumed we’d made a wrong turn. When we walked in, at 4:50 p.m., the place was nearly empty.
“Hi! Welcome to Mr. Gilberti’s! Do you have a reservation?” a woman in a black fedora asked. We told her we did not, and she said they could squeeze us in anyway. I chuckled as she directed us to our table, assuming she was joking about how many open seats there were.
By 5:20 p.m., Mr. Gilberti’s was absolutely packed with locals and tourists alike, and
make appear in Little Rock if I could, it would be Mr. Gilberti’s.
After dinner, it was (finally) time to do the thing I’d been looking forward to the entire trip: go-karts. We scoped out a couple of different tracks on 76 before we were pretty sure we’d found the fastest karts and got ready to race the road course at Track 4 of The Track Family Fun Parks.
Raise hell, praise Dale
I was fourth in the starting grid as we rolled onto the track. Jess was immediately ahead of me. I passed her about halfway through the first lap. By the end of the second lap, I’d passed the two other people who started in front, including a pass that I set up so well earlier in the lap that the other driver said,
Waffle & Pancake House.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when we got there, mainly because the place feels like it’s in a converted Denny’s and there was a 10-minute wait to get seated. When we got our food, that wait made sense. The Belgian waffles were legitimately excellent and served room temp as is the custom in Belgium (according to the menu). Whipped cream, butter and strawberries were available for topping your waffle, and the coffee was bottomless and totally fine, which is about all you can ask for in a breakfast setting.
Sated, we left feeling the way you should at the end of any good road trip: a tad tired and ready to get back to our basset hounds.
HAMMER DOWN, FORKS
BUCKET LIST FOOD
ADVENTURES TO PLAN YOUR SUMMER BY.
BY RHETT BRINKLEY, MATT CAMPBELL, DANIEL GREAR, BROCK HYLAND, STEPHANIE SMITTLE AND SAMMY WILLIAMS
Spring has sprung and it’s hard to avoid the restless feeling of wanting to get the hell out of dodge, even if only for a few hours. The good news for Central Arkansas: At the intersection of wanderlust and hunger are a plethora of food adventures less than two hours away from Little Rock. The list below is not comprehensive; we could dedicate an entire issue to the subject. But we did find that the celebrated catfish at Murry’s in eastern Arkansas’s Grand Prairie region needs to be added to your bucket list immediately, one of the best steaks we’ve ever had can be found in the middle of nowhere at Taylor’s Steakhouse in Desha County’s sweeping rice fields, and sometimes barbecue is best served for breakfast if you can get your hands on a pulled pork sandwich from Marianna’s James Beard Award-winning Jones Bar-B-Q Diner.
EAT A "DINO RIB" AS BIG AS YOUR FACE AT RIDGEWOOD BROTHERS BBQ IN RUSSELLVILLE
803 W. Main Place, Russellville
Back in 2022 I wrote of eating at Ridgewood Brothers BBQ three times in four days, so beware. Starting out as a very successful food truck by childhood friends Robert Couser and Grant Hall, the Ridgewood Brothers name has become synonymous with some of the best brisket Arkansas has to offer. Come hungry and come early; when Ridgewood runs out of any given meat option, that’s it for the day. While the brisket is the star of the show here (and for good reason), I am also a huge fan of the smoked turkey, the house-made jalapeno/cheddar sausage and, of course, the pitsmoked green beans. Feeling crazy? Go for the Dino Rib (pending availability), a big-as-yourface beef rib smoked to absolute perfection. BH
EAT YOUR DESSERT FIRST AT CHARLOTTE’S EATS & SWEETS IN KEO
290 Main St., Keo
The sign on the city limits of Keo lists its population as 207, but it’d easily double if you counted all the folks over at Charlotte’s Eats & Sweets between the hours of 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. (and 5-8 p.m. on Saturdays). The venerable eatery, ushering in lunchtime visitors with window lettering that reads “dessert comes first” in country cursive, is virtually synonymous with the town itself, surely having bolstered the area’s ATM fees for years with its longtime cash-only policy. (If you forgot cash, rest easy; they’ll take a card these days.) Inside, you’ll find an old-fashioned soda shop bar, and locals and Little Rockers alike gathered around tearoom tables under wooden cabinets that house the extensive teapot collection of the store’s original proprietor, Charlotte Bowls. The place is under different ownership now, but the signature is still the same: classic, church-potluck-style, flaky crust pies with loads of meringue and an ever-rotating inventory of fillings: chocolate, peanut butter and coconut, plus candy-inspired combos like Rolo and Reese’s. You can’t go wrong with the savory stuff, either; go for the parmesan-crusted Keo Classic or the horseradish mayo-spiked Reuben. SS
FOLLOW THE I-40 SIGNS TO TRUE ROADHOUSE DINING AT NICK’S BAR-B-Q
1012 Bobby L. Glover Highway, Carlisle
Even if you’ve never been to Nick’s Bar-B-Q & Catfish, the name probably lives in your subconscious on account of the Carlisle institution’s myriad billboards peppered all over Interstate 40 between Little Rock and Memphis. Established in 1972, the Lonoke County barbecue joint has a saloon roadhouse vibe, accentuated by an extra parking lot for semi trucks adjacent to the building. In the entryway you’ll find headshots of celebrities who have made the pit stop: George Strait, Pink, Darren McFadden, a gaggle of Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. The family-owned eatery has expanded twice, first in 1999 and again in 2018. The menu features several apps that include
yellow cheese dip (a secret family recipe), corn fritters, fried green tomatoes and huge hand-battered onion rings that could probably fit around your ankle. The signature combos offer the namesake catfish and a choice of smoked pork, brisket, chicken, kielbasa sausage or St. Louis-style ribs. Before you get back on the road, we advise you to order a fried pie a la mode. Nick’s is only 35 miles outside of Little Rock, but it feels like you’ve made a deep trek into the Arkansas Delta. RB
PLAY IN THE WATER AT GREERS FERRY, THEN STUFF YOUR FACE AT JANSSEN’S LAKEFRONT RESTAURANT
9999 Edgemont Road, Edgemont
Need a place to eat a monster meal after a sun-sapped day in or on the water? If you take a seat by the window or on the patio at the of-
SHARE A RIBEYE OF COLOSSAL SIZE WITH A RIDE-OR-DIE AT TAYLOR’S STEAKHOUSE
14201 Arkansas Highway 54, Dumas
In an unceremonious metal building in the middle of nowhere in Desha County’s sweeping rice fields, near where Esau Farms grows its seasonally sought-after sweet corn, is Taylor’s Steakhouse. If it weren’t for the signage, it might register as the sort of place you go to buy deer bait, or an outboard motor. Then again, it’s hard to see the building at all when the place is open, thanks to the throngs of cars parked in its roadside lot. The draw: dry- and wet-aged steaks of colossal size and equally colossal flavor. Fans of steakhouse-style creamed spinach will find a sterling example here, fans of happiness and contentment are advised to order the chocolate bread pudding, and fans of transcendental bliss should share the ribeye with a ride-or-die. In a side dining room near the kitchen, patrons sit opposite a glass-paned, temperature-controlled cabinet cooler with hunks of beef in various states of tenderness and hue, the mystery of the slow-motion aging process on full display. Too fickle a gamble in the seesawing beef industry to reprint menus every time the market price shifts, the prices for the more capricious parts of the menu (the parts you drove 90 minutes from Little Rock for) are in chalk across a blackboard mounted on the dining room wall. SS
ten-bustling Janssen’s Lakefront Restaurant — founded in 1978 — you might as well consider lunch or dinner to be an extension of your time on Greers Ferry Lake, which Janssen’s delightfully overlooks. That said, it’s hard to imagine returning to the water after a visit to Janssen’s. The menu is full of enormous portions of steak, comfort food (they have bacon-wrapped meatloaf, for goodness sake), seafood and fish, and most of the entrees come coupled with access to a bottomless salad bar that’ll get you up and talking to neighboring tables, so don’t you dare worry about leaving hungry or undersocialized. Double-battered and smothered in white gravy with a slight kick, I managed to finish only half of my chicken fried chicken before entering a near-comatose state. But when an array of fresh cheesecakes and pies were presented to me as I tried to leave, I couldn’t help but say yes. Don’t sleep on the Oreo-crusted chocolate mousse. DG
ORDER IT HOT AT CRAIG’S BAR-B-QUE IN DEVALL'S BLUFF
15 W. Walnut St., DeValls Bluff
I used to travel to East Arkansas frequently during major I-40 construction, so I often passed Craig’s Bar-B-Que on the Highway 70 detour. On a recent tour of Arkansas Delta barbecue restaurants, I stopped by Craig’s, ordered a pork sandwich with hot sauce and settled into a table in the small dining room.
DANIEL GREAR
Tucked away in the folly-friendly town of Hot Springs, DONS Southern Social would be worth the drive from Central Arkansas even if it were located in the middle of nowhere. DONS is a capital E experience from the drop, masquerading as a small art gallery until you speak the password that’s been texted to you in advance (reservations are a must) and the kindly attendant spins open the bookshelf on the back wall, revealing the real entrance to the restaurant. Inside, you’ll find a cozy, speakeasy-esque room lit with filament bulbs, many of its tables subtly suspended from the ceiling rather than resting on the ground. Mischievous aesthetics aside, the food and drinks are stellar, with chef Joshua Garland taking the well-trod concept of upscale Southern-inspired cuisine and infusing every last detail with intention. Paired with perhaps the creamiest grits and juiciest collard greens known to man, the KFC — that is, koji marinated fried chicken — is my first recommendation, due in no small part to the “piri-piri foam” on top, which is a fancy way of saying that its impressively light breading is smeared with a dollop of unforgettably tangy sauce. A close second and third place go to the Silent G (a smoked duck bolognese lasagna that takes a crispier approach to the noodles than what you’re probably used to) and the Better Call Saul-Man (a slightly spicy Mediterranean marinated salmon is the main event, though it comes with gouda orzo that’s like a heavenly mac and cheese). DONS is pricey, but you won’t regret it. DG PULL BACK THE
Soul, R&B and blues music blared from the kitchen. Many customers came in for to-go orders, and the women running the place knew most of them by name. Craig’s uses sliced pork on their sandwiches, and while it’s tender and flavorful, the sauce is what it’s all about. It’s arguably the most complex sauce in Arkansas, with notes of what I think of as winter spices (some combo of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves or allspice) and a subtle heat in the hot version. The sauce is bottled for customers to take home and slather over whatever their hearts’ desire. Slaw is available for the sandwiches, and while it's nothing special on its own, it adds a little crunch and a cool and creamy counterbalance to the tanginess of the sauce. After the first bite, I forgot that I was completely stuffed from a previous meal and devoured the entire sandwich. SW
GET A DAIRY BAR BURGER AT MAMMOTH ORANGE, THE ARKANSAS EATERY MOST LIKELY TO BE MISTAKEN FOR A UFO 103 N. Highway 365, Redfield
If you know only one thing about the town of Redfield, it’s probably that the town is home to the Mammoth Orange Cafe, a cash-only dairy bar as famous for the shape of the building as for the food that comes out. The round, orange building has been slinging burgers and ice cream at the intersection of Sheridan Road and Arkansas Highway 365 since the mid-1960s. Like so many places that manage to survive for decades in less-than-ideal locations, Mammoth Orange succeeds by doing the basics well and letting the burgers be the star of the show. The patty is standard dairy bar fare, well seasoned and smashed onto a hot griddle to get a perfect sear on both sides, as are the toppings: American cheese, lettuce, tomato, pickle, onion and mustard. If you’re not into burgers, Mammoth Orange also offers BLTs, barbecue sandwiches, chicken sandwiches and a host of other handheld lunch options. But you should get the burger. As for a side, you could opt for fries (regular or Cajun),
DANIEL GREAR
RHETT BRINKLEY
onion rings or tater tots. But might I recommend the corn nuggets instead? They’re fluffy, pecan-sized ovals of corn meal batter, studded with real corn and deep fried to golden perfection. And, since it wouldn’t be a trip to a dairy bar without some ice cream, there’s dessert. Mammoth Orange offers shakes, cups, cones and sundaes, all of which start with their vanilla soft serve. There are more than a dozen flavors to add to your treat, ranging from the typical chocolate and strawberry to more unique offerings like candied orange and peanut butter. MC
GO ALL IN ON DESSERT AT SARACEN CASINO RESORT IN PINE BLUFF
1 Saracen Resort Drive, Pine Bluff
Following the collapse of our 401(k)s in April, my friend Motley and I headed south with every intention of doubling the money in our wallets at Saracen Casino Resort in Pine Bluff. Despite our baseless bravado, we knew the odds were against us. Win or lose, though, we planned on making solid food memories while we were there. The Jefferson County casino’s flagship restaurant, Red Oak Steakhouse, is situated at the back of the 80,000-square-foot gaming floor. If you happen to beat the house, you can splurge on a mind-blowingly tender cut of A5 Kobe beef from Japan’s Hyogo prefecture. Not everything is priced for high rollers, though. The fried oyster app runs $22 and is a must-try, featuring pork belly-smoked grits topped with fried oysters and a piquant pickled corn tartar sauce. The black forest cake ($14) might be worth the trip alone. Bearing a striking resemblance to red mushrooms from Nintendo’s "Super Mario Bros.," the dessert could get by solely on its looks, but it’s quite decadent. The cap and stem are made of tempered chocolate, which encases chocolate cake and delicate chocolate
mousse. Layers of cherry are hidden beneath three green mounds of pillowy pistachio cake. The plate itself is swirled with dried chocolate sauce, which Motley likened to a “trunk cut off of a 20-year-old tree.” We celebrated our modest winnings by stopping at the casino’s food court near the entrance (known as The Post) with a $10 order of chicken tenders for the road. (Arkansas Times did not provide any gaming money for this story. Please gamble responsibly.) RB
HEAD TO THE GRAND PRAIRIE FOR SOME OF THE STATE’S MOST CELEBRATED CATFISH AT MURRY’S RESTAURANT
93 U.S. Highway 70, Hazen
You’ll need a plan if you’re going to experience the legendary catfish fillets served up near Hazen at Murry’s Restaurant, but your effort won’t be in vain. Available only two nights a week, the catfish at Murry’s has been blowing the minds of magazine writers for generations. A former Garden & Gun feature said the eatery prepared the best fried catfish in the South. And Southern Living Editor Sid Evans once wrote that Murry’s served the best catfish in America. Founded in 1958 (at least according to the sign) by Olden Murry, a former Mississippi River boat cook, the famed eatery was originally located in a series of interconnected railroad cars in DeValls Bluff that the late Arkansas journalist Mike Trimble said looked like “a minor train derailment” at first glance. Located on Highway 70 between Carlisle and Hazen, it’s now owned and operated by Olden Murry’s daughter Becky Young and her husband, Stanley Young, the latter of whom has been frying up catfish for a half-century. Entering the eatery from the strikingly quiet prairie flatlands, it feels like you’ve stumbled into a lake town’s general store/duck lodge where everybody knows each other’s names. The service, provided by owner Becky Young herself, was as warm as I’ve had in recent memory. Many guests greeted her with a hug. One playful diner joked with regulars as they entered. “You gonna let him eat tonight?” he said to a young couple making their way through the restaurant. The three pieces of
catfish I ordered, accompanied with fries and coleslaw, were far and away the best I’ve ever had. Don’t forget cash or, like me, you’ll be driving a few miles down the road to an ATM in Hazen. Polish off your meal with the famed bread pudding served in a rich pool of buttery rum sauce. RB
HAVE JAMES BEARD AWARDWINNING BARBECUE FOR BREAKFAST AT JONES BAR-B-Q DINER
219 W. Louisiana St., Marianna Celebrated far and wide as the oldest continuously operated Black-owned restaurant in the South (and perhaps the nation), there is no barbecue joint in Arkansas that is more well-known — or important in defining the state’s barbecue culture — than Jones Bar-B-Q Diner in Marianna. This quaint spot holds the distinction as Arkansas’s first James Beard Award-winning restaurant, having been named an “American Classic” by the revered organization in 2012. Operating since at least the 1910s, Jones’ proprietor today is Mr. James Harold Jones, who inherited the role from his father, who inherited the role from his father before him. Don’t expect any frills. The menu consists only of chopped pork, which can be ordered on a sandwich or by the pound, and smoked sausage links. The sauce is old school — thin, red, tangy and wet — and not the kind of sauce you’d dip a french fry in. Sandwiches are made by Mr. Jones himself, a handful of hickory-smoked pork shoulder mounded betwixt two pieces of plain white bread. Slaw on the sandwich is optional, but you’d be a fool not to get it. Jones receives barbecue pilgrims from around the world, but most of the clientele are locals, and the folks in Marianna eat barbecue for breakfast. Lines usually begin around 7 a.m. and when the meat is gone, Jones is closed for the day. BH
BROCK HYLAND
RHETT BRINKLEY
RHETT BRINKLEY
Daytripping with 'Driftwood Johnnie'
CRUISING THE LONGEST RIVER IN NORTH AMERICA WITH THE QUAPAW CANOE COMPANY.
BY PHILLIP POWELL PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON
While millions of Arkansans have grown up within miles of the Mississippi River, it doesn’t exactly make the list for popular day trip destinations, and with good reason: Northwest Arkansas and Hot Springs make for stiff competition. But the Quapaw Canoe Company, led by famed river guru John Ruskey, aims to open the eyes of Arkansas residents to the wild body of water in their own backyard.
Being one of those Arkansans raised less than an hour from the river in Jonesboro, I honestly wasn’t convinced that I would make it back to tell the story. I’m an adventurous fella and all, but the Buffalo River or White River or Spring River — or really any other river, for that matter — always seemed like much safer, more realistic outdoor experiences. And I could tell from the nervous looks of my two companions — longtime Arkansas Times photographer Brian Chilson and my friend Lucas Dufalla, a reporter with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette — that they didn’t have to grow up near the river to know it probably wasn’t a good idea to paddle a canoe on it.
Ruskey — or “Driftwood Johnnie,” as he’s sometimes called — doesn’t take his voyagers out on one of the 2,500ton grain barges that now dominate Mississippi River travel, opting instead for far smaller, handmade canoes that he’s been designing for years. And as Ruskey told us aloud and via signed waiver before we set off, those bold enough to head out on the Mississippi River have to recognize that they’re entering the unknown.
But the roughly 320 miles of mostly wild, undammed Mississippi River that make up the eastern border of Arkansas between Memphis, Tennessee, and Lake Village in southern Arkansas have been paddled by Ruskey and his crew countless times. So many times, in fact, that Ruskey maintains rivergator.org, a ridiculously detailed, mile-by-mile guide on how to paddle and navigate 600 miles of the lower Mississippi River between St. Louis and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. So, at least we knew we were getting in a canoe on the largest river in North America with an expert. And it turned out that we were getting in the canoe with more than one. Ruskey invited a cast of river guides, including his lieu-
tenant, Mark “River” Peoples; Ruskey’s fiancée, blues musician Heather “River Otter” Crosse; and their office manager, Ceilie Hale, along with two younger adults being mentored by Ruskey and the company.
Ruskey is famous for his long camping trips down the lower Mississippi River, but our group was in for just a day trip, to travel a 6-mile circle around the Montezuma Islands between Helena-West Helena and Ruskey’s home of Clarksdale, Mississippi. Our trip is far more common and accessible to a majority of people, according to Ruskey, and we were able to get to Clarksdale to start our day-long river journey in a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Little Rock. By the time we were off the river at around 5:30 p.m. and heading to dinner in Clarksdale, I could say I’d just had one of the greatest outdoor adventures of my life.
Muddy waters
Because we were meeting the Quapaw Canoe crew early, coffee was a major priority. In downtown Clarksdale, a trendy coffee shop that looked like it would be more at home in Bentonville than the Mississippi River Delta gave us the start we needed. Called Yazoo Pass, the coffee spot reflected a surprisingly vibrant downtown for a place with around 13,000 people. I went for the Yazoo Mack Muffin with my usual cappuccino.
Clarksdale sits southeast and across the river from Helena-West Helena, and is mostly famous for its connections to blues music. Famous blues musician Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil on a Clarksdale crossroads to become a great guitar player, and the town hosts a blues festival called Juke Joint every spring.
On our way to the river, Ruskey took our group to the site where blues musician Muddy Waters worked as a sharecropper before becoming renowned in the Chicago music scene. Ruskey might be a full-time canoe expert, but in his spare time he’s an artist, musician and writer who often makes the river his muse.
We followed Ruskey in our vehicle as he towed the canoe up onto a towering levee designed to protect the sprawling crop fields and little Delta towns from flooding. We would
“
The river is so immense, even while coming out every day for 30 years, I still can't come to grips with it and understand. Nowhere have I felt so humbled and so in awe of the beauty and power of nature as I have here."
THE ROUTE LESS PADDLED: John
Ruskey guides our canoe to Montezuma Island.
be “setting sail” in the Junebug II, a 29-foot canoe Ruskey fashioned out of California Red Oak more than a decade ago that was in part named for his daughter.
Before we knew it, we were parking the car and slapping on sunscreen and sliding on bulky life jackets. Hale tried to make a brief safety presentation engaging. Crosse dropped by and told me the water was cold enough to threaten hypothermia as the Quapaw crew worked to push the canoe off the boat ramp. I dipped my hand into the Mississippi River for the first time; she was right.
River time'
The first 15 minutes of our journey made me feel like I was captive to a bunch of goofy pirates hellbent on making us row for our dinner. Ruskey sang an incomprehensible tune as he steered the huge canoe from the back while Peoples had us working those oars like you wouldn’t believe. Except Chilson, who got out of most of the heavy rowing work while trying to keep his iconic Nikon cameras from tumbling into the freezing river.
We had to get all the way from the eastern bank of the river where we started to the islands in the center. From our vantage point, hundreds of yards away, the islands looked to be the western bank of the river because of their sheer size. As our canoe raced across the water, powered by our strokes, a few Asian carp — truly the ugliest invasive species in America — launched themselves out of the water around us. A colossal grain barge worked its way up the river ahead.
The trip Ruskey chose for us is called the
“Montezuma Island Adventure,” which involves hopping between islands that are only visible while water levels are down. An onlooker wouldn’t ever know they were there on high-water days. As Ruskey explained, the so-called Montezuma Towhead was named for the Montezuma steamboat that sank way back in the 1800s, eventually forming an island in the middle of the river.
I’d read quite a few stories about Ruskey and Quapaw Canoe Company before I set out on this journey, and subscribed to his Substack, “River Time: Lower Mississippi River Dispatch.” I hope he wouldn’t be offended by me writing this, but I found him to be far more of a wacky, Gen X-style dad than expected. He combines humor and antics from an era before memes and gifs with a rare, real serenity you don’t see in many people. And he carries the kind of wisdom that comes only from a lifetime spent doing exactly what you’re meant to do.
He was so self-assured and relaxed as he guided our canoe across the river that it was hard not to absorb his confidence, despite the endless, dangerous water ahead of us. Ruskey and his guides, intentionally or not, made us feel like we were all part of one big rowing team that couldn’t function without everyone doing their part. Peoples and Ruskey both emphasized to me that, as counterintuitive as it may seem, a trip on the Mississippi River can be one of the most relaxing experiences of a person’s life.
“We don’t need to do anything but put them in a canoe and their fears go away,” Ruskey said. From the looks I was now getting from Chilson and Dufalla, I would say Ruskey was
right. The water was calm. Of course we knew the river was still treacherous — Ruskey told us too many stories of trips gone awry for us to believe otherwise — but at least that day, it seemed like the river was happy we were there.
A wild mile
For our first stop, Peoples had the team beach the canoe to give us a rest on the eastern side of the towhead. As we disembarked, we saw ahead of us a sandbar so large it looked almost like we were on a Florida beach. Ruskey and the others wandered through the sand, heading this way and that, looking for fossils and sea glass and other trinkets that might have washed up. They grew small in the distance, the sunshine and sand distorting their figures. Eventually Ruskey walked back to the group with his finds: a fossilized tooth and a smooth piece of driftwood.
Montezuma Island — an archipelago of islands, actually — is one of many wildlife corridors that exist in the Mississippi River, according to Ruskey. In various parts of the season, it creates important connected habitats for all kinds of animals that have seen much of their historic habitat destroyed over the years by human growth and development.
Ruskey and his team were full of quirky fun facts about the river, his knowledge about the ecosystems, history and wildlife spilling out generously. Whether he was telling me what animal tracks were up ahead in the sand or explaining the history of the lost Mississippi town of Friars Point, forever swallowed by the river, he never missed a beat.
While digging in the sand for fossils isn’t re-
SPLASH LANDING: (From top left) Ruskey and the crew beach the Junebug II, and Ruskey cooks up a "Quapaw stew" for lunch before we settle down to talk; It takes all hands to beach Junebug, the solidly seaworthy handcarved canoe; A group photo, a picnic lunch and a closeup of the vessel that delivered the team across the Mississippi and back.
ally my thing these days as an ostensibly mature 24-year-old, I could see how that could be some fun youth programming. And much of who Quapaw Canoe Company serves is younger people, especially underserved children in the Delta, who Ruskey teaches how to canoe, cook, camp and take care of themselves away from modern amenities.
On the next island we traveled to, the team set up a small camp and began working on the “Sandbar Smorgasbord” lunch that Ruskey promised us before we set out. He said it was the typical lunch they offer to groups, but he had something a little special for us. Ruskey had just returned from a trip out west where he visited the Quapaw Nation’s reservation in Oklahoma and brought back a soup mix and some bison jerky.
By the time we settled down for lunch around 1 p.m., I would’ve eaten anything after all that rowing, but Ruskey’s spread wasn’t bad on the eyes. And, man, that bison was good. An hour later, while we were packing up for the last leg of our journey, I couldn’t help but sneak another piece (or two or three).
He cooked the Quapaw soup over a fire, and we settled down to talk and eat while
several of our crew members drifted off to nap on the beach or swim in nearby waterholes that weren’t as life-threateningly cold. Ruskey is closer to the end of his journey with Quapaw Canoe Company than he is to its inception, and he would be the first to admit that; Ruskey’s been paddling and documenting the Lower Mississippi since 1982. But as we looked out at the river from our small camp, there was nothing but admiration in his voice for the landscape before us. Across the entire horizon, we couldn’t see an inch of notable human development — a wild mile before us that you’d be hard-pressed to find in most of the country these days.
So, while I had more than one question for a man who had been leading these trips since the 1990s, I had only one that really mattered: Why has he done this for 30 years and why did he choose to build a business out of taking strangers out here, too?
“The joy of discovery and seeing things with fresh eyes. The river is so immense, even while coming out every day for 30 years, I still can’t come to grips with it and understand. Nowhere have I felt so humbled and so in awe of the beauty and power of nature as I have here,” Ruskey said.
As for why he’s made a career out of guiding people up and down the Mississippi River, Ruskey believes that more people’s exposure to a river means more people will care about conserving the river, and appreciating the amazing natural places left in the country and the world.
And when it comes to getting more people out on the Mississippi, there’s a long way to go. Only a few canoe companies operate on the lower Mississippi River basin, and it is estimated only dozens of people attempt to canoe the entire river each year. Ruskey’s first time on the river was as one of those few people who tried to go all the way from Minnesota down to the Gulf on an ill-conceived raft with a friend. He almost died in the process. Decades later, he is still trying to travel every inch of the river with friends, though he emphasizes preparedness now.
'Same river twice'’
We finished up lunch and boarded the Junebug II for the last leg of our circular
Mississippi River day trip. A quick push through some rapids brought us into the Yazoo Pass, a natural byway of the Mississippi River that was used by Union forces during the Civil War to bypass the Confederates and retake Vicksburg, Mississippi. Now the name of the coffee shop in Clarksdale made more sense.
The water was slightly less cold, so Ruskey dove in and disappeared beneath the waves. I heard a few thumps under my side of a canoe, either Ruskey playing another dad joke or an Asian carp that still had a bone to pick with me. You can probably guess which.
And our little crew just sat for a moment and enjoyed the stillness of the river around us. I breathed in and out, stretched my shoulders and rubbed my new sunburns. Like Ruskey inspired me to do, I just took a moment to absorb the wild mile before me, knowing it might not be there forever. But neither would we.
We turned the canoe and paddled back to Clarksdale.
ON THE ROAD: Ruskey drives the Junebug II down the levee, heading for the Mississippi River.
Throughout history, bold adventurers have known that the best way to discover new worlds is by water. Even today, in Mississippi, you can find scenic and secluded waterways where you’re more likely to see lush landscapes and abundant native wildlife than large crowds of travelers. Plan your next water adventure today at VisitMississippi.org/Waterways. #VisitMS
Crystal Lake | Flowood, Mississippi
THE UPBEAT WAY TO SPEND YOUR WORKDAY
MAY 1 - MAY 31, 2025
Appreciating Our Nurses
WHO KEEP ARKANSANS HEALTHY
When we think about the health and wellness of our families, friends and neighbors, we think about the hearts and hands that go into making sure Arkansas stays in top condition. All across the state, folks come into the hospitals and practices we love, getting to know each and every one of us as they monitor our well-being. So we’re showing our appreciation to the amazing individuals who have stepped into the field of nursing and given us their hours, dedication, and expertise in keeping us healthy.
How did getting your AAS and starting to work as an RN allow you to get a well-paid job in the field? Getting my AAS (Associate of Applied Science in Nursing) and starting work as an RN allowed me to enter the healthcare field quickly and begin earning a competitive salary. By obtaining this degree, I gained the qualifications needed for a well-paid, in-demand role, providing essential care while also building experience that can lead to career growth and further education opportunities. Obtaining my BSN while working was manageable with good time management and support from my husband. Working long hours can make it difficult to keep up with schoolwork and personal responsibilities, so strong time management is essential. Even with good planning, I might have struggled if it weren't for the support of my husband. I've noticed a difference in my nursing style and skills since completing the BSN program. I approach patient care with a broader perspective, using more evidence-based practices and showing stronger critical thinking and leadership abilities.
“To do what nobody else will do, in a way that nobody else can, in spite of all we go through, is to be a nurse.”
— Rawsi Williams, JD, BSN, RN, PhD
What is your nursing specialty? Maternal Newborn (High Risk Perinatal)
Why did you choose to become a nurse? My little sister was born prematurely and suffered from many chronic conditions. While at her bedside, I witnessed firsthand the effect the nurses had on her overall well-being. I wanted to do the same for others. To gain more exposure and better guide my career choice, I later accepted a position as a Clinical Technician at UAMS. My role was primarily clerical, but one of the technologists noticed me seeking every opportunity to advocate for and comfort the patients. She recommended that I consider nursing and after much thought and prayer, I pursued nursing!
Why did you choose that specialty? I was impressed by the clinical expertise and dedication it took to practice safely in this specialty. Complex conditions, limited access to resources and support systems, and low health literacy contribute to Arkansas’ alarmingly high maternal mortality and morbidity rates. I am continuously astonished at how much of an impact I can make in such a short time, and thankful for the privilege of supporting better outcomes for our maternal newborn population. What qualities do you think are essential for being a nurse? Nurses must be able to deliver care with an altruistic, unbiased attitude. Inclusivity, empathy, adaptability, and a willingness to invest in their own knowledge and professional growth are also essential qualities.
Honoring Our Nurses Year-Round!
Celebrating the People Behind UCA Nursing’s Simulation Center Accreditation
Earning national accreditation from the Society for Simulation in Healthcare (SSH) is no small feat — and at the University of Central Arkansas, it was made possible through the extraordinary dedication of the School of Nursing's faculty and staff. UCA's Nabholz Center for Healthcare Simulation is now one of the first programs in the state to achieve this prestigious recognition. But more importantly, this accomplishment reflects the tireless work and vision of the simulation team who brought it to life: Erin Garrett, MSN, RN, CPN, CHSE, Simulation Center Co-Coordinator, Sarah Luyet, Simulation Center Co-Coordinator, Tiffany Hall, Simulation Technician and Wendy Lowder, Simulation Technician. These educators and simulation specialists invested countless hours designing realistic, high-impact learning experiences that prepare UCA nursing students for the clinical challenges ahead. From building complex case scenarios to implementing best practices in simulation-based learning, their efforts ensure every student enters the workforce with confidence and competence. Their leadership and collaboration during the SSH accreditation process speak volumes about the caliber of faculty and staff at UCA. This milestone is not just about a program's success — it is a celebration of people who care deeply about student learning, patient safety, and professional excellence. UCA Nursing is proud to recognize the faculty and staff who continue to shape the future of healthcare through innovation, empathy, and an unwavering commitment to excellence.
From a mission that matters, competitive pay, development opportunities, and meaningful benefits, a career at Arkansas Children’s is filled with purpose and fulfillment. Our Total Rewards program includes benefits that go above and beyond to take care of team members at work and at home!
See What’s Waiting for You. Search for openings and apply at archildrens.org/careers EOE, Drug-Free, Nicotine-Free Workplace.
QUALITY & AFFORDABLE EDUCATION
Traditional RN, LPN/Paramedic Transition - Simulation-based education
RN to BSN online, complete in two semesters
Nursing Specific Scholarships Available
Nationally ranked as one of Arkansas’ Best Places to Work for almost a decade, Conway Regional Health System is a supportive workplace for young nurses to embark upon their careers. Conway Regional was one of the first hospitals in Arkansas to achieve Magnet Recognition. The American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) created the Magnet Recognition Program to honor healthcare organizations for nursing excellence, based on American Academy of Nursing research. Another reason for their success is nursing preceptorships. Ninety-four nurses at Conway Regional have more than 20 years of experience working in med surg, surgery, labor and delivery, emergency medicine, intensive care, mental health, and other crucial healthcare areas. That is nearly 2,000 years of collective nursing experience. Nursing preceptorship is an essential part of Conway Regional’s Nurse Residency Program. Conway Regional accepts two cohorts a year in February and July following college graduation dates. The Nurse Residency Program meets twice a month for six months, and nurses continue in the program even after their orientation on the floor is completed. Located in one of the state’s fastest-growing areas, Conway Regional is deeply rooted in community history, with more than 100 years of serving Faulkner and surrounding counties. During the last decade, Conway Regional has grown its healthcare footprint to provide various specialized healthcare services to people across eight counties of north Central Arkansas.
“Nurses — one of the few blessings of being ill.”
—Sara Moss-Wolfe
ARKANSAS HOSPITALS
FACES OF DEATH:
Rev. Jeff Hood stands among his paintings of prisoners on death row in the chapel his Old Catholic congregation uses for Mass at the Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church.
‘HOPE DEALER’
REV. JEFF HOOD STRIVES TO FOLLOW JESUS IN HIS QUEST TO END THE DEATH PENALTY.
BY DAN MARSH PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON
The Rev. Jeff Hood hauls nine large, framed paintings into the small chapel his Old Catholic congregation uses for mass at the Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church in Little Rock. Each painting depicts a face in agony, a man being executed by the state. Hood, a priest living in North Little Rock, has witnessed nine executions. As a spiritual adviser to men on death row, Hood befriended each of the prisoners. The executions haunt him. He has nightmares. He paints the men’s faces to remember — and, possibly, to forget.
“I don’t know,” Hood says, asked how he feels after he finishes a painting. “I paint and then I paint over it and paint again. It’s almost like a cycle of emotions. The kids don’t want them at the house. They say [the paintings] scare the hell out of them.”
Hood’s laugh rings out in the echoey space. He has a long beard and a shaved, monastic head and wears clear tortoiseshell glasses and heavy overalls. His image is that of a scholarly farmer, which may be intentional. In Matthew 9:37-38, Jesus told his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore, pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”
He arranges the paintings beneath a banner mounted to the wall behind the altar that reads “RESIST.” The words are white against a black background. The faces captured in oil and acrylic float on similarly black backgrounds — wide-open, pained eyes and mouths frozen in mid-scream, the final faces Hood saw as each of his “guys” succumbed to lethal injection or, in one case, nitrogen hypoxia. The paintings are not for display, nor have they been exhibited. “I’ve thought about doing some kind of
fundraiser with them, eventually,” Hood says of the paintings. “We’ll see.”
Hood calls himself a “self-taught artist. I just wanted to use art as a release. There’s this whole tradition of self-taught Southern artists where people put their emotions and blood and guts into paintings that aren’t these highbrowed, highly technical works of art. I really connect with that.”
The oldest of his paintings is of the first prisoner he accompanied into the death chamber, Scott James Eizember, who was executed by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester on Jan. 12, 2023. Eizember was convicted of killing an elderly couple in 2003 and committing other crimes before authorities arrested him in Texas. His attorneys did not deny that Eizember killed A.J. Cantrell, 76, and his wife, Patsy Cantrell, 70, but argued his life had value. The most recent is that of Steven Lawayne Nelson, who was convicted of killing an Arlington, Texas, pastor and executed by lethal injection in Texas on Feb. 5, 2025. Though Nelson maintained his innocence, he admitted taking part in a robbery as 28-yearold Clint Dobson was murdered.
“I believe in the marginalized and the op-
TEXT, MESSAGES: A wall of books on every conceivable subject fills the North Little Rock home office of Rev. Jeff Hood.
pressed,” Hood says. “In Matthew 25, Jesus said, ‘What you’ve done to the least of these, you’ve done to me.’” By joining the condemned in the death chamber — laying hands on them as they’re strapped onto the gurney, praying over them as they accept their last moments, watching as a lethal chemical dose is administered intravenously or, in one case, nitrogen gas fed into a facemask — Hood believes he is doing the Lord’s work. “I’ve learned that to be with Jesus, you have to be where he said he would be,” he says. “And I have found that to be most viscerally true with the guys I work with on death row.”
Hood points to a painting that’s slightly different from the others, though it captures the same agony. The face is covered with more than a dozen splotches that resemble chicken pox. This is Hood’s representation of the execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith in an Alabama death chamber on Jan. 25, 2024. Smith was sentenced to death for his role in a 1988 murder-for-hire. He was the first in the nation to be executed via nitrogen gas, a method of capital punishment some experts have said could result in a torturous death. The ant-like blotches in Hood’s painting illustrate Smith’s boiling skin as he suffocated. Hood told CNN that Smith convulsed when the gas was turned on, “popped up on the gurney,” and gasped and heaved. “An unbelievable evil was unleashed tonight,” Hood said. He later described what he witnessed in a column for the Arkansas Times, once legislators in Arkansas began considering adopting the practice.
“I could see the horror in his eyes,” Hood wrote. “I will never forget.”
On March 18, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed legislation allowing the use of nitrogen gas, making Arkansas the fifth state to sanction the execution method.
Hood conducts a weekly mass at the St. Oscar Romero Catholic Church, which utilizes the chapel at Quapaw Quarter UMC. “The church really exists as kind of this chapel in the woods,” Hood says. “It’s intended to be a place people can come to quietly. We’ve had as many as 40 people show up and as few as four.”
He says hundreds of people — far more than the number who sit in pews — stream the service online. “The Sunday morning service is intentionally small. I’m not interested in a larger one. No offering is taken up. We don’t have music. We have several unhoused peo ple who come. It’s a very contemplative, spo ken-word Eucharist.”
The congregation is named for a Salvadoran Roman Catholic archbishop who was a vocal critic of right-wing groups and leftist guerrillas in El Salvador’s civil conflict. He was assassi nated in 1980 and canonized by Pope Francis in 2018. Hood preaches in front of the “RE SIST” banner on an altar painted black and is often critical of Donald Trump. He doesn’t hold back his opinion.
“Someone asked me, ‘Is Trump the an ti-Christ?’” Hood says. “I said, ‘I don’t know if he is, but he is certainly anti-Christ.’”
Hood does not consider any institutional ized system of death a tenet of Christianity or any other worldview. His home library is stud ded with paintings he made of social justice advocates, including Sister Helen Prejean, the country’s premier anti-death penalty activist, and social justice martyrs, including Charles Moore, a minister who self-immolated in 2014 in Grand Saline, Texas, to protest what he viewed as entrenched racism in society. Hood considers them role models, along with Rome ro, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Mahatma Gandhi. His views incorporate their teachings but are not limited to them, just as his theology is based on the Old and New Tes taments but acknowledges the value of other perspectives.
“I think the message of Jesus transcends Christianity,” he says. “I don’t know that I’ve yet encountered anything good or loving or wonderful that doesn’t come from Jesus. When I’m struck by the message of Buddhism, I’m struck by the message of Jesus. When a Buddhist says, ‘Buddha teaches this,’ I go, ‘That’s wonderful.’ I am engaging through the lens I have. God is love; Jesus is the incarnation of love. Anytime I meet love, I believe I’m meeting the incarnation of Jesus.”
Yet, love has not always greeted Hood’s views. He shows me a postcard addressed to him with smiley faces and a question mark next to the word “priest,” calling him a “de-
"I THINK A PROPHETIC PRIEST IS GOING TO SAY THINGS THAT DISRUPT, BUT ONLY TO SHOW PEOPLE THERE IS A BETTER WAY."
mented activist” and his sermons on Trump “vile bullshit.” He then reads to me dozens of text messages explicitly threatening his life and family. Hood seems to take it in stride, and he hasn’t shied away from telling his elementary-aged children about the threats.
“I think it’s important they know that the nature of loving people in a society so unloving is that it causes a reaction,” he says. “They also know we live in an incredibly conservative place that is in many ways addicted to violence — a region of the world defined by violence. Our hope is that when violence is done to us and we don’t respond in violence, they learn a lesson for life — that violence is incompatible with the mission of love. I want our children to know that the only thing that makes life meaningful is when you give it away.”
Hood, 41, was raised Southern Baptist in South Atlanta, in a “very conservative theological context. I was shaped by two things: the civil rights culture in Atlanta, and the ‘believe and behave’ theology that says the Bible is inerrant. You know, ‘don’t drink, don’t chew, don’t go with girls who do.’ It’s a very rulesbased faith, and I kept that kind of faith for a
long time. It was safer that way.
“Our church was very concerned with the End Times,” he says. “It did not teach that our faith had any social relevance. If it did, it was abortion, gay marriage, all that stuff. My firstgrade teacher, Ms. Ellington, who was the first Black teacher to ever teach at the school, introduced me to Dr. King’s writings. My maternal grandparents freaked out and stated very clearly, ‘If that’s all they’re going to teach him, we need to put him in a private school.’”
A pivotal moment came at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, when Hood’s mentor, a pastor, revealed to Hood on his death bed that he had lived most of his life as a closeted gay man. The revelation was “earth-shattering for me. That person had functioned to me as Jesus for a long time. He was the presence of Christ in my life.”
The realization led Hood to take up the mantle of LGBTQ+ issues. “They were a sort of gateway to broader social justice thinking,” he says. “I began to believe in a more powerful God, a more loving God.”
Then there was the 2011 execution of Troy Davis in Georgia for the murder of a police officer, which led Hood to become a fierce advo-
TRUMPED: An unsigned postcard is tucked into a window casement in Hood's home office. Hood said he and his family are frequent targets of hate mail and death threats.
cate against the death penalty. “That case was my first step,” he says. “The death penalty was problematic for me. The Gospel tells us to begin with ‘the least of these.’ That is, oppressed LGBTQ persons, oppressed prisoners on death row, oppressed persons that are migrants. I began to move from this ‘punch-you-in-the-face’ Jesus to learning how Jesus truly functions. It also taught me the consequences of following him.”
In July 2016, Hood organized and led an anti-police brutality and Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas. A gunman opened fire, killing five police officers and injuring nine others. Hood witnessed the shootings and used a large cross he was carrying to force people out of harm’s way. He became the center of media attention, giving interviews to such outlets as ABC’s “Good Morning America” and the Dallas Morning News. “I kept repeating, ‘love and justice, love and justice,’” Hood recalls. “I wanted to get those two words into everything I was saying.” But controversy erupted over a clip shown on Fox News, in which Hood could be seen at the rally shouting, “God damn white America!” Another showed him yelling before the shooting began, “White America is a fucking lie!”
Hood says he still believes what he said. “I think a prophetic priest is going to say things that disrupt, but only to show people there is a better way. The difficulty is that you don’t get to explain yourself in a 30-second soundbite. But I do believe Jesus is for everyone, not just white people.”
The fallout from Dallas was death threats so extreme his family had to uproot from Denton, Texas, where they lived, and move to North Carolina for a time. “People there figured out who I was,” Hood says, leading to a resumption of harassment. The family relocated again to Little Rock, where his wife found a job teaching art. “Little Rock seemed like a good place to be anonymous.”
Instead, the family lost their home at Breckenridge and Shackleford in the March 2023 tornado. “When you go from being comfortable in your home one second to the next second, your reality is destroyed,” Hood says. “When you realize that all you have is each other, you become firm in the belief that this is all you need.”
The family bought a new house in August 2023. Books and artwork fill Hood’s office,
which looks out on a yard bursting with flowers. He agrees to meet me for a second conversation at his home. The kids vie for his attention while I’m there, eager to go to the park. One of them flits through his office. “Hi, Dad,” the boy calls out. “Bye, Dad.”
I ask Hood about the “guys” he’s currently advising on death row. They are in 10 states, including Arkansas. He calls their relationships “complicated. Not all of them want me in the death chamber with them. Sometimes they just want to catch up. Sometimes they want to talk about their cases. One guy has already called me four times this morning.”
Prisoners become his “guys” for various reasons, all of them hard for Hood to articulate. They communicate via email, phone calls and letters. “Some of these guys only got the death penalty in 2018 or so, so they might be 15 years out from being executed. Of course, preferably, there won’t be any executions in 15 years.”
Hood describes Sanders’ recent adoption of nitrogen gas as an execution method as “shitting in the face of Jesus.”
“I always say that the greatest argument against the death penalty is not based on those guys, it’s based on us,” he says, his voice scratchy. “Meaning, what these guys have done is secondary to who we want to be. Do we want to continue the murder and mayhem, the killing, or do we want it to stop? You can’t teach young Arkansans not to kill by continuing to kill. I mean, these guys are locked up almost 24 hours a day. They’re no threat to anyone. Why are we spending so much energy trying to kill them?”
He says the state should spend money “trying to not fill up prisons rather than creating prisons to fill up,” referring to a proposed 3,000-bed prison to be built in Franklin County. “Sarah [Sanders] supports this huge prison when nobody she loves is ever going to serve time in that prison. It’s this radical disconnect between how people say they love Jesus and how they do it. They say Jesus is love, but their practice is that he’s a jailer. He’s locking people up. He’s killing people.”
I ask Hood whether he sees himself as an evangelist. “I feel like my job is to be a hope dealer,” he says with a laugh. “I preach on Sunday morning. I drop the kids off and pick them up from school. I work with all of these guys on death row. Jesus has called me to something. To give my life, to be faithful. I want to be like Jesus.”
After witnessing nine executions, he can feel frustrated with God. “Sometimes I’m like ‘fuck you, fuck you.’ But then I hear a voice in my conscience saying, ‘I am with you always.’ So I know I’m never alone.”
Is he any closer to realizing his goals? “I think the goal is to make this world more compassionate and humane,” Hood says, grabbing a hug from one of his passing sons. “And if we can make this world more humane, then we have accomplished something.”
FROM FINTECH TO FLOWER
HOW DAN RODA IS SHAPING ARKANSAS’S CANNABIS INDUSTRY.
BY TRICIA LARSON
LIFELONG ADVOCATE: Starting with a high school paper written in support California’s Proposition 215, the first medical marijuana law in the U.S., Dan Roda hasn’t stopped fighting to make cannabis more accessible.
Dan Roda has built his career on solving problems others tend to overlook. From stabilizing banking for cannabis operators to navigating complex regulations, his work has consistently bridged gaps in industries where financial and legal uncertainty run deep. Now, as the chief strategy officer for Natural State Medicinals, Roda is shifting his focus from fintech to hands-on cannabis operations, helping one of Arkansas’s top cultivators refine its product offerings and grow its footprint in a competitive market.
A Villanova University-trained attorney with a business degree from Tulane University, Roda initially moved to Arkansas for personal reasons: his wife, Elizabeth Michael. Roda said it was also Michael who issued the challenge that pushed him to join the cannabis discussion in Arkansas. “You’re not going to just sit here and watch the cannabis industry come to Arkansas and not find a way to get involved, are you?” she asked over dinner one evening in 2016, as The Natural State prepared to roll out its medical marijuana program.
Roda’s interest in cannabis reform started long before that dinner conversation. In 1995, he wrote a school paper supporting California’s Proposition 215, the first medical marijuana law in the U.S. “I remember getting a few raised eyebrows from my teachers at my small private high school in Pennsylvania,” he said with a laugh. “But even then, I recognized that this was a plant with incredible potential — one that could do far more good than harm.”
When Arkansas voted to legalize medical cannabis in 2016, Roda was in solo legal practice at the Little Rock Technology Park, specializing in business formation and capital fundraising for startups. The energy of the startup world resonated with him, and it wasn’t long before he became involved in shaping the early cannabis market. He co-founded the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Association, later merging it with the Arkansas Cannabis Industry Association to create a unified trade organization. His legal work also introduced him to a major challenge the industry faced: banking.
Seeing an opportunity, Roda co-founded Abaca, a fintech company that provided cannabis businesses with compliant banking solutions.
The North Little Rock-based company helped cannabis operators move beyond a cash-only model by building a secure, compliant framework for banking access in a federally restricted industry. Through partnerships with state-chartered banks and credit unions and its innovative fintech platform, Abaca offered services like FDIC-insured checking accounts, electronic payment processing and treasury management. Its
BRIAN CHILSON
If
The Hat Club
Crawfish Salute
Thursday,
May 1
Rusty Tractor Vineyards
“Carrie the Musical!”
Friday, May 2 thru Sunday, May 18
Weekend Theater
Tacos & Tequila
Thursday,
May 22
Argenta Plaza
Fall Margarita Fest
Thursday,
September 18
Argenta Plaza
Arkansas
501Fest 2025
Friday, May 2
Downtown River Market District
Cannabis & Wellness Expo
Friday, May 16 thru Sunday, May 18
Simmons Bank Arena
All Arkansas Beer, Wine & Spirits
Friday, August 22 Argenta Plaza
Pig & Swig
Thursday, November 6 Argenta Plaza
2nd - Starroy
3rd - Queen Anne’s Revenge 9th - Dogtown Throwdown w/ Whoa Dakota (7pm outdoors free) 10th - Dogtown Throwdow w/ Red and the Revelers 7pm free outdoors 16th - The NARS 17th - Big Dam Horns 23rd - The Waymores 24th - Drums
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financial system integrated sales data with customer due diligence tools, ensuring every dollar could be traced to a legal transaction. This enabled operators to conduct secure and electronic retail and wholesale transactions from the first days of Arkansas’s medical cannabis program, and the transparency allowed financial institutions to meet federal requirements and gave cannabis businesses access to the financial infrastructure most industries take for granted.
“People don’t realize how critical that was,” Roda said. “In other states, cannabis operators had to deal entirely in cash, patients had to transact solely in cash and operators were even having to pay their state and local taxes in cash.”
In Arkansas, Abaca helped the state’s operators avoid many of those pitfalls.
Over the next few years, Abaca grew into a multistate banking leader, ensuring cannabis operators had access to legitimate financial services from day one. In 2022, the company was acquired by Safe Harbor Financial, where Roda led a nationwide cannabis lending program, rolling out new underwriting standards and helping deploy more than $50 million in loans to cannabis, hemp, CBD and ancillary businesses across a dozen markets.
Even as he worked nationally, he remained committed to Arkansas. So when the opportunity arose to step into an executive role at Natural State Medicinals, located in White Hall, he took it.
“After spending the last seven years supporting the industry with banking services and innovation, it’s great to be able to tackle new challenges and to work directly with the plant,” Roda said.
Roda’s new role at NSM places him at the center of Arkansas’s medical cannabis market. His immediate priority? Learning.
“There’s still so much I don’t know about the art and science of cannabis cultivation, extraction and confection,” he admitted. “In some areas, I’ve been able to jump right in and add value. But, in other areas, it’s amazing how much I don’t know.”
Roda said that learning is part of the fun, and he enjoys being able to directly influence product strategy — from selecting cultivars to perfecting new flavors of chocolate. “I don’t think it’s necessary to be a cannabis consumer to be a cannabis executive, but I do think it helps,” he said. “And it makes life more fun if you truly enjoy what you do and you feel good about what you produce and create.”
NSM has built a reputation for high-quality, craft cannabis products, from hand-trimmed flower to small-batch, locally sourced edibles. Under Roda’s leadership, the company
aims to build on that foundation while also exploring new product categories.
“We’ll continue focusing on quality while adding new products that surprise and delight Arkansas patients,” he said.
One area he is particularly excited about? Cannabis beverages.
“The category is getting bigger, the products are getting better and the beverage format — especially with the right combination of low dosage and fast activation — lends itself to consumer acceptance and adoption in a way that most other cannabis products don’t,” Roda said.
Beyond product innovation, Roda is also focused on patient access and education, which he sees as one of the biggest hurdles to market expansion. While Arkansas now has about 110,000 registered medical cannabis cardholders, he believes there is still room for growth.
“It still remains a challenge educating patients, getting certified and enrolled and into a dispensary, especially in the more rural parts of the state,” he said.
Roda’s move from fintech to cultivation comes at a pivotal time for the cannabis industry. With federal rescheduling discussions gaining momentum, many are wondering how impending policy changes will affect state markets.
“Federal rescheduling would be a big deal for many aspects of the industry, but in Arkansas, it wouldn’t change much overnight,” he said. “We would still operate within the confines of state law. That said, access to capital could improve significantly, and that would create new opportunities.”
One of the biggest regulatory hurdles he would like to see addressed is 280E — the federal tax code that prevents cannabis businesses from deducting normal business expenses.
“Eliminating 280E would instantly improve cash flow for cannabis businesses across the country,” he explained. “And from a banking perspective, it would make businesses more bankable, more investable and more financially stable.”
Reflecting on his career so far, Roda is proud of the role he has played in molding Arkansas’s cannabis industry.
“We ensured that, from day one, operators had access to stable banking services,” he said. “That might not seem exciting, but it prevented so many of the issues that other states experienced.”
Now, he’s excited to make an impact in a new way.
“I love this industry because it brings joy and healing to people,” he said. “And now, I get to be part of the process from seed to sale. That’s incredibly rewarding.”
MARK YOUR CALENDER!
WELL WELL WELL
GET YOUR BODY RIGHT AT THE ARKANSAS TIMES CANNABIS & WELLNESS EXPO.
As spring settles in, it’s time to explore the burgeoning world of health and cannabis at the Arkansas Times Cannabis & Wellness Expo! Mark your calendars for a comprehensive three-day event blazing through Central Arkansas from May 16-18 at Simmons Bank Arena in North Little Rock.
Presented by the Arkansas Times, Arkansas Cannabis Times, the Arkansas Cannabis Industry Association and Speakeasy by Dark Horse, it’s the ultimate destination for industry insiders, patients and the wellness-curious to connect and learn. Prepare for an enlightening journey into cannabis and holistic health — no prerequisites needed.
Friday (noon-4:20 p.m.) focuses on the industry, featuring regulatory insights from the Alcoholic Beverage Control and panels on building an inclusive workforce, optimizing operations and more. You’ll also hear from cannabis companies like DIZPOT, Fohse, Lucid Green, WeedMaps, Bags 454 and more, each of whom will be offering insights about leading the industry in packaging, engineering, innovation and in technology.
On Saturday (10 a.m.-4:20 p.m.), we’ll bridge industry and consumer interests. Savor cooking demos with Chef Trevor Swedenburg in the Taste BUD Cook Room and experience main stage energy with a Korto Momolu Lifestyle and Home canna couture fashion show. Plus, there’s music by reggae artist and cannabis advocate Rochelle Bradshaw, who’ll bring her signature island rhythms and passion for plant medicine.
Sunday (noon-4:20 p.m.) is dedicated to consumers as we welcome more educational programming, panels and cooking demonstrations alongside a hilarious lineup of comedians, including Lucas Aaron Smith, Adam Maldonado and Blair and Seth Dees, each ready to deliver side-splitting cannabis-themed humor.
What’s more, both Saturday and Sunday will showcase the Custom Cannabis Marijuana 101 stage, a space dedicated to medical marijuana certifications and new patient education; the Let Us Be Blunt stage, including a Veterans’ Voice panel; and an arena floor packed with an artisans’ marketplace, dispensaries, CBD products, doctors, med spas, holistic health practitioners and more.
This yearʼs sponsors include Custom Cannabis Superstore, Natural State Medicinals, Leafology, The Source Dispensary & Apothecary, River Valley Relief, Wright Lindsey Jennings and Arkansas’s Finest Dispensaries.
Secure your access at centralarkansastickets.com, where you’ll find weekend passes for $30 and single-day tickets ranging from $10-$20. Need to consult with a physician to score your medical card? Guarantee your spot by scheduling an appointment when you purchase your tickets online. Walk-ins will be accommodated as available on Saturday and Sunday. To your health!
SUNDAY, MAY 11 th
ARKANSAS TIMES TACOS & TEQUILA RETURNS IN MAY.
Forget your ordinary Thursday! Arkansas Times Tacos & Tequila, our annual celebration of the best taco artisans in Little Rock, is back May 22 from 6-9 p.m. at Argenta Plaza in downtown North LIttle Rock. Get ready to embark on a tantalizing journey, where you’ll sample innovative tequila-infused beverages and indulge in a diverse array of taco creations. Cast your vote and help us award the coveted Golden Taco Trophy.
Last year’s reigning champion, Casa Mañana River Market, returns to defend its title, but it’ll face fierce competition from local legends like Las Palmas, The Spot, Midtown Billiards, Taco Mexicana and a host of other culinary maestros. Expect everything from time-honored classics to daring, avant-garde taco interpretations.
This event is presented by Land Rover of Little Rock and Volkswagen of Little Rock — both of which will be showing off brand-new cars — and sponsored by Milagro Tequila, Edwards Food Giant and KARK Channel 4’s “Arkansas Style” show. Join us for an evening of sensational flavors, friendly competition and the electrifying beats of Club 27.
Early-bird tickets are available now for $35 at centralarkansastickets.com, but it won’t be long before the price jumps to $45 on May 8. For an elevated experience with exclusive private seating, a curated original menu crafted by a private chef, and a dedicated bar with a personal bartender, consider upgrading to VIP tickets ($100).
CRYING AT McCAIN MALL
The Observer went to Dillard’s on a recent weekend in search of a new pair of jeans and found himself taking a casual stroll through McCain Mall, North Little Rock’s two-story 850,000-squarefoot shopping complex. McCain Mall opened in Dogtown in 1973, just off U.S. Highway 67/167 (now Interstate 57). According to the North Little Rock History Commission, a newspaper at the time called the 56-acre development a “virtual new city.”
Fifty-two years later, in this era of unbridled e-commerce, McCain and many malls just like it have lost their luster. But, as I walked past the mostly empty clothing stores, I could still picture dreamy sequences of vibrant shopping scenes from my childhood in the ’80s and ’90s. Gone are the fountains full of pennies little kids hedged their dreams on, the Aladdin’s Castle arcade, the Luby’s Cafeteria, Musicland where I bought a Kriss Kross cassette tape, and Mr. Dunderbak’s, the beloved German pretzel-and-brat restaurant where apparently you could smoke cigs and drink beer back in the day. Obviously the video store that was located in the food court packed up and departed the scene, but I will never forget renting the spoof horror film “Saturday the 14th” and being wildly disappointed.
Some relics remain, though: Spencer’s is still there if you need a lava lamp or a Playboy poster. I don’t know if they still carry those metal pin art boards dozens of kids a day would use to make molds of their faces. Despite the epidemiological horror, it feels like something the Legislature will vow to bring back in 2025.
While taking the escalator down to the mostly deserted food court, I recalled some intense food memories from my shopping
mall glory days. McCain Mall provided my first bite of Chick-fil-A, when an employee of the chain was wandering around the dining area handing out free samples of bite-size chicken on the end of toothpicks. My first lick of coffee-flavored ice cream came from a cone my dad purchased at a Baskin-Robbins stand that has been gone for decades.
Speaking of ice cream, the first memory I have of leaving a restaurant in tears was in a trippy ice cream shop at McCain Mall in the mid-to-late ’80s. Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour was a popular chain at the time, but even if you’re too young to have ever visited one, you’ve likely seen it depicted on screen. In an early scene in “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” Keanu Reeves’ character, Ted “Theodore” Logan, and Alex Winter’s character, Bill S. Preston Esq., inadvertently bring Napoleon Bonaparte back through time from the battlefield in Austria in 1805 to San Dimas, California, in 1988. They leave Napoleon with Ted’s little brother Deacon while they use a phone booth time machine to kidnap other historical figures so they can pass their history report and graduate high school. Otherwise, Ted will go to military school in Alaska and their band Wyld Stallyns will never fully form and help align the planets, bringing peace and harmony to the Earth. It was a most triumphant premise.
Anyway, Ted’s little brother and a couple of his girlfriends take Napoleon to an ice cream shop, where he proceeds to bogart a massive bowl of ice cream with several scoops. It doesn’t say so in the film, but that was Farrell’s and the mammoth dish was called a Pig Trough. The ice cream parlour franchise was supposedly a throwback to the early 1900s, but this was the 1980s and
people were out of their minds. Apparently each location had a player piano hammering out saloon-style music, but I don’t remember that. I do remember the volume of the place being loud as hell. Kids got free sundaes on their birthdays, comically large double banana splits were presented to tables under Tiffany lamps, and employees wearing vests, bow ties and straw hats walked around banging bass drums and blaring sirens for people who finished their Pig Troughs, who would then be awarded ribbons that said something to the effect of, “I made a pig of myself at Farrell’s.”
Napoleon Bonaparte seemed unaffected when two unhinged employees pinned a ribbon to his woolen grenadier coat, but for the 5-year-old Observer, the sensory overload surrealism of it all was too much to handle. I began sobbing at the table, ruining what should’ve been a fun family outing. Then my brother ran around the edge of one of the water fountains and fell into the coin-filled pool. Rather than leaving, my mom purchased him some dry clothes from JCPenney so we could finish the day’s shopping.
We never returned to Farrell’s, and I was relieved when it closed a short time later. As I grew into adolescence, though, every time I walked past the spot where Farrell’s used to be, I wished I could go back. It felt like part of an era that was ending. Ice Cream of the Future (aka Dippin’ Dots) stands would show up in malls soon after, and those little pellet-size creamy dots were delicious. But it would almost always lead to a conversation about how sensational Farrell’s was and how I’d wimped out at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put back my very own Pig Trough and win a ribbon that I would be proud to display in my cubicle today.
