Arkansas Life: July 2019

TA K ING A (MOON)SHINE TO FA MILY HER I TAGE

G OING BACK TO T HE L A ND AT DOGWOOD HIL LS GUEST FA R M

BIK ES, BLUES & BBQ’S 20-Y E A R HISTORY IS OF F T HE CH A IN

PL

ING T O WA S H I T D O W N

BIR OUT THE BEST OF TH E

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US NATURALLY CURIOUS | Summer 2019 | VOLUME 11, NO. 11

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JULY PROMOTIONS

THAT TIME AT OAKLAWN WHEN WE HIT THE JACKPOT

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GIRLS’ NIGHT OUT WED, 12-10PM

HOT SPRINGS VILLAGE DAY THUR, 12-10PM

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• Saturday, July 27, 4-10pm •Drawings, drink specials, & a $4.99 Dinner

FRI, 6–10PM

It’s time to raise the stakes at Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort in Hot Springs.

With new live blackjack tables, true casino action is in the cards.

RACE TO THE FINISH WED, JULY 31, 4PM

OAKLAWN – A NEW LEVEL OF THRILLS. OAKLAWN.COM

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SUMMER Fe a t u r e s

60 TH E BIRD S A ND TH E BEERS We’re seasonal eaters around these parts, seeking out whatever’s freshest. But come summer?

There’s nothing we’d rather have than a cold beer and fried chicken by jordan p. hickey and wyndham wyeth photography by arshia khan

74 THE H OU S E TH AT C OT TON BU ILT Drive through the Delta, and you’re sure to come across signs of the industrial agriculture complex—hulking, brutalist-esque structures that dot the landscape.

Just inside, though—there’s art by jordan p. hickey photography by tim hursley

Pictured: A glass of Hawk Moth’s 2nd & Hudson, and Marie’s Kentucky Fried Chicken from the Junior League of Little Rock, (page 65). Not pictured: Lotsa full bellies.

Photo and cover photo by Arshia Khan

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SUMMER Departments

DISPATCHES

18 FIVE THINGS FIRST 417,000 cubic

48 FROM JONESBORO Hepatitis A is

feet of flood water per second, 500 transcribed fiddle tunes, 34 people depicted on Hot Springs’ Black Broadway, 20 years of Bikes, Blues & BBQ and four mayoral tips for grape stomping

breaking all the rules in northeast Arkansas

“Neither blood nor water is thicker than moonshine. It’s always been this way.” page 53

52 FROM NEWTON COUNTY Distilling family heritage from a jug of white lightnin’

VENTURE

Ashel Parsons keeps her head below water

TABLE

Farm

LIFE/STYLE

98 FIRST TASTE Light and freshness

24 BIG DAM PHOTO Photographer

abound in both food and wine at Bentonville’s Bar Cleeta

28 OPEN HOUSE This hillside home

104 STATE DISH Shari’ Haley’s take

40 WELLNESS We’re getting a leg

106 CORK DORK This Independence Day, pop fireworks and pop bottles … for freedom

bucks all the conventions of “Fayetteville architecture”

up on this whole martial arts thing

44 WHAT’S IN STORE Drawing inspiration from the vintage prints and maps at Rogers’ Dandy Roll

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on peach cobbler has us feeling all warm and fuzzy

112 WISH YOU WERE HERE Harvesting hospitality at Dogwood Hills Guest

118 CULTURALIST Falling in love with TheatreSquared’s new digs, taking to the skies in NWA, swinging for the fences at Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, spending the night at the Old State House Museum and celebrating Tesla (the man, not the car) in Hot Springs 120 HOMETOWN Finding fortune in DeWitt 128 ONE TAKE Lost and found in Northwest Arkansas

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: PHOTO BY DAVID YERBY; PHOTO COURTESY OF SILO AR+D; PHOTO BY ARSHIA KHAN

FRONT PORCH

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EDITOR’S LETTER

I can feel myself salivating as I write this, so maybe “lesser,” isn’t the right word.

I

f you’re at all familiar with our wine columnist Seth Eli Barlow’s work, you know what I mean when I say this: Wine is never just a wine.

It’s Jolly Ranchers, and bottled sunshine, and bottled sunflowers, and “flying through hyperspace in a walnut.” (In this issue, on page 106, it’s: “I often liken Champagne to a ballet dancer, a graceful spiral of electric motion, but California’s wines are like Olympic gymnasts, each one taut and lean, robust and full of energy.”) In his work, there’s a reminder of something that I think is especially pointed in this issue’s cover feature: Food and drink have an amazing capacity to be vessels for all manner of memories and associations. This goes double for anything ever made in a family member’s kitchen—triple if it’s delicious.

But the same can be said of dishes that are less formative, that might not define our childhoods or memories of our parents, but define, for whatever reason, some brief stretch of time. They might not have the staying power of, say, fried chicken (page 60), but they are no less evocative.

Even during the final stretch of this issue’s publication, I feel as though I’ve been gradually populating an especially fleeting mental smorgasbord of lesser food memories.

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However, it does then beg the question as to why some recollections make it into longterm memory. There’s an inherent awareness, I think, something bordering on instinctual, that automatically sets those memories apart, that elevates them, triggering them for posterity. Although our brains are weird magpies, flagging unexpected bits of information, trivia and song lyrics to hoard away for the long haul, there’s a secret to ensuring that something sticks: By allowing our interactions with loved ones to define the meal, by partaking in fellowship, by treasuring those moments, we may finish what’s on our plate— but it’s never gone. Not really. In that way, we keep the memories forever preserved—no matter the expiration date.

It’s not every issue that we find ourselves in a Muskogee house surrounded by cottonseed (page 74), but when we do, we make sure to bring along a proper face mask.

GROCERIES ACQUIRED IN THE MAKING OF THIS ISSUE: Two dozen handpicked eggs and three potatoes (red, white and purple) from Dogwood Hills Guest Farm.

A 500-milliliter bottle of Hawk Moth’s The Dark Arches, which at 16.1 percent boasts the state’s highest alcohol content produced in a beer. (It’s also delicious.)

Fried chicken from Advada’s Diner in Hazen and Haybird in Little Rock.

Strawberries, radishes, bread, nectarines, chicken, poultry seasoning, corn on the cob, cucumbers … from Kroger in Little Rock.

Feedback? We’d love to hear from you!

Email us at jordan@arkansaslife.com, tweet us @ArkansasLife or send us some snail mail to P.O. Box 2221, Little Rock, AR, 72203. POSTMASTER: Please send address changes to address above.

PHOTO BY TIM HURSLEY

After a long weekend at the office, it was leftover homemade pupusas, eaten cold, and the last bowl of chili from a batch made the week before (inexplicably, it’d gotten better as the week went on). On a long trip back from the Delta— specifically, after changing a flat tire on the side of Interstate-40—it was flavor-packed corn chips and a large Styrofoam cup of coffee (page 74). On a farm just outside of Marshall, it was a breakfast of crepes, blueberries, house-made ricotta and three cappuccino-chip muffins with homemade butter, all of it produced either there on the farm or just up the road (page 112).

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Ark ans a s Lif e NATURALLY CURIOUS

EDITORIAL

Editor Creative

“My favorite meal as a kid was fried tuna croquettes with a side of macaroni and cheese. I’ve never known anyone outside my family to make it, but when I eat it, it tastes like my childhood.”

JORDAN P. HICKEY

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Associate

EMMA DEVINE

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Photographer Copy

ARSHIA KHAN

Editor

Contributing

KAREN LASKEY

Writers

SETH ELI BARLOW DAVID CONRADS MARIAM MAKATSARIA STAN MORRIS JIM PETERSEN JOHNNY CARROL SAIN HEATHER BREED STEADHAM

—Wyndham Wyeth

Contributing Photographers

AUSTIN COLLINS HENRY O. HEAD TIM HURSLEY ASHEL PARSONS DAVID YERBY

“Khachapuri, hands down. Every Georgian family has a different way of making it, but simply put, it’s a dish composed of fresh bread stuffed with ooey-gooey cheese and topped off with an egg. It’s quite addictive.”

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Have your own answer?

Email us at jordan@ arkansaslife.com, and we'll publish our favorites in the August digital edition.

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—Wess Daniels

SCOTT STINE

V.P./Circulation

What’s a dish that always brings back memories?

“We used to love to take my grandmother’s fudge while it was still warm and stick it between two saltines and make sandwiches out of them. Every holiday, there were fudge and saltines on the table.”

LARRY GRAHAM

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121 East Capitol Ave., Little Rock, AR 72201 501.918.4505 | www.arkansaslife.com For subscription inquiries, please call 501.918.4555 For advertising inquiries, please call 501.244.4334

“Sausage balls! Growing up, I helped my grandmother make the original Betty Crocker recipe from the Bisquick box. I’ve evolved the recipe over the years to add my own flavor, but every time I make them, I think about family holidays at Grandma’s house.”

—Staci Miller Franklin

Price per print issue: $9.95

Arkansas Life, Volume 11, Number 11 (ISSN 2374-0868, print) (ISSN 2374-0892 online) is published quarterly by Arkansas DemocratGazette Inc., 121 East Capitol Avenue, Little Rock, Arkansas 72201.

Postage paid at Little Rock, Arkansas, and additional mailing offices.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Arkansas Life, P.O. Box 2221, Little Rock, AR 72203-2221.

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SHARI’ HALEY

STAN MORRIS

ASHEL PARSONS

TIM HURSLEY

Chef and co-proprietor at Wilson Cafe who created the peach cobbler for this month’s State Dish (page 104)

Founder of NEA Report who wrote “Going Viral” (page 48)

Central Arkansas (and beyond)-based photographer who shot this month’s One Take (page 24)

Little Rock-based photographer who shot “Point-Counterpoint” (page 28) and “The House that Cotton Built” (page 74)

The first cobbler you can remember sampling?

My grandmother’s peach cobbler.

It was always one of my favorite summer desserts!

Best tip for aspiring bakers out there?

Find a local bakery or a restaurant where you can start learning and getting hands on experience. My high school teacher helped me get my first kitchen job at 16, and it was the best decision that I made during my teen years.

A sure sign that you’ve made a good pie?

When someone’s plate is clean after eating one of my desserts, I know it was a winner!

Instagram: @sharihaley

Did reporting this change your thinking about the outbreak?

Yes, and I’m eating out at restaurants ten-fold now.

How you know that you’ve done a thorough job on a story?

There must be no unanswered questions or unexplained lack of answers.

Where can people read more of your reporting on northeast Arkansas?

If I do my job right, you’ll read it everywhere. But read it first at NEAReport.com

Best tip for taking photos underwater?

Take a lot and embrace the imperfections.

Something that the photo doesn’t quite capture?

How she doesn’t love getting her hair wet, but she did for me because she’s my best friend.

You’ve taken photos underwater, from the air—what’s next?

Space. But for now, I’ll stick with capturing things from different perspectives on Earth.

Instagram: @ashelphoto

Facebook: NEAReport

What were you thinking the first time you walked inside a Muskogee house?

The first one I walked into was dark and empty. It looked like an industrial cathedral. The next one had a mountain of cottonseed that reminded me of an iceberg.

How many Muskogee houses would you estimate you’ve visited?

I’ve visited and revisited sites in Wilson, Pine Bluff, Helena and Brinkley. Recently, on the way back from Alabama, I rode out a thunderstorm in a Muskogee house in Helena, while getting more shots, of course.

Any recent notable projects?

I just completed photographing the Jewel Changi airport in Singapore for Moshe Safdie, the architect of Crystal Bridges.

Instagram: @timhursley

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FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: PHOTO BY ARSHIA KHAN; PHOTO BY ARSHIA KHAN; PHOTO COURTESY OF ASHEL PARSONS; PHOTO BY BENNY SCROGGIN

CONTRIBUTORS

Pleasant Shopping.

Pleasant Dining.

Pleasant Ridge.

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501.258.8637

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6 5 7 H I G H W AY 3 6 5

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M AY F L O W E R , A R

PHOTO BY AUSTIN COLLINS

FRONT PORCH WHAT YOU'LL BE TALKING ABOUT THIS SEASON

An on-the-water look at the Arkansas River’s “ f lood of historic magnitude” p. 18 16

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F RON T P ORCH > F I V E T HING S F IR S T

2.

Meandering Way and Rogers Avenue, Fort Smith on May 25.

GRAPE JOB!

1.

Altus Mayor Veronica Post offers tips for this year’s grape stomp

THE MEASURE OF WATER

By jordan p. hickey

Press It

When the Arkansas River flooded this past May, the USGS took note. This is what they saw

to help Adam and Bobby anyway he can. After making four passes across the river, the average flow is almost instantaneously determined to be 417,000 cubic feet per second, and the stage is about 26 feet. Typical flow for May/June, by comparison, is about 70,000 cubic feet per second.

The flow value will be passed on to the Corps of Engineers and the National Weather Service for use in flood-management decisions and flood predictions—both for this specific flood and for future Arkansas River floods. The flood later peaked at a stage of 29.71 feet on June 5.

Data, however, have their limitations in the telling of a human story.

By Jim Petersen Photography by Austin collins

I

t’s a morning in May. By 9 a.m., Adam Jones, Bobby Connor and Neil Holaway are cautiously launching their U.S. Geological Survey boat from the flooded parking lot adjacent to the submerged boat ramp at Little Rock’s Murray Park. The 26-foot Silver Carp is alone on this part of the Arkansas River. “Comin’ up,” Adam softly warns as he powers the boat into the main river channel, and they motor about 2 miles downstream to a section of the river bounded by bluffs on the north and a levee to the south.

The Silver Carp is the platform from which they will measure the volume of water flowing past Little Rock in the Arkansas River. This marks the third of five times they’ll visit this section of the river during the May-June 2019 Arkansas River flood.

The levee protects the area of apartments and office buildings along Riverfront Drive between the Rebsamen Park Golf Course (there were no tee times available on this particular Thursday) and downtown Little Rock. From where the men sit, the levee

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appears to be up to the task of holding the river at arm’s length. The levee should be high enough. Constructed with a mixture of sand, silt and clay—levees with higher amounts of sand are more susceptible to failure—it appears to be structurally intact. There are no trees to weaken its integrity. There are concerns that some other levees along the river are not high enough or haven’t been properly maintained. Dardanelle Levee near Holla Bend was breached, and Lollie Levee near Conway threatened to fail before floodwaters receded. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently rated the condition of 20 levees along the river as “unacceptable.”

While gathering their thoughts, the three, almost in unison, reach for a jolt of energy—a splash of caffeine or sugar. Before hitting the river, the USGS crew had stopped to refuel their truck, the Silver Carp and themselves, (after making their measurements at Little Rock, they’d be heading upriver to Morrilton). For themselves they’d bought some water and soft drinks, some chips and a few candy bars. Bobby had brought a banana on board—that’s bad mojo on a fishing boat, but apparently not on the Silver Carp.

Their need for some energy called to mind the food and drink purchased by the North Little Rock Water Co. in April 1927, when its workers

To see a video from Jim’s excursion with the USGS, visit arkansaslife.com/flood

protected the company’s pumps and buildings from one of the most horrendous floods in Arkansas history. Provisions for the workers included 108 pounds of chewing tobacco, 25,400 cigarettes, 1,859 sandwiches, 5,064 bottles of soft drinks, 3,435 pints of milk and 395 gallons of coffee.

As they prepare to take the first measurement, conversation ebbs and flows between small talk about a lightning-scarred tree now standing in 10-foot-deep water and professional talk about the data coming in to their laptop computer. Each of the three is a seasoned hydrologic technician with many flood measurements under the belt of his life jacket. Still, there are the tensions associated with the need to get an accurate measurement and the inherent perils of a large flooding river. Two technologies are used in the measurement: GPS to keep track of the precise location of the boat as it moves across the river; and Doppler technology to continuously measure the depth and velocity of the water.

Adam is responsible for keeping the Silver Carp pointed more or less upstream, while also moving it along an imaginary line stretching from one bank to the other. Bobby manages the GPS and Doppler technologies to calculate the streamflow volume based on the width, depths and velocities.

Neil’s job is to watch for trees and other hazards floating down the river and

I

t’s a morning in June. After Arkansas River water levels recede, USGS crews get a chance for a short breather before settling into routine streamflow measuring trips and preparing for the next flood. Individuals and entities with floodwater in their homes, on their property or affecting other infrastructure don’t get a breather. A damage estimate will take some time to calculate, but more than 800 homes were flooded, and the flooding affected the rich and the poor, the urban and rural, and those with businesses along the river. Even if Arkansans were not directly affected by the flooding, there is always next time.

Failing to plan is planning to fail— so they say.

“What you’re trying to do is, you’re trying to press as much of those grapes open as possible, because with a closed grape, the juice is not going to pour out.”

Squish It

“My foot is not that large. I wear a 7 1/2 shoe, and I have beat people who wear size 10s before.

So it’s more about the process of keeping your foot moving and literally squishing every grape in your barrel.”

Stomp It

“If you just stand there and basically keep stomping in one spot, there are going to be grapes around the edge, upper, lower, around the barrel, that aren’t going to get under your feet.”

But DON’T cap it …

If you keep the juice you’ve stomped, don’t screw the cap on very tight: Within 24 hours, the grapes will start fermenting, and pressure will build up. Mayor Post knows this firsthand from when her daughter first stomped grapes years before. “We had shards of glass in our ceiling tile.”

Stomp over to the 36th Annual Grape Festival in Altus on July 26-27. For more info, visit facebook. com/altusgrapefest arkansaslife.com

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F RON T P ORCH > F I V E T HING S F IR S T

3. MURAL, MURAL ON THE WALL …

A Hot Springs mural reflects Malvern Avenue’s past and present By jordan P. Hickey | pHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID YERBY

F

“We worked together for 12-hour days for five weeks,” Anthony says.

“And now he’s gone [from Hot Springs], and I kinda miss him a little bit. We are from two different worlds, two different perspectives on everything. But we clicked. Art brought us together.”

Texture of the Beach:

“It’s like footprints in the sand.

It represents the ancestors who made a path for them—made the path a little easier.”

See the mural for yourself at 350 Malvern Ave. in Hot Springs. Learn more about the area’s history by checking out the Pleasant Street Historic District’s National Historic Register application, available online.

Hot Springs Residents:

Tim Anderson:

Necessary Prep Work:

“It’s more than just art,” he says.

“It really gives us value, shows that people care about us, care about the community. We could’ve easily put Patti LaBelle or Duke Ellington [in the mural]. We could’ve easily done those. They’re easily recognized. But we wanted to do something different that would really help the community.”

“It’s an unspoken language around here, that when you need help with something, that’s who you go to,” Anthony says of Tim Anderson, whom he works with at Tim’s Barber Shop. “That’s why he’s kind of in the back. You can’t really see him because he don’t like being out front. But honestly, if you need help in the community, in the black community in Hot Springs, that’s who you go to.”

“There was a lot of prep work before we even started painting,” he says. After cutting down the vines and power-washing the wall, they patched the holes and applied a white primer, (in addition to leveling out the ground). Rather than projecting the image on the wall, they scaled the mural, breaking it into boxes.

“We probably had 500 boxes.”

Himself:

Who else is in there? “Uhhhh, I’m in there,” Anthony says, laughing. “[Pepe] made me paint myself.”

Bud Kennedy:

Someone else Hot Springs residents might recognize? “Bud Kennedy—he’s been doing the Wednesday-night poetry for over like 30 years,” Anthony says. “He’s a trolley driver, so he’s got his trolley hat on in the mural.”

CAPTURE ARKANSAS | JAMES FORTUNE

or much of the early- and mid-20th century, Hot Springs’ Malvern Avenue—nationally known as Black Broadway—and the surrounding Pleasant Street Historic District, must’ve been a sight to see. Anchored by the fourstory, block-spanning Woodmen of the Union Building—the structure boasted, among other amenities, a 75-room hotel and a 2,500-person auditorium that drew the likes of Count Basie and Duke Ellington—the commercial corridor represented a thriving community, a cultural hub with a mix of black- and white-owned businesses several paces ahead of its time.

Completed in May, the mural at 350 Malvern Ave. is very much a celebration of the area’s rich cultural heritage, depicting musicians and poets and artists. But it’s worth stressing that these individuals aren’t from the past. Instead, the 34 people shown marching in the mural, done by Pepe Gaka (aka Giuseppe Percivati) and Anthony Tidwell, the founder of Cutwell 4 Kids, an arts-education nonprofit, are all from this moment in time.

They’re kids from the Hot Springs World Class High School Band. They’re residents, business owners, faces you’d see in passing around town. For a better sense of what—and who—went into the mural and what you should take away from it, we turned to Anthony for some insight.

Muralist Pepe Gaka, aka Giuseppe Percivati, (not pictured)

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F RON T P ORCH > F I V E T HING S F IR S T

Cycling through Bikes, Blues & BBQ’s 20-year history

“T

4.

By David Conrads

T

he exact year that Fayetteville’s annual Bikes, Blues & BBQ Motorcycle Rally started is the stuff of legend.

It can be said with certainty that it incorporated in 2000, making this year’s rally the 20th. What started out rather casually—a blues band, a barbecue smoker, 75odd motorcycles parked outside of Jose’s Mexican Restaurant on Dickson Street—exploded into 22

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here were a few visionaries in Fayetteville in the later 1990s who also happened to be motorcyclists. One was Neal Crawford, who owned Jose’s Mexican Restaurant on Dickson Street. The other was Richard Watson, then the city’s chief of police.

Watson was an avid rider and had been to [the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota] and some other rallies. He thought we could do that here in Fayetteville. At the same time, Neal was having a little afternoon rally himself. It was called several different things: Jose’s Bike Festival or the Robert Hatfield Blues Festival. It incorporated and officially became the Bikes, Blues & BBQ Motorcycle Rally in 2000.

“I got involved in 2005 or 2006. My band played on Dickson Street on a regular basis, and I sucked up in any way possible to the club owners so we could get a gig during the rally, which we eventually did. [A few years later], one of my best friends, Nelson Driver, had become the executive director, and I gradually insinuated myself into the inner workings and became Nelson’s unofficial helper. I eventually became the emcee of the main stage and the booking agent for the bands. I was the head honcho (executive director) from 2011 until 2015.

“The growth was absolutely phenomenal. At one point, we were the fastest-growing motorcycle rally in the world. That was due primarily to

Learn more about Bikes, Blues & BBQ—scheduled for Sept. 25-28—by visiting bikesbluesandbbq.org.

5. PLAY IT BY EAR (MOSTLY) What do you do after transcribing 500 fiddle tunes? For starters, you need to take a bow By jordan p. hickey

“‘S

PHOTO BY JIM ABBRING ON UNSPLASH

THE LONG RIDE

700 bikes the following year and 7,000 the year after that. In recent years, the rally has attracted anywhere between 350,000 and 400,000 bikers and become one of the top ten largest motorcycle rallies in the country. It’s also the single largest charity motorcycle rally in the world and has returned more than $2 million to local charities in its first 19 years, according to the event’s website.

Joe Giles was part of the action almost from the beginning—first, as the frontman of Joe Giles and the Homewreckers, a popular cover band that performed at the rally—and later as the rally’s executive director. As such, if you’re looking to get an first-person account of where BBB has been and where it’s going—well, there are few people better to ask than Joe.

Dan Allen, the original executive director, then to Mark Pryor [Editor’s note: not to be confused with the U.S. Senator]. Dan was a great promoter and the one who really put the rally in the national spotlight. Mark ratcheted it up even further. He got the Discovery Channel to shoot an episode of Biker Build-Offs there. Nelson Driver, who followed Mark, really continued to grow the rally. After that, I was mostly a caretaker, hanging onto the rope and trying not to let go. Normally, I’m sufficiently incompetent to screw up anything, but I couldn’t even screw that up.

“For real bikers, we live in one of the best parts of the country for riding. The roads in Northwest Arkansas, southwest Missouri and eastern Oklahoma are just great roads. They’re hilly, they’re curvy, and in mid- to late-September, there’s tremendous scenery. I think that had a lot to do with the growth of the rally.

“Another thing that I think is extremely important is that Bikes, Blues & BBQ is family-friendly.

On a Saturday afternoon on Dickson Street, when it’s wall-towall bikers and everybody down there looks like Hell’s Angels or the Sons of Anarchy, you can take your children down there, and you will see almost nothing objectionable. My mother is a Quaker, and I would not have been embarrassed about anything she saw down there.

“My wife and I will go [to the rally] for a little bit this year. I just want to go down there and have a couple of beers. I don’t want to have any food because that takes up space better filled with alcohol. I just want to have a couple of beers, then listen to some bands and head home. At this point in my life, all I am is a casual attendee.”

hanghai Rooster,” fiddler Emily Elam says with a sigh, “I won’t ever forget.” Though she’s got lessthan-pleasant memories of the transcription process—when she sat down at a computer two years back and committed the tune to the electronic page— it wasn’t so much the tune that gave her trouble. It was the notation. Much like Banjo Billy, the legendary fiddler whose tunes she’d given herself the task of transcribing, she’d learned to play by listening, rather than reading sheet music.

And the notation software? With all its quirks, it presented a steep learning curve.

All told, those couple of lines took her 10 minutes or so, which wasn’t so bad—until she realized she had 499 songs to go.

The thing is, she’d grown up hearing these tunes—she’d learned by listening to Billy’s music. When she first started playing, she’d attended his workshops at the Inn at Mountain View, a historic structure just off the square, and had marveled at how people had committed hundreds of songs to memory. A few years later, however, immersed in the oral folk-music traditions, she was one of them. Going into this project, she estimates she knew some 400 tunes—375 of which she’d learned by ear.

Of those, she’d picked up probably half from a set of Billy’s CDs:

Visit arkansaslife.com/ banjobilly to see Emily’s transcription of “Shanghai Rooster.” Or visit banjobilly. net/music_store.htm, where you can buy the book.

500 Fiddle Tunes: Old-Time Archive.

But as Emily says, these weren’t your standard old-time tunes.

Drawn f rom Billy’s extensive travels, they ranged from tunes he’d picked up in places from the Ozarks to Appalachia, f rom Irish fiddlers and minstrel banjo tunes and even a few culled from vintage vinyl polka records. “They are from everywhere, Emily says.

Over the course of two years, she transcribed all 500 tunes (by the end, she says, it wasn’t taking her longer than two minutes to transcribe a tune, tops) and is now working with Billy to do another hundred. ( They ’re shooting for 1,000.)

But of course, given the nature of the music— so often passed between musicians, carried forth on the bow rather than the page—the question then becomes, why put this oral tradition into writing?

“It seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it?” Emily says. “Billy and I both brag on this being an oral tradition and that we both learned from people sitting in front of them and learning by ear. And that’s the way we both prefer to learn. … Then we come up with this, Oh, let’s write it all down. And for me, it’s inclusivity.

“I think this is a way of keeping old-time music alive, [by] broadening the number of people who can play it.”

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F RON T P ORCH

> BIG DA M PHO T O

TAKING THE PLUNGE Photography by ashel parsons By wyndham wyeth

S

earcy-based photographer Ashel Parsons has always tried to look at the world a little differently. When she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta, Ashel spent her time looking up at the stars, dreaming of becoming an astronaut. So at 14, after her family moved to Searcy and there was a small municipal airport just up the road, Ashel started working toward her pilot’s license. She was then seeing the world from on high, the landscape of the Earth spread out before her, the creations of mankind reduced to miniature.

Then during her freshman year at Harding University in Searcy, she picked up a camera, more or less for the first time in her life, and everything changed. “It came naturally,” she says. “It wasn’t just like a hobby. It was like I truly … I don’t know. There was just something that connected with me.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that Ashel’s consistently driven to capture new perspectives in her work, to see the world from an unexpected angle or point of view. Sometimes it’s the image of a loving couple reflected in a pool of rainwater. Other times, it’s a father holding his child, both in silhouette, as an enormous sea creature passes just beyond the aquarium glass in front of them.

And sometimes it’s the view just beneath the water’s surface at Greers Ferry Lake on a hot summer day, when splashing about is the only item on the agenda.

“We all are in the same world,” she says, “yet we see it very differently.”

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LIFE/STYLE LIVING WELL IN THE NATURAL STATE

PHOTO BY TIM HURSLEY

28 OPEN HOUSE 40 WELLNESS 44 WHAT’S IN STORE

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This home in the Fayetteville hills? It’s the stuff of architect dreams p. 28 arkansaslife.com

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LIFE/S T Y LE

“I love how when the trees lose their leaves you get these shadows, and how in the early morning you get this pinkish tone to the house and in the late afternoon, this orange-y warm tone. It’s a literal reflection of its place in a lot of ways.”

> OPEN HOUSE

POINT-COUNTERPOINT At first glance, architect and University of Arkansas professor Frank Jacobus’ hillside Fayetteville home might feel in direct opposition to the landscape surrounding it. That is, of course, until you walk inside

By Katie Bridges | Photography by tim hursley

C

ul-de-sacs usually conjure images of suburban sameness—maybe a handful of brick-veneered McMansions, a half-circle of low-slung split-levels, a ring of cookie-cutter Craftsmans.

Not this one.

“Fayetteville” architecture usually conjures images of Fay Jones-esque organics, of wood and Ozark Mountain stone and glass, of homes that merge and meld into the sites enveloping them.

Not this one.

Instead, pull into this Mount Sequoyah cul-de-sac and park in front of this home—built as the personal home of Frank Jacobus, founding partner of the firm known as Silo AR+D and UA associate professor of architecture—and you might be surprised by what’s in front of you. Especially if I were to tell you (and I am!) that at its core, the home’s design was dictated by the wooded site around it. There’s no melding happening here: Rising f rom the green, there’s a white metal home that’s folded into shapes that play with your understanding of geometry.

It’ll catch you off guard, at least at first. But then you’ll notice that the expanse of white metal almost makes the surrounding oak leaves appear greener. That the abstraction of the shapes almost highlight the hillside’s contours.

That, in a way that might be hard to articulate, you’re feeling a fundamental connection to the land beneath you.

Walk inside, and you’ll see that your connection to the site goes even deeper—that your experience in the home, in many ways, is the experience you’d have if the home 28

Summer 2019

were actually not there at all.

“What I guess I’m trying to say is there are other ways we can appreciate and accentuate a site rather than just merging with and growing out of it, you know?”

Frank says.

W

hen we laymen think about our dream home, we’ve got a pretty

limited vocabulary to pull from: tall ceilings, panoramic windows, an open layout. When you’re an architect, you’ve got languages.

Frank realized early on that designing a home for himself would never be as straightforward as interpreting his clients’ wants and needs and turning those wants and needs into something fully articulated. So he drew. And drew.

Resources Architect: Silo AR+D Contractor: Frank Jacobus Home Energy Rating: Pinnacle Energy, Inc. Plumber: Quality Plumbing Electrician: O’Barr Electrical Services, Inc. Mechanical: Thomas Murie Tile: Chris Lee Contracting Custom Maple Hardwood Flooring: Chris Lee Contracting Countertops: Pruden Granite and Tile, LLC Glass Shower Doors and Mirrors: Fayetteville Glass Co. Paint: Sherwin-Williams Interior Railing: Chris Lee Contracting Paint: Sherwin-Williams Exterior Railing: Modus Studio

And drew. He made a total of five full-out drawings of his family’s home, to be precise, in which he tried in earnest to merge both the “architect” and “family-man” sides of himself. He did this all the while creating something evocative of a design philosophy rooted in both abstraction and site connection, the central tenets of Silo AR+D’s approach to architecture.

As both a practicing architect and a tenure-track professor, Frank knew that people in his circles were going to look to this house as a bellwether of sorts: OK, that’s who you are—that’s either how talented or not talented you are. He admits that he was “clouded” at first by what the house “should” be. Ultimately, it was his wife, Emilie, a grade-school librarian, who determined what the house needed to be: a multistory home that reached high up the hillside to take advantage of the Boston Mountain views.

Hillside.

That sparked something within the “architect” side of Frank.

After all, the hills, reminiscent

of the tree-snarled Connecticut landscape of his youth, are what had attracted him to this subdivided plot hugging the north side of Fayetteville’s Mount Sequoyah.

Working on his final drawing for the house, he recalled how he and Emilie and their two teenage sons would pack picnics and head to their virgin property. The boys would gather and stack rocks while their parents marveled at how the experience changed the farther up the hill you climbed—how you started out in the neighborhood, climbed up through the woods and then up and up into an Ozark panorama. Wouldn’t it be cool, he wondered with Emilie, if the house weren’t haptically divorced from the site? That when you went inside, you were walking up and down the stairs as if you were walking up and down the hillside? If you were a little out of breath by the time you reached the top, just like you would be if the house weren’t there?

And in the end, that’s where the house ended up. Take away Continued on page 32 arkansaslife.com

29

LIFE/S T Y LE > OPEN HOUSE

Inside, a sparse palette— white, blonde wood, concrete—accentuates the surrounding foliage, as well as Frank and Emilie’s collection of abstract art.

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LIFE/S T Y LE > OPEN HOUSE

the exterior’s metal whiteness, its almost crystalline volumes growing out of the ground like a geode of otherness, and this is what remains: a house that lets the Jacobuses live as they did during those daydreaming, hillclimbing picnics. In essence, a house that enables them to live as if it’s not there at all. The drawing that became the home is organized around a series of half-levels that, though open to one another, subdivide the living space into different experiences that recreate—and accentuate— the hillside’s dynamism. With each level you climb, you experience a constantly changing relationship to the land, one that follows its contours and highlights all that’s best about dwelling on it—that allows you to experience it the way you ought to, the way it was intended. It’s a counterpoint to the natural beauty surrounding it.

“Being in the house feels like you’re attached to the site, like you’re never divorced from it,” Frank says. “I love the form and the space inside, the flow of the levels from one to the next. I love how on the outside—because it’s a white surface—how when the trees lose their leaves, you get these shadows, and how in the early morning, you get this pinkish tone to the house, and in the late afternoon, this orangey warm tone. It’s a literal reflection of its place in a lot of ways. It’s just a pleasure to live in.”

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Summer 2019

Frank’s grandfather was a painter—his brother is, as well. “My growing up years were all about making and creating,” Frank says, “so the house—the architecture philosophy—probably extends in some way from that: the nature of abstraction.”

It was also a pleasure to build, Frank will tell you. As the first home he designed for himself, as well as the first home he ever contracted, it was a project that not only made him a better teacher, but a better architect—or at least a more empathetic one.

“When you’re the homeowner, you’re realizing what you could have done a bit differently and what would have functioned better,” he says. “And then on the positive side, you realize that things you were maybe indirectly thinking about or intuitively thinking about are just the most pleasurable things. Like we just love sitting in our living room and watching the leaves blow and the changing of the leaves. … The big windows, all the way down to the floor, allow us a kind of access to the environment that we haven’t had before. Little things like that aren’t the architecture stuff of legends by any means, but they just change the way you live.” arkansaslife.com

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LIFE/S T Y LE

> W ELLNE SS

GET YOUR KICKS Our wellness columnist came to her sensei(s) and took a self-defense class

By Mariam Makatsaria

Whether it’s through Krav Maga, Taekwondo or Brazilian JiuJitsu, here’s a list of institutions in Arkansas that can teach you a thing or two about selfdefense.

Arkansas Self Defense

1520 Macon Drive, Little Rock (501-519-2100) Força Martial Arts & Fitness

900 W. E St., Russellville (479-214-1245) Fayetteville Krav Maga

1700 N, College Ave., Fayetteville (479-799-7144)

W

The question, unexpected and honest, stumps me.

I feel as though I’m being quizzed, plunked in ice-cold water when I wasn’t ready for it.

“Um,” I stutter, avoiding eye contact with the bald, bearded man in a dark karate gi. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”

Did I pass?

The man, Sensei Rich, doesn’t say anything.

When I take a seat in the reception area to sign the waiver he hands me, I face the same question, in written form. This time around, I’m presented with a long list of answers to choose from. Confidence, selfdefense, respect, physical fitness, awareness, coordination, focus, positive attitude are just a few options of more than a dozen, and I want to check all of them. Yes, my confidence could use a little work. And yes, it would be nice to 40

hy are you here ?

Summer 2019

Impact Martial Arts

9808 N. Rodney Parham Road, Little Rock (501-224-1222) Danny Dring’s Living Defense Martial Arts

308 E. Kiehl Ave., Sherwood (501-834-3537) Legacy Martial Arts

4500 W. Kingshighway, Suite 1, Paragould (870-761-0861) Joey Perry Martial Arts Academy

4225 Stadium Blvd., Jonesboro (870-910-3903)

pick up a few fighting skills. And of course, anything that sharpens my awareness is a self-improvement project worth delving into. But then I think of a question of my own: Can a self-defense-driven martial arts class teach me all of the above? Really?

During this private, one-on-one class, my first lesson is in humility, and it takes place even before I’ve stepped into the dojo area. After I kick my shoes off and stow them in a cubby, Rich and I follow proper dojo etiquette by bowing to the front of the spacious carpeted room, a sign of respect for the place where we’re about to train. It all feels very serious, very by the book.

“I’m actually really nervous,” I blurt out, and I mean it. I glance over at the only other student here—a young Bruce Lee, not even 7 years old, his movements tight, efficient and exact—and I’m overwhelmed by a single thought: Am I too old for this? Rich immediately tells me not to worry and confesses that even though he’s been practicing martial arts for over two decades, it took him several years of driving past a brightly lit dojo on his way to work every day before he finally mustered up the courage to step in. At this, I feel a lightening of my load.

The class starts off easy enough. We talk about personal space, what it means (for most people, it’s an arm’s length) and what to do when someone invades it. “First of all, if you can run away, do that,” he says. “That should always be your first choice.” In other words, no matter what, if you have an opportunity to escape from a situation that’s about to turn ugly, don’t even think about it—do it. In fact, the more you reduce your chances of having to use your physical skills, the better.

But say push really does come to shove, and say, for one reason or another, you can’t leg it. In dire, desperate situations, it’s beneficial to know where to direct a hit for maximum impact. In the case of a male attacker, it’s a nobrainer. A groin kick, if performed correctly, can deliver enough impact to stop him dead in his tracks long enough for you to find your way out. (But of course, I’m certain most people know this already). Another vulnerable spot? The solar plexus, the space between the bottom of your sternum and the top of your stomach.

“Ever had the wind knocked out of you?” my sensei asks me.

“Um, no?” I make a mental tally of my life’s experiences.

“No,” I confirm.

That’s what a kick in the solar plexus does—knocks the air out of a person’s lungs. I also learn that you can break an elbow joint by forcing the arm to bend in a direction it’s not meant to bend. You can escape a wrist grab by rotating your wrist toward the attacker’s thumb and forcefully pulling away. A good kick in the knee is an option, too.

“It’s all about distance,” Rich says, explaining that most of your decisions, like where you strike and what you strike with—a leg, knee, elbow or arm—will be based on the position of the attacker. But at the end of the day, of course, all of this requires practice. Without practicing proper techniques—until they become as easily summoned as a

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LIFE/S T Y LE > W EL L NE S S

During this private, one-on-one class, my first lesson is in humility, and it takes place even before I’ve stepped into the dojo area.

reflex—all you’re left with is a false sense of security and preparedness.

During the last 20 minutes of class, Rich whips out a padded blocking shield, and we spend some time practicing knee kicks. At first, my kicks are timid, but my sensei assures me I can’t hurt him through his shield, no matter how hard I try. Little by little, I pack more power to my kicks. Before I know it, I’m breathing loudly. At the end of class, right before we part ways, my sensei tells me he’s seen more women my age sign up within the past weeks than ever before. I think about this on my way home.

Why was I so apprehensive about taking up a practice that’s so empowering? Is it because every time I pass by one of those strip-mall martial arts studios, I see a mostly male-dominated crowd through the floor-toceiling windows? Is it because martial arts— like ballet, which requires years and years of training—in general is quite intimidating?

I’ve always wanted to do this. I really have.

I’ve been wanting to do it ever since I first saw Jennifer Lopez kick some serious butt in Enough. (This was back in 2002, and I was 10). A few years ago, I almost signed up for a class, inspired by the character of Elizabeth Jennings from The Americans—who, in the show, can jab and kick with billow and flair and ward off any enemy with her 5-foot-4 frame. It’s all fiction, of course, but a part of me always wondered what it would be like to have that kind of physical intelligence.

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Over a week later, after getting over a cold, I sign up for a group class. I arrive early to the dojo on a Tuesday evening. There’s a kids karate class in session, and I quietly sidle over next to a row of parents proudly watching their children kick, punch, thrust and throw.

Most of the students do stunningly well. A couple of boys flounder along as best they can. When the session draws to a close, the class’s instructor, Sensei Michael, calls out the only girl in class to the front of the dojo and rewards her for her outstanding performance.

The parents burst into applause.

Right around then, a new wave of students—a much older, serious crowd decked out in pajama-style uniforms—march in. (I was told to wear something comfortable, so here I am, totally standing out as a newbie in my leggings and T-shirt). Again, I’m nervous, feeling a fleeting shiver of reluctance. I spot Sensei Michael and remind him again that I’m new. We’d already spoken over the phone, and I’d told him I was interested in learning self-defense techniques. He assures me he’ll take it easy—and he does. (Well, sort of ).

After going through a strenuous cardio round, we practice “roundhouse kicks” on free-standing heavy bags. Everyone around me seems to know what they’re doing.

Everyone, that is, but me. Since I’ve taken dozens of boxing classes, I’m comfortable with throwing a punch or two, but kicking with my feet is still new to me. I give the sensei my very best confused-first-grader look, and he immediately comes over to correct my stance.

The power, in a roundhouse kick, comes from the hips, he tells me. Knowing how to pivot on the ball of your planted foot is important, so I work on that—over and over and over. I look like the slow-motion version of the other cool dudes (and one gal) in class.

In the last portion of our session, we cover simple defensive positions, like covering up to absorb the impact of strikes on the head and torso. The other students partner up and jump right into the exercise, and something tells me that the sensei’s spiel about guard styles is all for my benefit. Which is fine, really. I falter and mess up too many times to count, and that’s fine, too. I’m humbled and ready to learn. I realize that it’s true, that aside from jabs and roundhouse kicks, you do learn so much in a martial arts studio.

Even though I only have a few classes under my, erm, belt, I’ve already learned a few things about confidence, because going out on a limb and trying something new—particularly when that thing scares the white, elastic-waisted pants off you—takes a heck of a lot of courage.

For me, it happened after I took that first literal step into a dojo, and who knew that was all the kick in the behind I needed?

’TIS (ALMOST) THE SEASON! Find something for everyone on your list in the Arkansas Life Holiday Gift Guide, publishing this October.

E-mail lstoev@arkansasonline.com to reserve a spot for your business.

Space is limited.

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> W H AT ’S IN S T ORE

FINE AND DANDY ROLL Vintage-print-and-map shop Dandy Roll is charting its own course in downtown Rogers

By Jordan P. Hickey | Photography by arshia khan

T

he flea and the louse are old. Way older than they let on. Their lines are all still dark—their anatomy still intact, unfaded—but the background’s a little yellowed. What appears to be a light thumbprint smudges the top right corner. It’s a vintage print, no doubt, though its provenance isn’t entirely clear until Dom Smith, who owns Dandy Roll with his wife, Courtney, pipes up from across the store and gives the date.

1791.

Lest you think this isn’t an especially impressive feat, allow me to paint a picture for you: There are a lot of prints. Like, a lot. Something to the tune of 10,000-odd pieces arranged into categories such as “Fish” and “Small Maps.” So, that he can correctly state, without much in the way of hesitation, what the date of a randomly pulled flea print is, sight unseen—well, it’s pretty impressive. Especially when he does so again (“Pin fire revolver knife”? 1940) and again (“The Matthews-Northrop Adequate Travel-Map of St. Paul”? 1893).

But lest you’re picturing Dom as, 44

Summer 2019

say, a curmudgeonly sort bent low over a set of scrolls on the counter, eyes clouded with dust and the fog of age, nearly as old as the prints he’s identifying, just know that image couldn’t be much further from the truth.

When my pen runs dry, he hands me one of the many clipped to the top of his apron, saying, “I have a whole pocket of pens—like sunshine?” He adds a second later: “Little did you know that I was hilarious.”

That exchange? That says everything you need to know about Dom. Young, spritely, excited about maps, hilarious, an improbable host. But of course, it’s an improbable store. After all, this place—“Home. Gifts. Clothes. &

DANDY ROLL 107 W. Walnut St., Rogers dandyrollprints.com

HOURS:

11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Saturday

TWO CUTE DOGS #TeamDelia #TeamDoby” reads the sandwich board out front—wasn’t originally in the plan. The idea had come when Dom and Courtney were on their honeymoon in Savannah, Georgia, in June 2016, visiting V&J Duncan Antique Maps, a shop for vintage prints. When the owners made an offhand remark about buying the store, the newlyweds got to thinking: Maybe there was something to it. The next month, they went down for a weekend, learned everything they could about prints and preservation, and came back with 300-odd prints.

In those early days, Dom says, “it was a fun daydream to have.” However, as the months and years wore on—as their collection grew, as their e-commerce business picked up, as conversations about a brick-andmortar storefront solidified into something more concrete—the business started to feel a little more real. When they finally opened their doors in downtown Rogers on Sept. 22, 2017, Dom says, when he left his day job to work there full time, that was when it was real. And now, to see him behind the counter, spouting off the names and dates of a collection that grows by the day, there can be little doubt: This is history in the making. arkansaslife.com

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LIFE/S T Y LE > W H AT ’S IN S T ORE

1.

4. Hawks Folio by Peter Mazell (1765)

Wish List What we’d really, really like to leave with 1. The Grammar of Ornament

“If I could afford 106, and afford to frame all 106, I would have all of these in my house,” Dom says.

Though lithographs are traditionally black and white, these colored versions, or chromolithographs, are each made with upward of 25 to 30 colors.

2. Little Bison Co.

Though focused primarily on prints, the shop’s got a fair assortment of home goods as well—including these candles by NWA’s Little Bison Co. “They’re soy-based candles, they’re locally poured, and they have really great smells—plus, they use essential oils to make their candles, so there’s no chemicals,” Dom says.

“And if my lack of inventory says anything, they’re super popular.”

The couple has started shopping some larger art auctions (see below), but Dom says you never know what you’ll find stopping at every little antique store on the side of the road. This folio set of hawks from 1765, for instance, one of the nicest sets in the shop, was found in a flea market in Tulsa.

2.

5. Prints from the Audubon Imperial Folio edition (1845-1848)

Although Dom and Courtney get much of what they find in flea markets and antique stores, some prints—including one handcolored by the son of John James Audubon, the legendary naturalist, ornithologist and painter for whom the Audubon Society is named—was purchased from an auction.

6. Prints from the Audubon Octavo Edition (1849-1854) 3.

“These are the first octavo printings of birds and quadrupeds of North America,” Dom says, noting that they’re the only printing that Audubon personally oversaw the printing of. “As somebody whose stick figures are really bad, it’s amazing to see art like this.”

3. Keeper Bin

Designed by Juliana Engler, an industrial design student from the University of Houston, these deceptively simple aluminum stands are used to repurpose plastic grocery bags as trash bags. “It’s like, I never have to buy trash bags again,” Dom says. “Plus, they’ll never scratch.”

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> F ROM JONE SBORO

GOING VIRAL Since 2018, there’ve been 363 cases of Hep A across Arkansas— compared with 7 in 2017. Focused primarily in northeast Arkansas, this outbreak is breaking all the rules

by Stan Morris 48

Summer 2019

F

or much of its 44 years, Pizza Inn in northeast Arkansas bustled with activity at lunchtime. Customers queued at the salad bar and hot buffet. Staff manned the open kitchen, navigating the sprawling dining room with aluminum pans of bubbling-hot pies. For most patrons of Pizza Inn, or most any restaurant, for that matter, the experience of eating out is somewhat limited, somewhat myopic: When people go out to eat, their experience is limited to what they see in the dining area, but ask the proprietors, and they’ll tell you the requirements for restaurants go much further than what diners observe on any given night.

A salad bar, for instance, with uncooked foods such as lettuce and

PHOTO BY BETTY PARTIN FOR THE CDC

DISPAT CHE S

spinach, has to be strictly controlled because viruses and bacteria aren’t cooked off. The lengths to which the health department enforces food-safety measures might appear o ver w rought—unnecessar il y thorough to the untrained observer—but for Bob Clairday and his family, such measures are practically second nature.

In the decades that Bob’s been a franchisee for Pizza Inn, the business has become more than just a job. With a handful of family members now involved in the dayto-day business dealings, Pizza Inn is a family enterprise. More than that, however, the business has become a part of who they are, a bond firmed up over many years.

Then in late 2018, that bond was nearly severed.

On Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018, one of the three Jonesboro Pizza Inn locations learned that one of its staff members had tested positive for hepatitis A. Representatives from the Arkansas Department of Health (ADH) arrived that same day, vaccinating the entire staff and preparing the company for a press release slated to publish that afternoon. The headline read, “Health Department warns of possible hep A exposure to customers of Jonesboro Pizza Inn.” In addition to providing details about the exposure—that people who had eaten at Pizza Inn “from Sept. 4 to Sept. 17 should seek vaccination” and that a free vaccination clinic was scheduled for the coming weekend—the press release also gave a brief epidemiological snapshot.

A highly contagious liver disease caused by the hepatitis virus, hepatitis A—or hep A— is typically acquired either by person-to-person contact, or via contaminated food. Although the disease can range in severity— “from a mild illness lasting a few weeks to a severe illness lasting several months,” as the ADH noted in the press release—when the public believes they could be at risk of a severe illness that can last up to several months, choices tend to change.

As such, even though the ADH press release said the exposure was “possible” and that no confirmed

In 1996, there were 500 cases in Arkansas.

By 1998, it’d dropped to 82.

With the exception of a brief spike in 2000—144 cases—those numbers never again left the double digits.

Confirmed cases even dropped into the single digits for much of the 2010s. And then came 2018: 256.

cases had come from food, the public fixated on two terms: “Hep A” and “Pizza Inn.” News reports ran graphics using the word “outbreak,” while showing B-roll footage of the Pizza Inn logo. The restaurant’s business dropped off almost immediately. The staff was reduced. Hours were cut across the entire company.

All because a driver for the company, who never handled food, tested positive for hep A. “We went from $22,000 a week to $5,000 a week,” Bob says. “Now I don’t put anyone to work for me who’s not had the [vaccine].”

It’s not uncommon for restaurants to experience dips and spikes in business with the ever-changing whims of the public and the evertumultuous cycle of current events, but nothing could compare to the alarming consequences of this outbreak of hep A. For the past year and a half, the Clairdays’ experience has been shared by many foodservice businesses across northeast Arkansas: In 2018, restaurants on the receiving end of similar press releases included the Corning Taco Bell in February, both the Corning Flash Market/Subway and the Walnut Ridge Doublebee’s gas stop in April, the Jonesboro Steak ‘n’ Shake in June, just to name a few.

But while hep A is often associated with tainted food, it hasn’t been so with this outbreak.

Not even one case has been confirmed to have been contracted through food.

HEP A AND THE OUTBREAK

B

y this point in the year, there should be no more than three cases of hep A across the entire state of Arkansas. Since February 2018, there have been 363. Three people have died.

One has to dig pretty deep to find any comparable numbers. In fact, according to figures provided by the Arkansas Department of Health, confirmed cases of hep A haven’t been this bad since the vaccination was introduced in 1996, when the disease was virtually wiped off the map.

That year, there were 500 cases in Arkansas. By 1998, the number had dropped to 82. With the exception of a brief spike in 2000—144 cases— those numbers never again left the double digits. Confirmed cases even dropped into the single digits for much of the 2010s. Then came 2018, with 256 cases.

Of course, the first question that arises is, where is the hep A coming from?

This strain of hep A seeped into Arkansas from the Missouri Bootheel, which has seen an even more severe outbreak than Arkansas. However, even Missouri hasn’t seen anything like Kentucky: More than 3,000 cases were confirmed there in 2018, with more than 50 deaths. Reports suggest that Kentucky was hit particularly hard because the state was slow to vaccinate its residents, despite warnings beginning in February 2018.

Arkansas has been anything but slow in administering vaccinations.

The moment any hep A exposure was confirmed at a restaurant, a team was dispatched to the business. Press releases went out to media. Pop-up vaccination clinics were immediately opened in the days and weeks that followed (the vaccine is effective until symptoms set in a few weeks after exposure). Even though Arkansas has seen numbers going through the roof compared to years prior, those numbers could have been far more severe had it not been for the response from the Arkansas Department of Health.

From February 2018 to May 2019, ADH hosted 32 days of hep A mass-vaccination clinics throughout northeast Arkansas. During that same time period, they administered some 26,047 vaccinations (not all of which were done through those clinics). But while hep A is often associated with tainted food—owing, in part, because of the disease’s fecal-oral transmission, and news stories like 2016’s multistate outbreak linked to arkansaslife.com

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DISPAT CHE S > F ROM JONE SBORO

frozen strawberries—there’s a different reason why the ADH has been painting the area with such a broad brush, epidemiologically speaking: Those most at risk aren’t customers at restaurants.

Rather, they’re people engaging in high-risk, often stigmatized behaviors—a factor that can make it difficult to get the vaccination to the people who need it most.

“We are balancing the issue of being proactive with the issue of being targeted,” ADH epidemiologist Dr. Dirk Haselow said. “It would be great to say we want to have a clinic for people who are homeless, incarcerated, drug users—come on down, come to our clinic. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work.”

As far as the health department’s outreach in restaurants is concerned, Haselow said that while it might be less efficient than their work in settings with high-risk groups—in jails, prisons, homeless shelters, soup kitchens and so forth—it’s still very important.

“Part of the reason why it’s important is because there have been some studies that show that fast-food workers have a pretty high prevalence of recreational drug use, maybe as high as 25 percent,” he said.

Even though the risk of getting hep A from an infected food worker is low—he made a point of stressing that, again, this outbreak hasn’t been food-related—the health department reaches out anyway “because we know this vaccine is safe and effective and underutilized [in people] from 20 to 60 years of age.”

While there might be some degree of uncertainty with respect to some aspects of the virus—largely because hep A’s incubation period ranges from two weeks to two months, with an average of three to four weeks, making it difficult to pinpoint the virus’s source—the effects of the vaccine are indisputable: It works.

“I’ve seen a few follow up stories, but I think the big takeaway for me is, as an industry, we’re not spreading this disease. We’re not making people sick.”

The health department encourages restaurants and restaurant chains to vaccinate all of their employees. In the northeast corner of Arkansas, most of the business owners are listening. Although vaccinations haven’t been mandated—at $50 per treatment, it could create a major financial strain for small restaurants with higher turnover, health officials said—they did share that it was a discussion being looked into. (State Rep. Jack Ladyman of Jonesboro introduced a bill on March 14 calling for food workers to be vaccinated; however, it failed to make it out of committee before the legislative session was adjourned.)

“Different states have different policies,” said Dr. Mike Cima, chief epidemiologist for the ADH. “At this point, we do not have a regulation.

We do recommend that a restaurant do it. It’s in their best interest to do so.”

But Cima’s tone shifted as we asked him about the trend of many being skeptical of vaccines. Some people, despite overwhelming scientific evidence, suggest that vaccines even cause health ailments. This has created a resistance by some to using vaccines or vaccinating their children. Despite whether one elects to get vaccinated for hep A, Cima said, vaccines are crucial to human survival.

“Vaccines are among the safest and most studied medicines known to man,” Cima said. “They’ve been lauded in medicine and public health as one of the top-10 discoveries in the past 100 years. They’ve done more to expand our human lifespan than anything, other than clean water, and are associated with increasing our human lifespan by over 10 years. So, yeah.”

FEELING THE PAIN

A

t a recent lunch hour at Pizza Inn on Caraway Road in Jonesboro, Greg Clairday, Bob’s son, shifted between working in the kitchen and checking on customers. Even though he said no one in the family has official titles, he might be seen at Pizza Inn locations trimming the grass one day, inspecting kitchens the next and eating with his family at still another. So when the news broke about an exposure at one of his establishments, Greg was as alarmed as anyone.

“When it first came out, I didn’t know anything about it,” he said. “I was concerned, personally for my children, my grandkids—they all eat in the store. I was concerned for my employees; I was really concerned for my customers. We didn’t know anything about it. We met with the health department and said, ‘Do we need to close the store?’ They said ‘No! You wash your hands, and you wear gloves.’ [Those are] the two biggest things in controlling the spread of contagious diseases.”

The efforts have made the food-service industry in northeast Arkansas safer than it has ever been. Nowadays, if you’re a food-service worker, you almost can’t get hired unless you go to the health department and verify that you have your hep A vaccine, Greg said. Despite the absence of a mandate by the ADH—so far—business owners like the Clairdays don’t dare experience a possible exposure again.

But the hep A outbreak came at a steep cost for many businesses, almost all of whom fear doing interviews about the topic because of previous effects of media coverage. For Pizza Inn, those weeks after the news broke were devastating. It took six months before business returned to normal.

“It was traumatic,” Greg said. “It was, yeah. And we have a published office phone number, and we talked to a lot of customers. You could feel that worry, on that end. I’ve seen a few follow up stories, but I think the big takeaway for me is, as an industry, we’re not spreading this disease.

We’re not making people sick.”

Stan Morris is the owner and primary news reporter for NEA Report, a local news outlet based in northeast Arkansas.

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DISPAT CHE S

We meet and we talk, but Charlie is a master at dodging questions and changing lanes. The only thing I get out of him is that Grandpa sold a little moonshine every now and then.

I tell Charlie that wasn’t the story as I understood it. Charlie starts talking about how much my dad loved squirrel hunting. but it could also wreck a family. And when Mom wanted to drive that point home, she threw out a healthy dose of Assembly of God doctrine, along with a few choice examples of relatives (most were distant) or family acquaintances who had drowned their job or their marriage or their liver, or sometimes all three.

I’m not sure why my parents displayed the jug of moonshine on the mantel. Maybe it was for the same reasons I do now, but I’m not sure about those, either. Pride in heritage? A conversation piece? A subtle but constant reminder of the real dangers lurking within the drink? Whatever the reasons, that old bottle was a fixture in our home for as long as I can remember. It’s alternated between sitting on my own fireplace mantel or a bookshelf in the 24 years since Dad died, and I’ve never so much as dipped a finger in it during that time. In fact, years ago, I dripped wax over the cork to keep evaporation to a minimum. The reasons I had not indulged—until now—are complex, seeded in conflicting thoughts about all that the contents of the bottle represent.

A

> F ROM NE W T ON C OUN T Y

LET IT SHINE What happens when your family’s heritage is bottled up? You take a sip words and photos

By Johnny Carrol Sain

52

Summer 2019

I

t looked like an innocent jug of water—clear liquid in a corked nondescript glass bottle. But why would a corked bottle of water be sitting on the mantel? I asked Dad about it.

Dad said the liquid was “shine.”

He chuckled a bit as he looped a finger through the handle and brought it down to my 15-yearold nose. With a slight twist, he pulled the cork. The jug responded with a soft and hollow thumpf. Set free from their confines, ethanol vapors swirled and danced through my nasal passages. The smell had

a bite similar to the rubbing alcohol Mom used to remove ticks from my summer-tanned hide. But there was something else in there, too, a sweetness I couldn’t quite describe. Raised on music from the Grand Ole Opry and Hee Haw, it made me think of that line from Grandpa Jones’ song “Mountain Dew,” about how “the buzzards in the sky get so drunk that they cain’t fly.”

I wanted a taste.

Dad said no, and it’s a good thing Mom wasn’t there, or she would have gone ballistic just hearing me ask. This was the only bottle of alcohol in our home that I was aware of, and the level of shine in that jug never wavered through the years. I think I saw Mom drink one glass of red wine one time. Dad drank a beer or two in my presence on a few occasions.

I don’t recall ever seeing either of my parents even slightly intoxicated.

Alcohol wasn’t a taboo subject in our home; it was a heavy subject. I’d overheard a few “grownups-are-talking” conversations at family gatherings.

A stiff drink might have been a part of who we were in our cultural past,

lthough mom’s Scots-Irish blood runs back to a rogue king of Scotland who went by the nickname of “Black Knight” and married into the throne, and even further back to a general who fought alongside William Wallace, the fame and fortune of our ancestors had dwindled quite a bit before they moved to Ireland, then on to the New World. My dad’s lineage is tougher to decipher, but there’s a good probability that the Sains were of Scots-Irish descent. That shared heritage alone guaranteed that our family had a relationship with whiskey.

Whiskey, or “whisky” in the Scottish spelling—a corruption of the Gaelic “uisce beatha,” meaning “water of life”—is a distinctly Celtic endeavor. The art and science of distilling made its way to Scotland and Ireland sometime between 1100 and 1300 A.D. Though we can thank monks for passing along the tradition, it’s always had a bit of the outlaw mystique attached to it.

The Scots and Irish, in general, have never cottoned much to government authority (that authority was often in the form of an English boot stepping on their necks), and they sure as hell didn’t want to fund an oppressive government with taxes paid on their liquor. According to Heidi Donelon, an Irish-whiskey historian and founder of the Ireland Whiskey Trail, when England began taxing Scottish distilleries in the 17th century, it didn’t take long for illegal stills to pop up all over the rugged highlands. And when the number of licensed distilleries in Ireland declined to just 20 in 1799, there were an estimated 800 illegal stills operating in one county alone.

The love of whiskey, the hatred for taxation and a cultivated cultural disposition to thumb their noses at authority came along with many Celtic people to the U.S. The Scots-Irish, in particular, followed the spine of Appalachia down from Northeastern ports and settled in areas across the South, often with an affinity for the highlands. Mom’s family went a little north into the Missouri Ozarks. Dad’s folks (both sides) crossed the Mississippi River from Tennessee (there’s actually some remnants of a community called “Sainville” in Tennessee) and on into Arkansas, where they again made straight for the hills.

However, in that new setting, which brought with it a new crop, those traits were expressed in a different form.

“Moonshine”—AKA white lightnin’, corn squeezins, wild cat, mountain mule and several other interesting nicknames— is the New World version of outlaw whiskey. The definition of moonshine is untaxed—therefore illegal—unaged corn whiskey, so if you buy your white whiskey legally from a licensed retailer, you’re not drinking moonshine, no matter what the label says.

In Arkansas, the Sains weren’t known for making moonshine, but my paternal grandmother’s family, the Heffleys, had cookers in the bunch. My Grandpa Sain did, however, regularly sell a few jugs of moonshine out of his store (I think my “heirloom” jug came from one of his old suppliers, but I don’t know for certain), or so the story goes. The funny thing about those stories is that I’ve heard them off and on through the years without even asking. But place a recorder and a notepad in my hand, and folks—even family—seal their lips up tighter than bark on a tree.

Take my cousin Charlie Heffley, for example. Charlie was first cousin and best friend to my dad when they were growing up. He’s been my go-to for stories that many of the gentler souls in our family haven’t shared with me. He’s even told me how Grandpa wouldn’t sell “wildcat” to him or Dad, so they would sometimes sneak a nip here and there from jugs Grandpa

thought were hidden. I call Charlie for an interview.

“Hey, Charlie, this is Johnny Jr.” “Well, hey, Johnny Jr. How ya doin’?”

“Fine, just fine. Hey, Charlie, I’d like to interview you for a story I’m working on.”

“Why shore, come on over sometime. How ’bout Friday?”

“Friday would be great. Now, Charlie, I need to tell you that this story is about moonshine and Grandpa doing a little bootlegging.

Are you cool with that?”

Long silence.

“Well, Johnny Jr. …”

We meet and we talk, but Charlie is a master at dodging questions and changing lanes. The only thing I get out of him is that Grandpa sold a little moonshine every now and then. I tell Charlie that wasn’t the story as I understood it. Charlie starts talking about how much my dad loved squirrel hunting.

Neither blood nor water is thicker than moonshine. It’s always been this way.

Even the folks who make unaged corn whiskey legally today will talk only about certain aspects of the craft. Father and son distillers Gary and Jon Taylor have owned and operated White River Distillery in Gassville since 2012.

Both are eager to discuss the nuts and bolts of distilling, along with some history, as long as it doesn’t get too personal.

“Why a distillery? Is it because you’re a craftsman?” I ask.

“Well, yeah,” Gary says. “With the change in the laws about six or seven years ago, everyone was getting this unaged corn whiskey thing going, and we thought we could put out a good product at a fair price.”

Gary’s response to my first question leads me to a pointed follow-up.

“Did you do this before it was legal?” I ask.

“Pardon me?” Gary replies.

“Did you make moonshine before it was legal?”

“No comment.”

This isn’t Gary’s first go-round with a nosy journalist.

“I had Ozark Public Television call me and ask questions for a story,” Gary says, “and they asked arkansaslife.com

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DISPAT CHE S > F ROM NE W T ON C OUN T Y

if I knew any guys still cooking in the woods that they could come down and film. For one of the few times in my life, I was speechless. And then the only words that could come out my mouth were, Are you f****n’ kiddin’ me?”

Yes, there are people still making moonshine in Arkansas, and other states as well. But no one is going to tell you who or where if you have to ask.

A foundation of Scots-Irish culture is to never mess with a man’s means of making a living—legal or not. And lost in the modern romantic notions of moonshining, brought to us by the Duke boys and the Discovery Channel, is the hard fact that moonshining and bootlegging were about survival. Period. Making whiskey from your barley or corn created a product that was easier to store, easier to transport and easier to sell. But no one got rich off of moonshine. There simply weren’t other options available for making money.

Backcountry folks were never wealthy folks, and this truth stretches across the years and across the Atlantic to Ireland and the Scottish borderlands. “Sampling” the product was often a favorite way to dull the harsh realities of that poverty. The parallels between today’s illegal substances and moonshine of years past and the common denominator of poverty-stricken areas are stark.

“Look at the whiskey rebellion,” Gary says. “They wanted to tax the liquor to pay for the Revolutionary War. And this was these guys’ livelihood.

Not everyone can have 100 head of cattle or 80 acres of tobacco.”

Gary’s family roots were watered with illicit alcohol just like mine.

“Rumor has it that my parents and my wife’s parents were making liquor and selling it during prohibition,” Gary says. “One was in the Black Hand, the forerunner of the Mafia. And one was Scots-Irish.” It’s worth noting that Gary gives the same weight to organized crime and Scots-Irish ethnicity when it comes to illegal alcohol. The association is just that strong.

After the 21st Amendment became law and did away with the 18th

“Could we take these things out into the woods and do it? You bet.

But I don’t think prohibition is something we’ll have to worry about again.”

Mount Magazine

@churchill.cj ever This place n gets old.

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Summer 2019

Amendment (prohibition), unaged corn whiskey remained illegal for reasons that are still unclear. Alcohol-law experts believe it was a combination of the federal government trying to keep this specific type of alcohol tamped down because of its long association with illicit activity, combined with industry lobbyists pushing for regulations to keep competition off the market.

In contrast, the reasons behind the legalization of unaged corn whiskey are crystal clear: It was a response to the 2008 recession.

And—in perhaps the ultimate twist of irony—the main impetus behind it was to keep tax revenue rolling into government coffers during tough times. Tennessee was the first state on board in 2010, but was quickly followed by other Southern states.

With white whiskey out of the shadows and commanding more than a cult following, Gary is concentrating on steering his business into manageable growth while clinging tightly to the old ways. “Those old cookers were pretty smart,” Gary says. “You’ve got to have a combination of physics, chemistry, engineering and microbiology. And they didn’t have the equipment we have now.

They didn’t have hydrometers to check the specific gravity of the mash. They tasted it. It was an art.

And it was passed down through the generations. I’ve heard of yeast strains stretching back for a hundred years. How do you keep this going and keep getting away with it?”

For Gary and Jon, it all starts with clean water, courtesy of a 500-foot limestone-rimmed well near the distillery. And then it’s ingredients brought together with some old-fashioned methods.

“I think it’s an important part of the history of this country that somebody has to do things in the traditional way,” Gary says. “I think you need to do it the way we do it—by hand. Mix the stuff yourself.

We’re even looking at coming up with our own local yeast strain.”

White River Distillery does use all-electric equipment to “cook” with. “It’s safer than an open flame,” Jon says. “You can regulate

the heat better, and it gives you a more uniform product.”

But true to the scofflaw spirit of white whiskey, Gary says they could relocate to the shaded hollows and make moonshine if need be. “Could we take these things out into the woods and do it?” Gary says. “You bet. But I don’t think prohibition is something we’ll have to worry about again.”

Just before we say goodbye, I try to trip Gary with a loaded question. “Do you miss the outlaw mystique before 2012?” I ask. I don’t know if I’ve penetrated Gary’s circle of trust or if he just doesn’t care, but he answers with sincerity.

“Yeah, kind of,” Gary says. “It’s a distinctly American thing, like fudging on your taxes. How much can you get away with?”

O

utside of an indulgent stretch during my early 20s and a beer now and then, I’ve never been a drinker.

Despite the genetics, some predisposed personality quirks and a few rough times, Mom’s words and Dad’s example carried me through. But a few years ago, when I learned more about my heritage and, in particular, the ScotsIrish component, I began an intriguing cultural journey through various types of whiskey. I’ve not tried them all by a long shot (kind of a pun if you stretch really hard), mostly bourbons and Tennessee whiskeys. And I’ve been lucky to sample better than half a dozen types of Scotch.

The bourbons and Tennessee whiskeys taste like corn and white oak with hints of sugar maple in some of the sweeter creations. Of course, there is more complexity, nuanced differences, variations in water and grain, along with distilling practices that make me appreciate one over another—some are delicious, and some suck—but this is their essence in general. They taste a little like the backwoods, but tamed. They’re domesticated.

The Scotches I’ve tried so far are vastly different. They taste ancestral, somewhat austere, like early forms of something not yet determined, but somehow more refined than what they gave rise to in the New World through distilled anagenesis.

There are no generalities with Scotch. The flavors are all over the board—light, heavy, tender, brawling—I’ve not found a consistency at all. Again, it’s due to the variables and regional peculiarities. Lagavulin is my favorite. It’s primordial. It’s an ancient seashore with North Atlantic waves pounding on stones formed before time began, cold salt spray, peat and a driftwood blaze. It tastes like the origin. And at $100 a bottle, it’s something I’ll be sipping slowly and only for the most celebratory of reasons. In another twist of irony, it’s a drink that most of my ancestors could never afford and represents the antithesis—wealth, refinement, sophistication—of moonshine.

I ponder all of this as morning sun pours through our living-room windows and through Dad’s jug of shine. The liquid is clear as spring water. I turn the bottle, and the moonshine plays with the light, bending, compressing, refracting.

I always imagined that one day I’d take a pull from the jug.

Maybe it would be on Dad’s birthday or maybe Grandpa’s birthday. Maybe some other momentous occasion. Or maybe, if I were to be blessed with the luxury of this option, I might take a few snorts on my death bed. That’d be a helluva way to go out.

Today is just a Monday in May. I’m in apparent good health with a full day of writing, editing and emails, and maybe some fishing this afternoon. But it sure seems like a arkansaslife.com

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good day for a swig or two.

Peeling layers of wax with my fingers, I get to the cork, only to discover that it’s become the consistency of cornbread. So I open a blade on my Old Timer pocketknife and gently poke it into the cork, hoping to pry it loose with minimal crumbling. But the cork is too far gone, and I am entirely too impatient. Soon the bottle opening is clear with about half the cork sitting on the kitchen counter and the other half floating in what’s rumored to be some of Newton County’s finest. It’s the whiskey’s first breath of air in a quarter century.

I grab a Mason jar from the cabinet (what else could I use?) and fashion a crude sieve from an old T-shirt. I pour, and that wonderful sweetness fills my nostrils. I remember that smell, but now other notes that I’ve come to recognize with age, knowledge and a wiser palate join the ethanol. The Mason jar is nearly full as the jug empties.

Damn … it smells good.

I’m leery, though. If the moonshine is straight from some unregulated Ozarkian still, there could be dangers lurking. Moonshine cookers were 56

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I always imagined that one day I’d take a pull from the jug. Maybe it would be on Dad’s birthday or maybe Grandpa’s birthday. Maybe some other momentous occasion. …

Today is just a Monday in May.

resourceful by necessity, like all poor folks. If you’ve ever wondered why many rural homes have stacks of junk in the backyard or sheds overflowing with the material detritus of stuff kept long past what you’d consider its useful life, it’s because those people have been repurposing before repurposing was cool. You didn’t throw anything away because you never knew when you’d need some doodad that you couldn’t find at the store and couldn’t afford if you did. So you fashion what you need out of something else. This shine could have dripped out of an old automobile radiator, complete with residual— and extremely toxic—antifreeze. It could be laced with lead. Who knows what all was used to make this whiskey and what’s in it?

I don’t. But I do know a rough backwoods method of determination. You simply take a spoonful of shine and light it. A blue flame means it’s good to go and no more dangerous to your innards than any other distilled alcohol. If the flame burns red or yellow, throw it out. I fish the Bic lighter out of one of our junk drawers (keeping a few junk drawers is, after all, part of my heritage), pour a smidgen of Dad’s shine into a teaspoon and light it. A glowing ball of cobalt dances on the spoon.

I grin. And then I lift the jar to my lips and take a sip.

It tastes even better than it smells.

I roll it around in my mouth, letting every taste bud have a sample. I close my eyes and note the sweetness of golden summer corn and limestone-filtered spring water. I hear fiddles on the front porch, accompanied by whip-poorwills and the clink of Mason jars. I see people who faced true tyrannical governments, who endured long weeks on the Atlantic, perilous treks across the Appalachia Mountains, across the Mississippi River and finally into the Ozark hills. I see poor mountain folk whose pride could never be bought, who lived hand to mouth in ways I can never imagine. I see a man who opened a small store in one of the poorest counties of our state, finding innovative ways to make a dollar when dollars were hard to come by. I see a teenage boy, who looks an awful lot like me, and his cousin alternating between stolen swigs and keeping a watchful eye for grownups.

The shine tastes like where I come from in every sense of the phrase.

I swallow, and the smoothness is surprising.

A little burn, just enough spice to give it a kick. Then a comforting warmth settles in my belly.

Arkansas native Johnny Carrol Sain writes about nature, outdoor recreation and rural culture for several regional and national publications.

His glass of choice for sipping any whiskey is a Mason jar. arkansaslife.com

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The casino has more than 1,800 slot machines that cover the latest games and classic machines.

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new-and-improved Seven Ponies Buffet. The buffet offers a variety of classic fare and daily themes, such as Wednesday’s Fiesta Buffet, featuring beef and chicken fajitas made to order; Thursday’s Lobster Buffet, with lobster tails and lobster ravioli; or Sunday’s Sterling Brunch Buffet, with omelet and waffle stations, and carved-to-order New York strip loin and glazed ham.

Choctaw Casino’s live music venue, Gilley’s, has an exciting lineup of entertainment for July.

Country recording artist John Michael Montgomery will perform on July 13. Montgomery is known for his hit songs “I Swear” and “I Love the Way You Love Me.” He has a rich baritone voice and has influenced singers such as Jessica Simpson.

Other acts for July include Larry B and the Cradle Rockers, July 5; Mike Ryan, July 6; Clint Scholz, July 12 and 19; and Asleep at the Wheel, July 20. Concerts at Gilley’s are free to guests to listen to while enjoying a wide selection of beer or cocktails at the fullservice bar. Guests must be 21 or older to attend.

These free live-music events start at 9 p.m., both Friday and Saturday.

SPACIOUS SUITES LOCATED NEAR ALL THE ACTION

F O R M O R E I N F O R M AT I O N , V I S I T W W W. C H O C TAW C A S I N O S . C O M / C H O C TAW - P O C O L A

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MAIN COURSE:

SIDE DISH:

SIDE DISH:

N O PASSIN G FLIGHT

WE TOOK A DIVE INTO

FIVE ARKANSAS CHEFS ON THE

O F FA N C Y, O R T H E S E A R C H

SOME OLD COOKBOOKS—

BEST FRIED CHICKEN—OUTSIDE

FOR THE BEST BIRD

AND STRUCK FRIED GOLD

OF THEIR MOTHERS’ KITCHENS

B Y J O R D A N P. H I C K E Y | P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y A R S H I A K H A N

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THE BIRD

explanation of the ice machine’s quirks. Everything would speak to, and of, and about home.

But to be here for the first time, looking in vain for these memories—which is, after all, what we’re looking for—in the steaming metal pans of the diner’s lunch buffet, there’s just the feeling of being outside a place so many have already connected with, from the pair of older gentlemen posted up in the back, to the half dozen electric co-op workers, all in dirty boots and work shirts, sunglasses on the visors of their caps.

But still, there’s potential. We take plates from the stack. We fill them with fried chicken. ( Just above the pan of chicken, a small rectangular sign reads, “Lord, help my words to be tender … for tomorrow I may have to eat them.”) We slide into a booth, raise a drumstick over the table and say, “Cheers.”

It ’s said that everything tastes like chicken.

But if chicken— specifically, fried chicken—is done right, there’s really nothing like it.

The best fried chicken is one of hearsay, rumor, little more than a poultry-fied ghost 99.9 percent of the time. On the surface, little separates one bird from another, one blue plate from another, one country kitchen from another. So, you chase rumors. You train your hopes on the often unfounded prospect of something special hiding in plain sight. You secret away the snippet details of this dive or that rural outpost in the safe corners of memory for later retrieval. And then, sometimes, you give it a go.

On a Friday morning in June, we chase a tip—not so much a rumor as a recommendation, the personal favorite of a friend whose opinions we trust in these matters—an hour’s drive east of Little Rock. It’s the sort of place you grow up with, that grows on 62

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you, where your name is known, that never changes.

With the right experience, there would be a lot to connect with here. The smell of the grass in the adjacent field would be familiar, the wave and the green and the lilt of it, knowing it had once seemed so tall until you were taller, and then it was neck, then waist, then knee height. The high school mascot—a bison silhouetted on bumper stickers on the backs of trucks in the gravel parking lot— would summon memories of first loves, homecomings, rivalries, trig, pimples, puberty, pep rallies, the smell of pencil shavings, perfume.

There’s the knowing, too, that if you were from here, you’d lean your elbows against the counter for a while, swapping gossip with the owners, before filling a plate.

There would be no need for an

*

PICTURED: MARIE’S KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN. IT’S JUST AS DELICIOUS AS IT LOOKS

I’VE ALREADY EATEN the best fried chicken. I know it well. I know exactly how the skin flakes at the touch and peels off in brittle strips. I know exactly the way it feels in my hand and the sheen of the oil it leaves there. I know the hard malingering smell of the smoke from the still-hot cast-iron pan. I know the hum of the refrigerator, the ringing of the phone with solicitors on the other end of the line, calling at the wrong time. I know what it is like to hunch over the plate, chest to the table’s lip, talking very little because it is fried-chicken night, and any spoken words would mean losing out on a bite.

For me, the best fried chicken is one that I don’t expect will ever change. For me, it will always be served in that poorly designed home in North Little Rock, a veritable shadow box with its westfacing facade all but blacked out, and it will always be after long days at work in a city still very new to me. I didn’t know it then, but there were only a few years left before

there would be no more dinners, when there would be no more castiron skillets on the stove, and there never would be again.

Thinking back on those dinners, those nights that my great aunt and uncle opened their home to me, I’m left with the question, Why does the best fried chicken taste so good? For the simple reason that the best catfish tastes so good, that the best hush puppies taste so good, that the best sweet tea tastes so good, that the best anything tastes so good—for the simple reason that the best food does more than satisfy or ease or quench or fill. It evokes a sense of place. And for many of us, that place is home or something like it.

*

A FEW DAYS LATER, my wife and I decide to try a very different kind of fried chicken. On the back of a spare piece of paper— the draft of a story I’m supposed to be editing—I write that this is no ordinary fried chicken. It’s got a brightness, a lightness, Chinese five-spice in the batter, pickled ginger and daikon radish in the pickles. You finish and don’t feel fried food’s sluggishness weighing down your eyelids, its tell-tale heaviness, the feeling of having ingested a canvas bag of river rocks.

What I take away from that afternoon’s meal—the reason why, in part, I suspect it tastes so good—is everything that isn’t the chicken, that happens off the table. In the years that follow, this memory won’t be just of chicken; it’ll be my leg against hers, the joy of an unplanned lunch date, her saying, “I love this more with you.”

Someday, I’m sure, it’ll be the best, too.

LOOKING TO START A TRADITION OF YOUR OWN? PLUCK A RECIPE FROM PAGE 65 arkansaslife.com

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THE BIRD

1. M A R I E ’ S K E N T U C K Y FRIED CHICKEN

FROM LITTLE ROCK COOKS (1972), PUBLISHED BY JUNIOR LEAGUE OF LITTLE ROCK (JLLR.ORG) serves four

1 fryer, cut up, 2 1/2 or 3 pounds 3 cups water 1 tablespoon salt 2 teaspoons fines herbes [Editor’s note: We used a packet of poultry seasoning] 2 teaspoons onion powder 2 envelopes instant chicken broth 2 teaspoons seasoned salt 1/4 tablespoon pepper 1 cup flour Salad oil for frying [Editor’s note: Light vegetable oil] Chicken broth (see below) Chicken gravy (see below)

Cover cut-up chicken in salt water in a medium-size bowl, and chill for 1 hour.

Make a fine powder of fines herbes, onion powder, seasoned salt, instant chicken broth and pepper with an electric blender or mortar and pestle. Combine the herbs with flour in a plastic bag. Remove the chicken from water one piece at a time and shake in the flour mixture while still wet (save the salt water for later use). Coat thickly with flour.

Pour enough salad oil into the skillet to make 1 inch deep, and heat to 375 degrees. Fry the chicken pieces 5 minutes on each side.

Turn with a slotted spoon. Drain on paper towels. Remove the oil from the skillet (don’t wash), and add 1 cup chicken broth. Return the chicken to the skillet. Cover and cook 20 minutes. Keep warm in the oven while making the gravy.

CHICKEN BROTH: Place the salted water that the chicken had soaked in into a pan. Add the chicken giblets, 2 onion slices and several celery tops. Cover and simmer 30 minutes.

Makes about 3 cups.

CHICKEN GRAVY: Strain the remaining 2

cups of chicken broth, and add to the skillet in which the chicken was cooked. Heat to boiling while stirring and scraping baked-on juices from the side and bottom of the pan.

Make a paste of 4 tablespoons flour and 1/2 cup cold water in a small cup. Stir into the boiling liquid. Continue stirring for 1 minute.

Salt and pepper to taste. Add chopped giblets, if desired, and simmer 2 minutes longer.

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2. S AV O R Y C H I C K E N FROM THE FOOD OF OUR PEOPLE (1994), PUBLISHED BY A N N U N C I AT I O N G R E E K O R T H O D O X CHURCH (ORTHODOXCHURCH.COM) serves four

3 pounds chicken, cut into pieces 3/4 cup flour or crushed bread crumbs 2 1/2 teaspoons salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1/8 teaspoon allspice 1/8 teaspoon cinnamon 1/3 cup butter or margarine 2 tablespoons water

Wash the chicken and pat dry with paper towels. Combine the flour, salt, pepper, allspice and cinnamon in a bowl. Dredge the chicken pieces in the flour mixture until evenly coated. Heat the butter in a large skillet. Brown the chicken on both sides for 15 minutes. Reduce the heat, and sprinkle with water. Cover and simmer over low heat for 30 to 40 minutes, or until tender. To crisp the chicken, uncover for the last 10 minutes, turning the chicken frequently.

IN WHICH SOME OF OUR F AV E C H E F S D I S H O N T H E I R F AV E ( R E S TA U R A N T- M A D E ) FRIED CHICKEN

SCOTT RAINS, TABLE 28

FRANKE’S CAFETERIA, MULTIPLE LOCATIONS

* BEN BRAINARD, YELLOW ROCKET CONCEPTS

3. C H I C K E N B A R B A R A R E C I P E B Y M R S . B A N K S D AW S O N FROM RECIPES FOR THE KING (1963) 12 chicken parts, (breasts, drumsticks and thighs) 1 large onion, chopped 2 stalks celery with leaves, chopped 1 teaspoon rosemary needles 1/2 cup water

(A more elegant dish may be prepared by using only the breasts from six birds.) In a large skillet, combine the onion, celery, rosemary and water. Place the chicken parts over the mixture, cover tightly, and cook very slowly for 30 minutes or until the chicken is almost done. Take the chicken from the skillet, remove the skins, and allow to cool.

Dip the cooled chicken in buttermilk waffle batter, and fry very quickly (at 375 degrees) in deep fat until golden brown. Remove from the fat, and drain on absorbent paper.

SOUTH ON MAIN IN LITTLE ROCK

* TITUS HOLLY, THE PANTRY CREST

CHICK-A-DILLY IN EL DORADO

* AMANDA IVY, LOW IVY CATERING AND FOOD TRUCK

GUS’S WORLD FAMOUS FRIED CHICKEN, MULTIPLE LOCATIONS

* VON NGUYEN, SAIWOK

“ANY TIME CHEF MICHAEL ROBERTSHAW DOES A FRIED CHICKEN POP-UP”

CONTINUED ON PAGE 124 arkansaslife.com

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FIRST DRAFT:

SECOND ROUND:

ARKANSAS BEER ENTERS

C L E A R YO U R S C H E D U L E ,

THE BARREL AGE AT HAWK MOTH

TA K E A S E AT A N D E N J OY O U R

BREWING IN ROGERS

IDEAL ARKANSAS SIX -PAC K

BY WYNDHAM WYETH | PHOTOGRAPHY BY ARSHIA KHAN

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THE BEER

Hawk Moth Brewing in Rogers is small and modern.

Floor-to-ceiling windows allow taproom visitors to look in on the single room where owner and head brewer Bradley Riggs crafts Hawk Moth’s elixirs. It’s all white walls and stainless-steel tanks. Valves and hoses.

Gauges and drains. But there’s one piece of equipment that stands out among the sterility of the rest of the room. Standing at around 8 feet tall just inside the entrance to the space, there’s what appears to be a giant wooden barrel up on one end, and essentially, that’s exactly what it is.

It’s called a foeder (pronounced food-er), and it’s Bradley’s pride and joy. It’s also the only one in use in Northwest Arkansas and one of two in the whole state—the other residing at Lost Forty Brewing in Little Rock.

Though historically intended for cellaring wine, aging their brews in the foeder allows Hawk Moth to impart the American white oak flavor from the foeder’s wooden planks and expose the beer to the oxygen outside the barrel through pores in the wood. This is no different from aging beer in a whiskey or wine barrel, except in the case of the foeder, you’re trading away those spirit and wine notes for a neutral oak flavor. The larger scale of the foeder also allows the beer to mature at a slower pace, letting it develop evenly with more complex flavors. This process is just one of the many ways Bradley and his brewery are taking Arkansas craft beer in a new and exciting direction by, interestingly, reaching into the past for inspiration.

Bradley places a glass beneath a spout sticking out of the towering cask and turns the valve. A dark, smooth liquid fills the glass—an aged Russian imperial stout. It’s slightly boozy, slightly dry, with deep roasty notes of oak. In short, it’s delicious.

*

IN ITS MOST BASIC FORM, beer consists of only four ingredients: a cereal grain, yeast, hops and water. It’s a relatively simple beverage at its core, but the traditions behind its production stretch back millennia—and that’s no hyperbole. There are even laws regarding 70

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the regulation and distribution of the stuff outlined in the Code of Hammurabi, one of humanity’s oldest written texts. Plainly speaking, beer is old. Like, really old. Like, 13,000-plus years old.

Some Native American tribes were brewing beer from corn before the Europeans arrived in the New World with a cache of their own, and by 1612, the newcomers had established America’s first brewery.

But when it comes to beer production—legal beer production, that is—and its relationship with The Natural State, well, that’s a much more recent development.

Though you can trace the modern history of our local beer scene to the mid-’90s, in the past 10 years or so, the industry has grown so much that craft-beer breweries in Arkansas are verging on ubiquity.

It’s a good time to be a beer drinker, but as it’s become easier for Arkansans to get their hands on delicious, locally crafted brews, the desire for new and interesting beer styles and flavor profiles has risen. And that’s a void Hawk Moth Brewing and its owner is determined to fill.

It’s been a slow process to get to this point, though, Bradley tells me as we chat over a couple of his Woodford Double Black IPAs—a blend of the foeder stout and a Woodford Bourbon-barrelaged IPA. The taproom is empty save for a couple of employees at the moment, but this evening, the place will be playing host to members of the NWA Ladies Beer Club. Bradley goes on to explain that he actually set out

MOST OF HAWK MOTH’S BEERS ARE BARREL-AGED IN SOME CAPACITY. THIS FRENCH OAK CASK, CRAFTED FOR THE BREWERY IN ITALY, IS CURRENTLY AGING A SOUR BLONDE ALE.

I N W H I C H W E TA P SOME OF OUR TRUSTY BEER GURUS TO DESIGN A DREAM A R K A N S A S S I X - PA C K

BECCA BONA, PUBLISHER OF BREWED IN ARKANSAS

LOST 40 BREWING’S BARE BONES PILSNER (ORIGINAL RECIPE)

*

STEVE SCHULER, SENIOR WRITER AT ROCK CITY EATS

REBEL KETTLE BREWING CO.’S SUMMER JAM RASPBERRY SOUR

*

SCOTT PARTON, CO-HOST OF TAP TIME ON 103.7 THE BUZZ

FOSSIL COVE BREWING CO.’S THE WHIZZLE WHITE IPA

*

JILL LINDER, VICE PRESIDENT OF CENTRAL ARKANSAS FERMENTERS

LOST 40 BREWING’S TRASH PANDA IPA

*

JOHN THE BEER SNOB

GRAVITY BREWWORKS’ ROCK-A-BILLY IMPERIAL RED

*

BRIAN SORENSEN, AUTHOR OF ARKANSAS BEER: AN INTOXICATING HISTORY

OZARK BEER COMPANY’S AMERICAN PALE ALE

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THE BEER to open the brewery about four years ago, but the timing wasn’t quite right. While the craft-beer scene in the state had been steadily growing since the early 2000s, breweries weren’t legal in Rogers until Benton County went wet in 2012. But before there would be a place for Hawk Moth’s more off-the-wall creations to flourish, there needed to be a foundation of local brews that were both accessible—from a flavor-profile perspective—and available—as far as volume was concerned.

“We knew that the market needed something like an APA … for people to get into craft beer,” Bradley says, referring to fellow Rogers brewery Ozark Beer Co.’s popular American Pale Ale. “It’s a gateway beer that you can find around town on 100 taps, and we knew the market needed that. But we also felt the market—maybe without even knowing it—wanted the imperial stouts, the old ales, the sour ales.”

While sours, barrel-aged brews and the like aren’t unheard of in Arkansas—Little Rock’s Rebel Kettle Brewing, in particular, tends to feature an impressive lineup of sours—the Old World style of beers that Hawk Moth focuses on

* “A DARK, SMOOTH LIQUID FILLS THE GLASS—AN AGED RUSSIAN IMPERIAL S T O U T. I T ’ S S L I G H T L Y B O O Z Y, S L I G H T L Y D R Y, W I T H D E E P ROASTY NOTES OF O A K . I N S H O R T, I T ’ S DELICIOUS.”

*

are a bit harder to come by. And unlike most other breweries in Arkansas, those styles make up more than 50 percent of Hawk Moth’s volume.

“When you think of European beer, you think of German Hefes, and you think of Belgian Abbey-style beers,” Bradley says. “Well, the forgotten Old World beer is that really dry French farmhouse-style beer. And within French farmhouse style can be many different sub-styles. We like bonedry beer that almost mimics a Champagne or something oftentimes in the way it feels on the palate and the way the high carbonation plays off of that as well. And that’s easily what half the beers that we’re doing are, and that’s not common.”

The first beer that Hawk Moth produced, for example, was a Bière de Garde. “No one knows what that is, right?” Bradley says. “Our take on what a Bière de Garde is is essentially a French-style amber ale.” Their house beer, The Interurban, is a style of beer called a grisette, which Bradley describes as “a really delicate French wheat beer” that’s a little hoppier than a traditional American wheat.

Bradley said Hawk Moth’s willingness to take on some of the more difficult or experimental styles is one of its most valuable strengths. “We’re just willing to swing for the fences,” he says.

They’re able to be successful at this, in part, as a result of the small-batch nature of the business. Currently producing around 300 barrels a year, they barely qualify as a microbrewery, which is classified by a maximum output of 15,000 barrels annually. But despite sitting at the lower end of volume scale, Bradley’s passion for small-batch brewing has resulted in Hawk Moth putting out an impressive 42 different beers in just a little over an eight-month period.

“It’s not another production brewery,” Bradley explains. “We’re not competing with Ozark or New Province or any of that. We’re just complementing. They’re pushing out large numbers and volume, and we’re doing, Hey, how small of a batch can we make? There’s plenty of room for all of us as we do our different concepts within a 3-mile radius.

So even though we’re appealing to a smaller percentage—that’s why our volume is smaller—we get to have a little more fun, maybe, and we’ve been rewarded by the market. I think the market was even more ready than I even thought.”

WHEN IT COMES TO EXPERIMENTATION? “IT’S WHAT FUELS ME,” BRADLEY SAYS. “AT THE END OF THE DAY, IF I GET BORED DOING THIS, THAT’S MY FAULT.” 72

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H I C K E Y

Y E L S R U

P .

H M I

J O R D A N

T Y

B Y

B Y H P A R G O T O H

W O R D S

Finding the angle of repose in the Delta’s Muskogee houses

P

THE HOUSE THAT Cotton BUILT

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A si n gle cotton seed

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looks like a furry Rice Krispie and weighs about the same. Massaged between two fingers, it feels like a tiny nubbin of yarn, but if you take a handful and let them fall back on the pile, they clack like glass beads.

They crackle underfoot. Cotton dust rises if you walk heavily or stamp a foot on the ground.

Cotton lint hangs in the air, like the slowest-falling snowflakes in the world.

And of course, there’s the elephant in the room: a pile of cottonseed, nearly 75 feet high.

A fixture of Southern landscape, the cavernous, football-fieldsized structure in which we’re standing—better known as a Muskogee house—is built around the shape cotton seeds make when they fall from overhead. As one seed becomes two, and two become hundreds and thousands and millions, the shape they make is this. It’s like watching the sand in an hourglass—if the bottom half weighed 26,000 tons.

In places where a leak’s sprung from the pipes above, you can see scale mounds of cotton seeds— the same conical shape rendered infinitesimally miniature. They store the seeds here; they take them out. Often, there’s activity.

But not today.

Today, in Brinkley, there is a slowness, and there is a stillness— in part because there’s nothing coming in or out. Flooding along the Arkansas River has inundated the rail yard in Pine Bluff, and at least nine boxcars, black tarps stretched tight and bulging at the tops, wait along the company’s spur of rail line. In part, too, because cotton isn’t what it used to be, and as a consequence, neither are its byproducts. Four or five times in the past few years, says Ricky Joshlin, who’s worked at this Muskogee house since it opened in 2000, they’ve shopped out the space and stored rice.

But no matter the stillness, and no matter the slowness, there are signs that something big happens here—even if it isn’t today.

Seventy-five feet above the ground, the rafters are draped with tattered curtains of cotton lint, something resembling spray-on insulation or dehydrated ectoplasm. Outside, where the sun is bright and the air is fresh and the wind is banging against the metal doors, a line of nine shipping containers with tightly bound bulging black tarps wait for the flood waters some 70-odd miles to the southwest to recede.

It’s not difficult to see why Tim Hursley, an internationally known architecture photographer who’s worked for everyone from Frank Gehry to Moshe Safdie, is drawn

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BLUFF

WILSON

76:

PINE

78:

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to such spaces. Because in this place made by falling seeds, something so natural and unnatural, there’s art or something like it.

A MUSKOGEE HOUSE that’s active doesn’t have the same stillness to it. As such, it’s much more difficult to capture one deep in the throes of cottonseed production. There is much less time to consider it at length, no time to think of it in terms of sculpture or cathedrals. In these moments, we’re forced to embrace the bigness, the hugeness of the agricultural complex, of all these little things piled into big things and the people who are paid to move the seed and earn their livelihoods by it. In Wilson, a hundred miles northeast of Brinkley, photographs do not receive priority on a busy day.

For most of the afternoon, Tim and I have been looking through the doors of the Muskogee houses. On a few occasions, he sets up his tripod, but within seconds we hear the telltale beeping of a skid loader reversing and we look down to see that we are standing in its hexagon-printed tracks. But it’s OK, though. That house, and most of the houses, are all about the same. Their pyramids of cottonseed are still intact, they haven’t been picked at yet. The last one, though, is different. It’d been full when he was here before, Tim says, but not today. That’s where most of the men are working. That’s the shot he wants.

“Hey, Bo!” Tim yells to a man in a shapeless blue gingham shirt that billows around him mostly untucked. “Can we snag one here?”

“Yeah, real quick,” Bo says, immediately turning his attention back to a train car filled with cottonseed, the long arm of a backhoe smoothing the jutting vertebral humps of the off-white ridge, the rough equivalent of some 80 bales worth (white lettering on the car’s red-iron side reads “7,100 cubic feet”). Though it seems a huge amount, it’s hardly anything when you consider this one business—which operates both a cotton gin and a handful of Muskogee houses—processed 184,000 bales of cotton this past year and expects 200,000 next year. Or that 50 million tons of cottonseed are produced annually, according to the International Cotton Advisory Committee, for use in everything from salad dressing to livestock feed.

After getting the go-ahead from Bo, we walk over to the house and pass through a doorway blackened with flies. It’s dark inside. Your eyes adjust to it. And this? This is what he’s been looking for. This is the gold mine, the sculpture, the stone carted off and the statue revealed.

“This is a moment, right?” Tim says, his voice carrying like it wants to be an echo, but it’s swallowed by the seed. “This isn’t going to be this way tomorrow. This isn’t going to be this way when [Bo] comes back.”

For a few minutes, there’s silence inside as Tim composes the frame.

But it’s not quiet. Outside, you can hear the skid loader running and rerunning its course, the sound of Bo yelling over the engine of the backhoe.

I find myself wondering what they must be thinking, if it’s odd to see two people so captivated by something they see every day.

“If you look at ’em, they’re almost like portraits,” he says a few moments before we see the lights of the backhoe illuminate the entrance, forcing us to duck through the door again. “And they’re fleeting, really.”

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Candice Kelso Farm Bureau Insurance

Kenzie Lowegard Arvest Bank

Jill Childers The Charlotte John Co.

Casey Jones The Janet Jones Co.

Whitney Owens State Farm

Stefanie Lyles Bank of England Mortgage

Shawn Clark The Janet Jones Co.

Tammy Justice Century 21

Joe Pruett AAA Insurance

Katherine Lyons First Arkansas Bank & Trust

Joshua Cole Venture Realty Group

Jerry Pryor Cabot Insurance Group

Mary Grace McCullar Iberia Bank

Jenn Cook The Charlotte John Co.

Coy Roberts Farm Bureau Insurance

GG Zimmerman Millard Benchmark

Mindy Cox Coldwell Banker Harris McHaney & Faucette

Pryor Robertson Farmers Insurance

Marilee Moreland Security Bank Mortgage

Jay Snider Shelter Insurance

Jacob Rice Bank of Little Rock Mortgage

Donna Dailey The Janet Jones Co.

Ed Bennett Regions Insurance

Matt Sullivan Natural State Insurance Group

Kathy Rice Gateway Mortgage Group

Laura Davis RE/MAX Elite

Keith Brooks State Farm

Monica Treat Treat Insurance Agency

Matthew Brown Farmers Insurance

Jay Van Dover Shelter Insurance

David Shoptaw Arch Mortgage Insurance

Reagan Brown Shelter Insurance

Richard Yager Shelter Insurance

Brittany Snyman Regions Bank

Elliott Carr Arkansas Insurance Advisors

MORTGAGE AGENTS Jake Arey Eagle Bank

Terry Studdard Eagle Bank

INSURANCE AGENTS Beth Allison McGhee Insurance Agency Michael Balliette Farmers Insurance

Parker Clay Allstate Mike Clevenger Farmers Insurance Tony Contorno Arkansas Insurance Advisors

gives accolades to the agents who received the most nominations to be recognized for the work they do in their respective fields.

Keith Carlson Premier Nationwide Lending

Brock Whisenhunt Jr. Simmons Bank Karolyn Ziemer Arvest Bank

Baker Cunningham Bank of Little Rock Mortgage Olivia Davis Arvest Bank

Todd Armstrong iRealty

Colton Duty Shelter Insurance

Brent Dugas First Financial Bank

Andrea G. Bakewell Coldwell Banker RPM Group

Kyle Duty Shelter Insurance

Stephen Griffin Iberia Bank

Megan Billingsley Crye-Leike Real Estate Services

Mike Eberle Nationwide

Karma Herzfeld Motto Mortgage

Farah Ervin American National

Shannon Howland Arvest Bank

Kelly Gleason Gleason Insurance LLC

Allan Huddleston Bank of Little Rock Mortgage

Brad Hankins State Farm

John Kerr Bank of England Mortgage

Greg Hatcher The Hatcher Agency

Roger Lenderman Gateway Mortgage Group

Bruce James State Farm

Shane Lester Wonder State Mortgage

Jonathan Kazemi New York Life

Matthew Lewis Regions Mortgage

Jason Dickinson Dickinson Insurance & Financial Services

insurance and real estate agents through an online submission. This list

Rod Beckham First Financial Bank

Josh Wagner Regions Mortgage

REAL ESTATE AGENTS Jennifer Adkins iRealty

Kaylee Creed Dickinson Insurance & Financial Services

Arkansas Life asked its readers to share their favorite mortgage,

Tiffany Barger Regions Mortgage

Phyllis Rogers Reliant Bank

Melissa Bond United Real Estate/Central Arkansas Kim Brown Crye-Leike Real Estate Services Amy Glover Bryant Coldwell Banker RPM Group Bob Bushmiaer The Janet Jones Co. Jay Calhoun Aspire Realty Group JoJo Carter Engel & Völkers (Formerly Pulaski Heights Realty)

Gaye Croom River Valley Realty

Evelyn Dean RE/MAX Elite

Kristen McCready Keller Williams Realty Sheryl McKelvey The Charlotte John Co. Veronica McKnight Apartment Hunters & Arkansas Suites Staci Medlock RE/MAX Elite Katherine Melhorn The Janet Jones Co. Tiffany O’Dwyer Modern Realty Group Margaret Payne The Janet Jones Co.

Ray Ellen Pixel Properties Realty

Nate Perry The Property Group

April Findlay The Charlotte John Co.

Allison Pickell Coldwell Banker RPM Group

Kathy Fortner Keller Williams Realty

Robert Richardson Crye-Leike Real Estate Services

Wendell Gibson Arkansas Homes & Land Realty

Barb Roberts Desselle Real Estate

Jamie Grantham Coldwell Banker RPM Group

Matty Ross The Charlotte John Co.

Conley Golden The Janet Jones Co. Brandy Harp Jon Underhill Real Estate Jenni Harrison RE/MAX Elite Kristen Hinson The Property Group Misti Holland Crye-Leike Real Estate Services

Jamie Rusher Michele Phillips & Co. Jennifer Starr RE/MAX Elite Shelli Stine Coldwell Banker RPM Group Patrick Sullenger The Janet Jones Co. David Sutton RE/MAX Elite Debbie Teague The Janet Jones Co.

Jody Huffmaster RE/MAX Real Estate Connection

Michael Teague The Janet Jones Co.

Jean Hurst Coldwell Banker RPM Group

Ellen Wilcox The Janet Jones Co.

Mandy Jackson The Charlotte John Co.

Amber Wilson Donham Realty (Greers Ferry Real Estate)

Natalie James RE/MAX Elite

Frank Yang Keller Williams Realty

Melissa John The Charlotte John Co.

Dana Yates The Property Group

Kelly Johnson The Janet Jones Co.

Emily Young The Charlotte John Co.

If you don’t see your agent on the list, be sure and nominate him or her for next year’s Top Agents honor.

Look for the submission ad in the Winter 2020 issue.

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TOP AGENTS

RAY ELLEN

KRISTEN McCREADY KELLER WILLIAMS REALTY

C

elebrating 25 years in the real estate business, Kristen McCready, with Keller Williams Realty, has developed relationships with lenders, title companies, contractors and inspectors that allow her to provide a seamless homebuying experience for clients. She earned her real estate license in 1994 with the encouragement of her mother, who has been a real estate agent since 1986. As a multimillion-dollar producer, McCready says honesty and compassion are the keys to her success.

“My philosophy is to follow the Golden Rule and treat people as I would like to be treated,” she says. “I hold everyone’s happiness and personal goals in the highest regard.”

SPECIALIZATION

PIXEL PROPERTIES REALTY

Residential real estate

AFFILIATIONS Member, National Association of Realtors Member, St. James United Methodist Church Sustaining member, 20th Century Club Board member, Out of the Woods Animal Rescue

12814 CANTRELL ROAD LITTLE ROCK 501.960.5353 KRISTENMCCREADY.NET

STACI MEDLOCK RE/MAX ELITE

S

taci Medlock, a Realtor with RE/MAX Elite in North Little Rock, says she is devoted to the real estate industry, but she’s even more devoted to the people she serves. She’s also a 15-year multimillion-dollar-producing real estate agent.

“My passion is selling real estate,” she says. “I get excited when I fi nd that perfect home for my client.”

Medlock worked in the beauty industry until she became a Realtor about 14 years ago. She says she had a zeal for helping people achieve their desired look, and she carried that customer-centered mindset into her new career. She has extensive experience with the new-construction market and working with fi rst-time homebuyers. She also has an eye for detail and can help identify easy updates to sell a home faster and for more money.

Medlock caters to a wide range of clients across central Arkansas, including in Little Rock, North Little Rock, Sherwood, Maumelle, Jacksonville, Cabot, Searcy and Beebe.

As a native to central Arkansas, she has built a reputation as a hardworking Realtor who knows the market and can fi nd buyers the home of their dreams.

Medlock uses a variety of marketing methods for the sale or purchase of a home, including professional photography, socialmedia marketing strategies and many other methods.

If clients have no real estate experience, Medlock takes the time to help them understand the homebuying process.

Her impeccable work ethic has helped her earn many repeat customers and referrals, she says.

TOP AGENTS

AFFILIATIONS Justice of the peace, Pulaski County District 15, 2019-2021 President of the North Pulaski Board of Realtors, 2016

AWARDS Diamond Award, North Pulaski Board of Realtors North Pulaski Board of Realtors’ Realtor of the Year, 2016 Mrs. North Little Rock, 2013 & 2014

2411 MCCAIN BLVD., NORTH LITTLE ROCK 501.944.8687, STACIMEDLOCK.COM

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ay Ellen, the owner of Pixel Properties Realty, became fascinated with property ownership and the opportunities it provides when he was a young boy, walking through his family’s south Arkansas timberlands with his father and grandfather, Since then, he has devoted his life to helping other people achieve the dream of becoming property owners.

“Real estate is not a job for me; it’s my craft,” he says. “I work hard to know the details and ins and outs of every aspect of the process so that I can create the best experience for my clients and our agents, from the fi rst point of contact to closing and after.”

With his unique approach, Ellen, who has been featured in Realtor Magazine and on Inmam.com, brings the real estate business into the 21st century by combining his years of experience with innovative marketing practices. His fi rm is known for utilizing fl ashy content such as videos, high-defi nition photos and 360-degree tours of homes.

However, Pixel Properties Realty also merges data analysis with professional negotiation strategies to allow sellers to net more from their homes and help buyers purchase their dream homes at an amiable price.

“With all the innovations in technology, I really love to dig into the analytics and data to see what is working and what isn’t,” he says. “I love buyer-behavior analysis, and what it teaches me helps give our clients an advantage in the market.”

Ellen and his team recently launched their own brokerage to empower other agents, who can now offer their clients the marketing services and systems that have enabled the success of Ellen’s fi rm.

Although Ellen is constantly searching for new tools to stay on the cutting edge of the industry, he has never let go of the passion for property ownership he fi rst felt while walking through his family’s timberlands.

“I love helping people fi nd homes and manage one of their largest investments,” he says. “So much life happens at home. It is really special to be a small part of someone’s story.”

SPECIALIZATION Residential real estate Real estate content and marketing

AWARDS Realtor Award of Excellence Winner, past five years 2018 Diamond Award of Excellence, Little Rock Board of Realtors 2018 Diamond Award of Excellence, North Little Rock Board of Realtors

5600 KAVANAUGH BLVD., SUITE 10, LITTLE ROCK 501.255.5855 WWW.PIXELPROPERTIES.COM

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TOP AGENTS

TOP AGENTS

MELISSA BOND UNITED REAL ESTATE | CENTRAL ARKANSAS

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ith more than 35 years of experience in the field of real estate, Melissa Bond, principal broker at United Real Estate, Central Arkansas in Little Rock, is equipped to handle every aspect of the real estate buying process. Bond previously worked in construction, banking and mortgage lending, title and escrow, and marketing and interior design. For Bond, shifting her career toward real estate seemed like a natural fit.

“Having had the opportunity to meet and work with so many wonderful people in my career and help clients achieve their goals and dreams is one of the greatest things about this job,” Bond says. “I aim to continue working in the field of real estate for many years to come, helping United Real Estate, Central Arkansas grow to be a leader in sales and service.”

CERTIFICATIONS Certified Residential Specialist

AFFILIATIONS Member, National Association of Realtors Member, Arkansas Association of Realtors Member, Little Rock Realtors Association Member, South Central Association of Realtors Member, The Residential Real Estate Council

916 GARLAND ST. LITTLE ROCK 501.747.1532 UNITEDREALESTATE CENTRALARKANSAS.COM

JODY HUFFMASTER FRANK YANG

RE/MAX REAL ESTATE CONNECTION

A

fter purchasing RE/MA X Real Estate Connection in Cabot this January, Jody Huffmaster said her new role as owner and broker allows her to take a more collaborative approach to helping clients.

“I spend time adding value to each of the agents in my office,” she says. “We build each other up and help with any problems we may have in all areas of our lives. This makes me an all-around better person, and I can invest more of myself into my clients.”

Huffmaster joined the real estate business five years ago because the career allows her the flexibility she needs to care for her family. She says she remembers the anxiety she felt when purchasing her fi rst home and works to help make the buying or selling process as smooth as possible for clients while helping them get a great deal.

“You always want to make sure you have an agent you can trust, communicate with and confide in on your side,” she says.

“I make sure I’m that agent for people.”

She adds that she works to go above and beyond her duties so that clients feel comfortable referring others for her services.

In the future, she hopes to grow her franchise into the top choice for agents and clients looking for professional support and service.

“I always try to communicate with my clients to keep them up to date on their transaction and the market,” she said. “Having clients recommend me to others is most rewarding because it means I did a great job for them, and they trust me to help their friends and family.”

KELLER WILLIAMS REALTY

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SPECIALIZATION Residential real estate

AWARDS National Association of Realtors Double Diamond Award (2016-2018) National Association of Realtors Diamond Award (2015)

913 W. MAIN ST., SUITE D, CABOT 501.843.3067, CABOTREALESTATE.COM

hen it comes to buying or selling a home, a good relationship with a Realtor can be key to a successful outcome. Frank Yang with Keller Williams Realty said he works to provide honest, personalized service when guiding clients through real estate transactions.

“I consider myself to be a matchmaker as a Realtor,” Yang says. “I fi nd joy and fulfi llment in assisting my clients as a tour guide through their independent journey to fi nd that perfect home, parcel of land or to list their home.”

Yang became interested in the real estate industry while he and his wife were hunting for their fi rst home, and he earned his real estate license in 2017. He quickly became a top performer, earning the North Pulaski Board of Realtors’ Platinum Award for selling more than $5 million in volume his second year on the job.

“Good service begins with providing a consistency of availability and transparency and maintaining market knowledge for clients,” he says. “I strive to always provide the same high caliber of service to all of my clients by fi rst listening to and anticipating their needs, then explaining the process thoroughly.”

Clients can count on Yang to walk them through the real-estate process, including what they can expect from him as their Realtor and potential challenges they might encounter while they work toward buying or selling their property. He ensures that he is available to his clients by responding to each inquiry as if it was the most important item on his to-do list.

As he advances in his career, Yang says, he hopes to continue to provide top-notch service and maintain a personal connection, no matter how large his client base grows.

“I view and treat each of my clients as humans, not real estate transactions,” he says, adding that he brings empathy to the table, understanding that each person’s situation is unique. “It makes a difference to know that your real estate agent isn’t just a salesman trying to get a closing, but a representative that genuinely wants to advocate for you.”

SPECIALIZATION Residential and luxury real estate

AWARDS AND AFFILIATIONS Award of Excellence Platinum Award, North Pulaski Board of Realtors (2018) Member, North Pulaski Board of Realtors Member, National Association of Realtors

12814 CANTRELL ROAD, LITTLE ROCK 501.416.7578 FRANKYANG.KW.COM

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TOP AGENTS

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JOJO CAR TER

NATALIE JAMES

ENGEL & VÖLKERS

RE/MAX ELITE

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orking to provide her clients with exemplary service in finding a new home, JoJo Carter, a real estate adviser at Engel & Völkers in Little Rock, has been involved in the housing industry for much of her life. With a family who worked in home construction, Carter developed her interest in real estate at an early age, and after taking a drafting and design class in high school, she decided to pursue a degree in interior design at the University of Arkansas. Now Carter’s well-rounded knowledge of the housing industry proves to be beneficial for both buyers and sellers.

“When it comes to buyers, I pay close attention to their needs, wants and personal tastes,” Carter says. “My interior-design background is beneficial for sellers as I assist them in everything from staging their homes to providing remodeling advice so that buyers can see a home’s true potential when it is on the market.”

N

ot only does real estate allow Natalie James to be available to her family; the business also empowers her to rebuild communities by helping other families become fi nancially stable. She says she enjoys showing people that homeownership can be attainable and works to simplify the buying and selling process for her clients. She also conducts free seminars to show the public how real-estate transactions work.

“If you like what I have done, just you wait— there’s more to come,” she says. “I’m just getting started and honing in on my skills to make home buying and selling a smooth, pleasant experience.”

AWARDS Little Rock Realtors Association gold status, 2017-2018 & platinum, 2016

2917 KAVANAUGH BLVD. LITTLE ROCK 501.773.9949 JOJOCARTER.EVREALESTATE.COM

BROCK WHISENHUNT JR.

SPECIALIZATION First-time buyers, first time sellers, new construction, relocation, luxury homes

AWARDS & AFFILIATIONS RE/MAX Executive Club (2019) Realtor of Distinction — Bronze (2018) Realtor of Distinction — Gold (2017) Little Rock Realtors Association (2015-2019)

11324 ARCADE DRIVE, SUITE 23 LITTLE ROCK 469.410.1469 NATALIEJ.REMAXARKANSAS.COM

OLIVIA DAVIS SHANNON HOWLAND KENZIE LOWEGARD KAROLYN ZIEMER

SIMMONS BANK

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career in mortgage can be tough, but Brock Whisenhunt Jr. said he embraces challenges in his role as vice president and mortgage loan offi cer for Simmons Bank. With 13 years of experience, he says knowledgeable, ethical service is the key to his success.

“I’m going to make sure to do what’s best for the customer every time,” he says. “If you do that, it will pay off down the road.”

He adds that his support staff helps him keep up with current industry standards and loan products, which allows him to determine which loan is best suited to each client. He says he spends ample time with each client, especially fi rsttime homebuyers, so they are not surprised at the closing table.

“I pride myself on educating my customers,” he adds. “I don’t want anyone leaving my offi ce or getting off the phone with me not knowing what they’re getting and why they are getting it.”

Whisenhunt says he joined the mortgage industry in 2006 because the career allowed him to combine his family’s background in real estate with his degree in fi nance. It can be a hectic job, he adds, but he hopes to work in mortgage lending for as long as possible.

“I often get asked the question, ‘What hours do you work?’ and the answer is all of them,” he says. “I always try to make myself available. That, to me, is priority No. 1 in our world.”

TOP AGENTS

ARVEST BANK

H

SPECIALIZATION Mortgage lending

AFFILIATIONS Alma mater, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

4220 N. RODNEY PARHAM ROAD, SUITE 300 LITTLE ROCK 501.978.7616 SIMMONSBANK.COM/ADVISERS/BROCK-WHISENHUNT

ome ownership: It’s the American dream, but it can be stressful without a mortgage lender’s expertise. Arvest’s top mortgage agents in central Arkansas for 2019—Shannon Howland, Olivia Davis, Karolyn Ziemer and Kenzie Lowegard—know this to be true.

As the largest mortgage lender in Arkansas, Arvest Bank has helped millions of Arkansans make the biggest purchase of their lives. These four women share a passion for what they do and attribute their success to strong communication skills, teamwork and building lifelong relationships with their clients.

Howland’s successful 18-year career in the mortgage industry started with her own positive homebuying experience. “I had an amazing mortgage lender who walked me through every step when I bought my first home. I’m passionate about giving that same dedication and customer service to my borrowers,” she says.

“My goal is a flawless experience for my customers and referral partners,” says Ziemer, a mortgage professional of 19 years. “The innovative ideas and technology we offer result in a very rewarding experience.”

The best advice these women offer potential homebuyers is to find a mortgage lender they trust. “Seeing these first-timers purchase a home when they may not think it’s possible is pretty awesome,” Davis says.

Lowegard believes Arvest’s slogan sums up the “why” behind the “what” she does every day. “We are people helping people—simple as that.”

Arvest Bank is a Member FDIC Equal Housing Lender.

SPECIALIZATION Mortgage, finance

ARVEST MORTGAGE LENDERS Olivia Davis, NMLS No. 1410380 Karolyn Ziemer, NMLS No. 564340 Kenzie Lowegard, NMLS No. 1369690 Shannon Howland, NMLS No. 1275312

DAVIS: 16107 CHENAL PARKWAY, LITTLE ROCK; 501.379.7452 LOWEGARD: 510 W. MAIN STREET, CABOT; 501.743.3742 HOWLAND: 612 OAK STREET, CONWAY; 501.513.4564 ZIEMER: 2590 DONAGHEY, CONWAY; 501.513.4535 ARVEST.COM

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Agents Pictured From Left to Right: Allison Pickell, Jean Hurst, Andrea Bakewell, Jamie Grantham and Amy Glover Bryant

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Faulkner Lake Orchard WEDDING & EVENT CENTER

At Bentonville’s Bar Cleeta: Clear Eyes, Small Plates, Can’t Lose. Because wine. p. 98 96

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We’d never heard of “asparagus tartare,” but now we need it. Desperately.

> FIRS T TAS TE

SETTING THE BAR HIGH At Bentonville’s Bar Cleeta, they’re already off and running

By Seth Eli Barlow | Photography by arshia khan

T

he staff of Bar Cleeta is tired. They’re assembled, almost in their entirety, around a backyard chessboard, where knee-high chess pieces are shuffled back and forth, a server and a sous chef doing their best to outwit each other. Around them, the rest of the staff sits watching, passing beer cans and a whiskey bottle among them. It’s 4 p.m. on a Saturday, and right now, they should be working—polishing glasses, rolling silverware, heating pans and simmering the first sauces of the night. But tonight, the restaurant is closed, and the staff is taking a much-deserved break.

What’s pulled them away from the restaurant is—what else?—a crawfish boil, one hosted in part by their bosses and owners of Bar Cleeta, Trae and Weisi Basore. The party is part reunion and part celebration. A chance for Trae, a Bentonville native, to have his high school friends together all in one place again, just for a day. It’s the kind of party at which there are no strangers, just friends you haven’t met yet, a mood that fits seamlessly into not only the restaurant lifestyle but also the one-to-two-degrees-ofseparation world of Northwest Arkansas.

Bar Cleeta in Bentonville has been open for three weeks—three good weeks, Weisi and Trae agree, and it’s time for the staff to blow off some steam. Some 60 people are at the party, but as any group does, the employees of Bar Cleeta have sequestered themselves, congregating above the chessboard, swapping three-week-old stories as if they were legends, waffling between the shared trauma and joy of restaurant life. I’d seen the team members in their element over dinner the night before, the small kitchen that overlooks the dining room a flurry of arms and ingredients.

But beneath the steady ostinato of the kitchen was a steady air of calming intimacy. The restaurant is a small space, only a handful of tables, but there’s an immediate familiarity to it, like it’s your best friend’s apartment, homey without being at home. The ceiling features thick ropes woven across it and hanging plants. From the outside, looking through the massive floor-toceiling windows, it’s like peering into the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, at some lofted terrace hidden among the vines.

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shuttered their Los Angeles restaurant and come back to Northwest Arkansas looking for a change of pace, the ability to focus on a single concept and to execute it at a level that Arkansas had never seen. That concept was Neff, a fine-dining restaurant they hoped would bring a touch of New York’s fine-dining scene, a world that they had both worked in, to Arkansas.

It was while waiting to open Neff and while hosting pop-up dinners in the months after they returned to Arkansas that they first found the space that would be Bar Cleeta. It was light and airy, defined by almost endless windows on two sides, allowing the room’s gold accents to sparkle like a cave of wonders.

“We just looked at each other and said, Someone should put in a

BAR CLEETA 110 NW Second St., Ste. 110, Bentonville (479) 553-7006 facebook.com/barcleeta

BEST DISHES?

The asparagus “tartare” and the brisket are amazing, but the foie gras torchon is what kicks the menu into overdrive.

Want to make it even better? Pair it with the Sauternes for one of the world’s most classic wine-and-food experiences.

KID-FRIENDLY?

The portions are small enough to count as kid-sized, but a wine bar is more fun when it’s just us grown-ups. Trust us; it’s worth hiring a sitter.

PRICE RANGE?

$10 to $25 HOURS?

4:30-10:30 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday arkansaslife.com

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wine bar there,” Weisi told me. Over time, as their restaurant plans hit the inevitable roadblocks of the restaurant world, they realized the someone who should be opening a wine bar was them. Neff, they decided, could wait, and Bar Cleeta was born. (Diners have no reason to worry, though; restaurant Neff is still in the works.)

Trae, a trained chef, would handle the food, focusing on small plates and cheese and charcuterie boards, while Weisi would lean on her background with wine and service to create the bar’s signature wine list. Together, they crafted what Weisi hoped would feel at once both contemporary and cosmopolitan, while still being organic to Arkansas. Though the bar’s atmosphere and food are tangentially Southern at best (the only clue, a small photo of Trae’s grandmother, hangs by the door), Weisi wanted her guests to feel like they were part of the Bar Cleeta extended family. “We 100

Summer 2019

want you to feel like you belong here,” she’d told me as she sat down at my table. I was finishing off dessert, a chocolate mousse with lemon and mint, a combination that seemed so wrong, I couldn’t not order it (it was, of course, delicious). “It doesn’t matter where you came from, why you’re here,” she said “You’re here, and we’re going to treat you like family while you’re with us.” That the dining room is centered around two large communal tables and that almost every plate on the menu is shareable is no accident. Bar Cleeta is a bar that’s designed to pull us out of our modern isolation, even if it’s just for the length of a meal.

T

he menu at Bar Cleeta is small, so much so that even a small group of friends could order almost every one of the small plates. My server recommended at least two per person. The menu seems built on the

eternal pursuit of freshness. Each plate is seemingly so fresh, so of the moment, that it is less a combination of ingredients and more a snapshot of time framed on a plate.

Frequently, raw ingredients are the star. Slices of big-eye tuna arrive with avocado and cream, each element arranged on the plate like a Joan Miro painting. Another dish is simply a handful of raw radishes nestled in a bowl of freshly house-made butter, each one crunching with a lightninglike snap of pepper and the immediate richness of cream as you eat them. An asparagus “tartare” was my personal favorite of the night, each stalk, chopped as it was into bite-sized portions, so fresh and ripe that you could almost taste the different shades of green. The menu’s most overtly Southern nod comes in the form of brisket made of six-day-aged Wagyu beef, a sleeker more haute couture counterpoint to its traditional

Texas cousin.

But of course, Bar Cleeta is a bar—a wine bar, even—and though the menu is full of gems, its wine list might be where Bar Cleeta shines brightest. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that my dear f riend Maggie Walters is a server at Bar Cleeta.)

“There’s so much great wine in the world,” Weisi told me. “So why do so many people only drink the

Weisi Basore handles Bar Cleeta’s impressive— though somewhat nontraditional—bar program, while her husband Trae is responsible for the wine bar’s charcuterie and small plate offerings.

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Everything at Bar Cleeta, from its shareable menu to the dining space itself, is designed to foster community and fellowship.

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same few grapes?”

“Why don’t we have a bythe-glass chardonnay?” she then asked, smirking like she’d just done something inflammatory. “People will come in and just ask for a glass of whatever chardonnay we have, and that’s where we get to have that conversation of, Well, we do things a little differently here.”

What does she recommend to those drinkers instead? A glass of schereube, an obscure German variety that mimics chardonnay’s natural minority and zest. Weisi sought to mirror the freshness of Bar Cleeta’s menu in its wine list, organizing a collection of wines

that, as a whole, are light and balanced, eschewing heavier wines for those that support the lightness of Trae’s dishes.

B

ack at the crawfish boil, the Bar Cleeta staff is in-between chess matches. They’re discussing radishes. They’ll soon go out of season and will need to be replaced with something new. I ask Jordan Ferris, Trae’s sous chef, about the idea of radishes on the menu in the first place. He tells me between sips of beer that Trae just found them at the local farmers market and thought they were good, a common theme for much of the produce at Bar Cleeta. I admit that I didn’t think I’d ever seen whole radishes served at a restaurant before, let alone eaten and enjoyed them so much, and he smiles. “We’re just trying to give people something that they don’t know they need yet.”

At that, a call rings out announcing that another pot of crawfish is ready to be eaten, and the Mars-colored crustaceans are dumped onto a waiting table. The staff disperses, some of them to get more beer, some to the pool and others to eat. For now, they’re going their separate ways, only to be back together tomorrow. arkansaslife.com 103

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Peach Cobbler with Bourbon Whipped Cream

INGREDIENTS CRUST

2 cups flour ½ teaspoon salt ¾ cup vegetable shortening 9 tablespoon ice-cold water FILLING

10 ripe peaches, peeled and sliced 1 cup sugar ¼ cup brown sugar 2 tablespoons lemon juice 2 tablespoons cornstarch ¼ teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons flour

I

> S TAT E DISH

PEACHY KEEN Lattice tell you about this amazing cobbler from Wilson Cafe’s Shari’ Haley By wyndham wyeth Photography by arshia khan

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f you’ve ever visited the Wilson Cafe, you probably know what a wonder pâtissier Shari’ Haley is, particularly when it comes to pies.

And if you don’t know, then you’ve certainly been missing out. So when we asked Shari’ about her approach to putting a spin on a traditional peach cobbler, we weren’t surprised when there was a pie crust involved.

While most cobblers typically have a crust on the top, Shari’ opted to encase the whole thing in pie crust. “To me, a cobbler is a little bit doughier,” Shari’ says. “In the South, I’ve had biscuitlike—almost dumplinglike—peach cobbler. So this is just a tad different. You get that texture and some of that hard crust on it.”

But Shari”s real twist is in the cobbler’s topping. “Some people do ice cream, but I personally like a whipped cream,” she says. “So I just add a little bit of bourbon in there, and it just gives it a little extra kick—nothing too crazy or anything.”

Cobbler, Shari’ says, goes deep in her roots. “My grandmothers were the two ladies that initially got me into cooking in the first place, and I just remember that both of them, anytime anybody came over, especially in the summertime, they either had a pie or a cobbler or a cake always on the table. It didn’t matter if it was just two people coming over or if it was 20 people coming over; there was always a dessert on the table.”

Well, we don’t know about you, but if we ever show up to a gathering and this cobbler’s on the table, just know we’ll be staying a while.

2 teaspoons cinnamon BOURBON WHIPPED CREAM 1 cup whipping cream 2 teaspoons powdered sugar 1 teaspoon bourbon

RECIPE

PIE CRUST Combine flour, salt and vegetable shortening in a bowl. Add ice-cold water and mix until combined, taking care to not overwork. Wrap up dough and set in freezer for 10 minutes. Take out and set aside.

FILLING Combine all filling ingredients in a bowl and mix until everything is incorporated. Set bowl aside for 20 minutes to allow peaches to soak up all the ingredients and form a sauce.

WHIPPED CREAM Using a hand mixer, or a stand mixer with the whisk attachment, whip the whipping cream, powdered sugar and bourbon on medium-high speed until medium peaks form, about 3-4 minutes.

For stiff peaks, whip another minute or so.

COBBLER Roll out half the dough for the bottom part of your baking dish. Pour filling on top of the dough in the dish. Roll out the other half of your dough and cut it into lattice pieces.

Place lattice on top of peach filling. Bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes.

Let cool, add whipped cream and enjoy!

Love you some peach cobbler? Don’t miss the Johnson County Peach Festival on July 18-20. Bonus? There’s a peach cobbler bake-off! arkansaslife.com 105

TA BL E

Scharffenberger Cellars Brut Rosé Excellence, $28

> C ORK DORK

BUBBLES OF FREEDOM You need to drink more sparkling wine—it’s the American thing to do

By Seth Eli Barlow Photography by arshia khan

N

o matter your personal beliefs about the current presidential administration, you have to admire its penchant for pageantry and pomp. And while a recent Energy Department memo referring to fossil fuels as “molecules of freedom” got understandably roasted online, I immediately knew this rebranding didn’t just have to stop at fossil fuels.

You see, American sparkling wine has always had an image problem.

Everyone is familiar with Champagne, the French sparkling wine from the region of the same name. The proper name for sparkling French wines from outside the borders of Champagne is Cremant. Sparkling wines from Italy and Spain have catchy names, Prosecco and Cava, respectively, but what about the many sparkling wines made right here in the US of A? “Sparkling wine” just doesn’t have a ring to it, doesn’t invoke that Pavlovian suggestion of hedonistic celebration inherent in the word Champagne.

“Bubbles of Freedom,” though? Well, now we’re on to something.

But of course, creating a name for American sparkling wines begs the question of what, exactly, makes these wines so special? If these wines are worth celebrating, shouldn’t they already have a name? Or at least some measure of cachet out there in the greater wine world?

The history of sparkling wine in the United States dates back to the 1880s, when the Korbel brothers, immigrants from what is now the Czech Republic, set up shop in California’s Russian River Valley. And while much has changed in the wine world over the past 130 years, you can still find Korbel California Champagne (the company is grandfathered in under laws that now ban the term “Champagne” on products that don’t originate in France). In fact, it was producers from Champagne proper who first realized the enormous potential for sparkling wine in California.

To make good sparkling wine, you essentially need two things: a cool climate and thin-skinned, high-acid grapes. Places like Champagne have both of these in spades. Located northeast of Paris, the region is famous for its bracing winters and harsh growing season, a climate too foul for hearty grapes like cabernet or merlot, but perfect for chardonnay and the fickle pinot noir. The cool climate allows the grapes to ripen, but just barely, leaving each individual grape full of acidity, the basic building block of sparkling wine. Wherever you have these building blocks, be it northern France, the Italian Alps, the Russian River Valley or even Tasmania—you’ll have everything you need to produce something delicious.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Champagne producers, along with the rest of the world, began taking American wine seriously and buying land 106

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in Napa Valley and other locales that are ideal for sparklingwine production. Many of these newly founded wineries are still in operation today, including Napa’s Chandon Carneros, owned by Moët & Chandon, and Domaine Carneros, opened by Champagne Taittinger. Over time, as demand for sparkling wines grew and California winemakers got better at making them, new wineries began to emerge, offering alternatives to the more massproduced, economy-priced wines already on the market.

And here is the prickly point of sparkling wine: price. The fact is that sparkling wine, no matter where in the world you’re making it, is a time-consuming and laborious process. While Italy and Spain have stepped in with budget-friendly, patio-pounding bottles for brunch, drinkers can sometimes be at a loss for where to turn when wanting something a little more, dare we say serious, without stepping quite into the $60-plus price point of French Champagne. This, of course, is where California’s Bubbles of Freedom come in.

California is home to a few special regions that produce sparkling wines that rival those of anywhere else in the world, each one of them in proximity to California’s natural air conditioner: the Pacific Ocean. Regions such as Carneros, the Russian River Valley and Anderson Valley are kept cool by deep-cut mountains that funnel the ocean winds inland, washing the vineyards in cool air and locking in the ripeness of their fruit. Modeled largely after Champagne, Californian sparkling wines are dominated by two grapes: chardonnay and pinot noir. Each one adds its own integral component to the blend— the chardonnay brings lightness and finesse, while the pinot noir contributes fruity aromas, body and energy to the wine.

Another wine from Anderson Valley, this rosé achieves its downy pink color from a small percentage of still pinot noir added just before the wine undergoes the fermentation to get its bubbles. The resulting rosé is summery and bursting with a nose of strawberries and cream.

If you’re brave enough to weather the Arkansas summer on a patio, consider this wine required drinking.

Schramsberg Vineyards Brut Blanc de Noirs, $45

Despite their similarities to Champagne, California’s sparkling wines are at their best when they go against the grain and embrace their exuberant and lively selves. I often liken Champagne to a ballet dancer, a graceful spiral of electric motion, but California’s wines are like Olympic gymnasts, each one taut and lean, robust and full of energy. Champagne may be the prima donna, but California is the pop star.

Literally translated as “white from black,” blanc de noirs denotes a white wine made from red, or “black,” grapes. The red grape in question here is pinot noir, and without its red skin to give the wine any hint of red fruit notes, we’re left with a wine that’s as spellbinding and dazzling as a disco ball.

Marzipan and apricots twirl with almonds and a soft macadamia nuttiness in the glass. Napa Valleybased Schramsberg Vineyards was the first winery to make an American blanc de noir, and it’s easy to see why it’s still one of the best.

Roederer Estate Brut, $25

H Ultramarine Blanc de Blancs Charles Heintz Vineyard, $55

If there’s a sparkling wine with a better dollar-to-quality ratio in California, I haven’t found it.

Located in northern California’s Anderson Valley (a few hours north of Sonoma), Roederer Estate is another winery operated by a French Champagne house, this one Champagne Louis Roederer, makers of a little wine called Cristal. Coming in at just 7 percent the cost of its big brother, the Roederer Estate Brut is where I’m constantly looking when it comes to those inevitable weeknights that just demand a popping cork.

The only thing more interesting than the history of sparkling wine in California is its present, and perhaps no one wine sums up California wine in 2019 better than Ultramarine. Coveted for its wildness, the sheer abandon with which its fruit, all golden apples, white peach and honeysuckle, cascade up out of the glass and onto your palate is unlike any other sparkling wine in the world. If there is anyone still doubting that the sparkling wines of California aren’t world-class, start here. No need to apologize for your mistake. arkansaslife.com 107

Personal Flotation Devices (Life Jackets)

Sun Protection

Fire Extinguishers

Alternate Propulsion (Paddles, Oars)

Visual Distress Signals (VDS)

Boating Safety

Sound Signals

Education/CertiďŹ cate

Watersports Flag (Skier Down/Diver Down Flag) First Aid Kit

Anchor with Sufficient Line Bailing Device 108

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VENTURE 112 WISH YOU WERE HERE 118 CULTURALIST 120 HOMETOWN

MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR WEEKEND

A lemur, an alpaca, and a dozen Great Pyrenees pups walk into a bar(n) … p.112 110

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VENTURE

We’ve never met a farm cat we didn’t like, but Oliver might be one of our favorites.

> W ISH YOU W ERE HERE

DOWN ON THE (GUEST) FARM The folks behind Dogwood Hills bought the farm to create a hospitality experience unlike any other

By Wyndham Wyeth Photography by arshia khan

W

e’ve been doing these “Wish You Were Here” travel pieces for almost two years now, but this is my first go at writing one. I’ve been present on every trip—from the Kings River Deck House to the Mound City Farm Resort—but until now, I was mostly just along for the ride, responsible for providing the trip’s soundtrack, some comic relief and the occasional observation about our stay that might make it into the final draft of the story. It wasn’t an easy job, but I performed it diligently.

This time around, however, telling the story is largely up to me. So once we pull into the gates of Dogwood Hills Guest Farm, I’m doing my best to take everything in and commit it to memory and my notepad—and there is certainly a lot to take in. The journey up from Little Rock has taken us deep into the Ozarks and well off the beaten path, which has now turned into a winding gravel drive. As we meander past an orchard of various fruit and pecan trees, the scene that opens up before us makes it feel as if we’ve stumbled onto the loading zone for Noah’s Ark: There are chickens, cows, ducks, goats—all the animals you might expect to see on a farm—then a few surprises, including an alpaca named Frodo and a lemur named Zaboo, and ohmygosh, are those PUPPIES? There must be six or seven Great 112

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Pyrenees pups roaming around the grounds before us—some romping, others lazing about in the shade, even more that are clearly eager for an ear-scratching or belly-rub.

Are we in heaven?

It’s then that we’re pulled out of our collective reverie by our approaching hosts. Ruth Pepler introduces us to her daughter, Grace, and husband, Thomas.

American Gothic, this is not. The Peplers are all extremely friendly and seem very at home on the farm.

Ruth, in particular, is eager to show us around. “Where do you want to start?” she asks, excitedly. “With the puppies?” We nod, grinning ear to ear while Ruth tells us about the 10-week-old pups bred from one of their livestock guardian dogs, Bree, who are responsible for running predators off the farm. It’s all very interesting, but still, we wonder, OK, if we’re not in heaven, then where are we?

And how did the Peplers f ind themselves here?

Well, technically we’re in Harriet, about 11 miles north of Marshall—but we might as well be in our own little world. The Peplers found their way here by way of New Jersey about 11 years ago after Thomas took a job as director of a nearby residential center. At that time, the farm wasn’t a farm at all— just a long driveway leading down to a house in the woods. Slowly but surely, however, the Peplers began to develop the property.

And when the residential center where Thomas worked relocated out of state, they decided to stay.

The seeds of what would become Dogwood Hills were already planted—it was then time for the Peplers to help the seeds grow.

“We didn’t have this,” Thomas says. “But we’d already started some of it.” This is what Dogwood Hills has become in the years since then: a fully immersive farm experience where every detail has been tailored for and designed around the guests. arkansaslife.com

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VENTURE > W ISH YOU W ERE HERE

DOGWOOD HILLS GUEST FARM Harriet

SLEEPS:

The guest house has three bedrooms, with two queen-sized beds and a pair of twin beds.

AMENITIES:

Farm-to-table you-pick breakfasts, hiking opportunities on 40-acres of free-ranging goat land, goat and cow milking, livestock grooming and feeding, fresh egg collection. A la carte options like additional farm-to-table meals, craft workshops and dutch oven cooking demonstrations also available at an additional price. A full kitchen, outdoor grill and hot tub at the guest house.

RATES:

Day rates start at $200, though rates vary depending on activities, length of stay and number of guests.

INFO:

thefarmex.com

The view of the pasture behind the guest house offers some pretty spectacular sunsets.

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VENTURE > W ISH YOU W ERE HERE

Living Off the Land Because even a farmer needs to leave the fields behind every now and again Dogwood Hills Farm Store

“[When guests arrive], they’re experiencing the baby chicks and playing with the puppies and milking the cow,” Ruth tells us as she shows us around the barn. “They’re making that first squirt of milk, and when they actually figure out how to get the milk out, then figure out that it’s warm—the surprise is just amazing.”

But maybe getting your hands dirty (or milky) isn’t really your thing.

Maybe you want to see how a farm operates up close, then retire to the guest house’s hot tub or take a visit to the nearby Buffalo River. That’s OK, too, Ruth says. Ultimately, the farm’s success depends on hospitality and the guest’s experience, rather than a yield of goods.

“We don’t really have a product here,” she goes on to explain. “It’s all agritourism, and everything that comes off the farm goes back into farmto-table or our guests.”

Speaking of farm-to-table, just above the barn, the Peplers have installed an industrial kitchen where they prepare fresh meals for their guests using ingredients sourced from their own farm or other local producers. Over the course of two days, they feed us pork marsala with mushrooms, onions and rice grits; homemade ricotta-filled crepes topped with a reduction of whole blueberries; fried eggs and uncured pork jowl; and unpasteurized cow’s milk and gluten-free (not that you’d ever be able to tell) cookies, muffins and buttermilk pie. Sitting at the enormous kitchen counter across from the gas range while Ruth and Grace prepare our meals (“I’m just the dishwasher,” Thomas says) feels like stepping through a TV screen onto the set of our new favorite cooking show. And as you might guess, everything is as delicious as it sounds.

All of this seems like second nature to the Peplers, but that’s really no surprise, considering their history. Ruth worked in catering and as a private chef once upon a time, and Thomas came from a big Italian family where there was always an open door and a pot of coffee on for whoever might drop by. “The hospitality thing was 116

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just part of my upbringing,” he says. As for Grace’s part, well, she’s grown up on this farm and spent a good portion of her formative years helping take care of Dogwood’s guests in one form or another.

W

e feel it in any number of moments: as we handfeed the goats and the cows with Grace’s hydroponically grown fodder, when we pull stillwarm eggs from beneath a chicken, while we watch Grace spin yarn from their sheep’s wool and felt it into a tiny sheep facsimile, as we supply Zaboo the lemur with raisins, when we squirt fresh milk from Molly the cow’s utter into Smudge the cat’s mouth. There’s something different about this place—something special.

Dogwood Hills might not be heaven, but it does feel like a slice of paradise. It’s truly unlike any other place we’ve stayed so far. And now more than ever—we wish you were here.

The livestock at Dogwood Hills are fed a sustainable, hydroponically grown barley fodder produced through a system originally developed

by Grace for a 4-H project.

Before you venture off the farm, be sure to visit Dogwood Hills’ store, where you can purchase artwork and goods hand-crafted by local artisans. Bonus: Locally grown farm provisions—eggs, rice, and buffalo snack sticks, just to name a few— from both Dogwood and other area farms. (thefarmex.com)

throughout the summer with the viewing lot open exclusively to pre1980s vehicles (though lawn chairs and blankets are allowed if you left your ‘59 Chevrolet Impala at home).

Don’t miss Back to the Future on July 25 and Dukes of Hazzard on August 29. (Westwood Drive off U.S. Highway 65, Marshall, kendadrivein. com)

The Buffalo River

RazorBack Ribs

If you feel like splashing around, Dogwood Hills is located just a few miles south of the Dillard’s Ferry access to the first National River.

And if you’re looking to float, be sure to check out the nearby Crockett’s Country Store & Buffalo River Canoe Rental, or Wild Bill’s Outfitters. (buffalorivercanoerental.com; wildbillsoutfitter.com; nps.gov/buff)

Before RazorBack Ribs’ owner Joel Gallegos opened his Yellville barbecue joint, he honed his craft cooking on a traveling competitive barbecue team. Now he’s serving some of the best Texas-style ‘cue this side of Texarkana: Pulled pork, brisket, chicken, spare ribs—RazorBack does it all. (369 Highway 62 E., Yellville, Search for “RazorBack Ribs” on Facebook)

Kenda Drive-In As if going to a drive-in movie wasn’t enough of a throwback, the Kenda Drive-In has been hosting free Throwback Thursday screenings

Ozark Grinder Trail Looking to get in a workout while taking in some of the most impressive views in the Ozarks?

Look no further than the epic Ozark Grinder Trail, which features over 140 miles of mostly gravel mountain biking trail with access points at nearby Tyler Bend, Snowball, Leslie, Marshall and Oxley. Just be sure to bring your own bike as outfitters in the area are scarce. (facebook.com/ OzarkGrinderTrail) arkansaslife.com

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SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE AT THEATRESQUARED'S NEW THEATER IN FAYETTEVILLE

There’s a lot to be excited about when it comes to TheatresSquared’s 2019 season.

First and foremost, there’s the grand opening of T2’s new 50,000 square-foot, $34 million theater space and permanent home. The Fayetteville theater company broke ground on the new building two years ago in June, and from the looks of the space, the wait was more than worth it. The facility features a mainstage theater, as well as a studio performance space, which allows the organization to add a seventh show to its lineup. The theater’s eight dedicated guestartist apartments will make it even easier to bring fresh talent to the region. And thanks to the development of the building’s commons area, patrons can enjoy TheatreSquared all day long with coffee, small-plate and cocktail offerings. T2’s grand opening season is set to be a doozie as well, beginning with a stage adaptation of the Academy-Award winning comedy Shakespeare in Love and including other selections such as the T2 originals My Father’s War and a new interpretation of the classic A Christmas Carol, an awardwinning new boxing drama called The Royale and the five-time Tony-winning musical Matilda. (theatre2.org)

8.24

8.1, 9.5 and 10.3

SOAR NWA HOT AIR BALLOON FESTIVAL AT DRAKE FIELD IN FAYETTEVILLE

NIGHTS AT THE MUSEUM AT THE OLD STATE HOUSE MUSEUM IN LITTLE ROCK

If you’ve lived in Arkansas for any stretch of time, you know fall’s a time to keep your eyes on the ground—specifically, for the increasingly narrow window when fall colors ignite the landscape. Come Aug. 24, though, you’ll want to keep your eyes on the skies. This year marks the inaugural SOAR NWA, a hot air balloon festival held at Fayetteville’s Drake Field. In addition to a full day of ballooning, live music, a car show, an appearance by the governor, pancakes, beer—and an evening of balloons lighting up like lanterns—organizers are all also offering daredevils a different perspective: a handful of slots for skydiving (those less inclined to see the world from 2 miles off the ground can take in the skydiving show put on by Skydive Fayetteville). The best part? Proceeds help support Open Avenues, an NWA group that supports individuals with disabilities. (soarnwa.com)

7.6 SWINGIN’ TIMBER DOCUMENTARY SCREENING AT MOSAIC TEMPLARS CULTURAL CENTER IN LITTLE ROCK There’s nothing left of the town of Claybrook today, but during the 1930s, the Crittenden County logging and farming community was home to an all-black multiple-championship-winning baseball team known as the Claybrook Tigers. On July 6, the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center will honor the team with a free screening of Swingin’ Timber, a documentary chronicling the development of the town by successful African-American entrepreneur John C. Claybrook and his efforts to keep his sports-loving son from leaving the family farm by building him a baseball stadium and a team to play in it. (mosaictemplarscenter.com)

THE SALT LAKE HERALD. (SALT LAKE CITY [UTAH), 27 JUNE 1897. CHRONICLING AMERICA: HISTORIC AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS. LIB. OF CONGRESS.

WHERE TO BE THIS SUMMER

CULTURALIST

8.14 - 9.8

IMAGE COURTESY OF DAVID D. DAWSON

VENTURE

7.13 TESLA FEST AT THE MID-AMERICA SCIENCE MUSEUM IN HOT SPRINGS These days, the name Tesla is most commonly associated with Elon Musk’s pioneering luxury electric-car company. But if it wasn’t for Nikola Tesla, the visionary inventor and electrical engineer responsible for the AC electric motor, Musk likely wouldn’t be where he is today.

So in celebration of what would’ve been Tesla’s 163rd birthday, the Mid-America Science Museum will host the fourth annual Tesla Fest, where a new generation of young scientists can learn about the inventor’s contributions through themed activities and an electrifying cagedlightning demonstration. (Search “Tesla Fest” on Facebook)

7.12-14 Fat Tire Festival in Eureka Springs

8.3 Hayes Carll at The Rev Room in Little Rock

8.9-10 MAD Battle band competition in El Dorado

8.13 An Evening with Temple Grandin at Fayetteville Town Center

8.21-25 Fayetteville Roots Festival

8.22-25 Arkansas Cinema Society’s Filmland in Little Rock

9.4 - 10.6 Million Dollar Quartet at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre in Little Rock

9.6 She: An Exhibition of Female Artists at M2 Gallery in Little Rock

9.13

On the first Thursday of each month through most of the fall, the Old State House Museum will come alive! Featuring games, activities, food, libations and costumed performers portraying historical figures, this adults-only event gives guests a chance to party on the museum’s front lawn and visit the exhibitions after hours for a modest $5 admission fee. Since the inaugural Night at the Museum-themed event back in March, subsequent events have riffed on the theme with the likes of “Raiders of the Lost Arkansas,” “Back to the Future” and “National Treasure.” Just be sure to double-check your belt.

The Monkey probably stole your keys. (Search “Nights at the Museum” on Facebook)

Lost Forty Brewing and Pallbearer’s “The Legend” collaboration pilsner release party and concert at Rev Room in Little Rock

9.13-29 ACANSA Arts Festival of the South in Little Rock and North Little Rock

9.14 Mac-n-Cheese Mania at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock

9.14 Bobby Bones and the Raging Idiots: It’s Just the Two of Us, Sorry at Robinson Center in Little Rock

9.22 Main Street Food Truck Festival in Little Rock arkansaslife.com

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As the birthplace of poet laureate Jo McDougall, it’s no surprise there’s something subtly poetic about DeWitt.

> HOME T OW N

A GAME OF DEWITT Seeking out Lady Luck in the Delta

By Heather Breed Steadham | Photography by arshia khan

H

istorically speaking, DeWitt’s been a lucky place. In the early 1850s, it won a place as county seat of Arkansas County when Arkansas Post—the first French settlement west of the Mississippi—became too depopulated and too far southeast for residents needing to do county business. By complete and utter chance, the city was quite literally named by luck of the draw, (“DeWitt” was pulled from a hat in 1853). And in 2011, Mud, a film directed by Little Rock native Jeff Nichols and starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew McConaughey, gave DeWitt its big-screen big break when the film’s producers chose to feature scenes at the DeWitt Hospital and Nursing Home. If this kind of kismet has been gracing the area for nigh on 200 years now, I figure fortune just might smile down on me now, this day on which I’m lucky enough to celebrate my 23rd anniversary.

And it is a ridiculously beautiful day, too. It hasn’t gotten too hot just yet, and the azure sky is streaked with contrails that look, from this angle, delightfully like a checkerboard. My husband, Dave, and I smile and enjoy the ride in the sparkling, candy-apple-red convertible Mustang that fate has granted us, and we figure this day just could not get any better.

Almost.

“Are we there yet?” our 6-year-old daughter, Rory, asks from the backseat.

We weren’t able to acquire a babysitter for the day, but luckily, yes, we are practically, essentially, virtually there. And thank heavens, too, because I don’t know if I could brook that question one more time.

We are greeted by two signs: “Population 3292” and “DeWitt—Home of the Dragons.” What a coincidence! we exclaim. With our nerdly love of Harry Potter and our weekends spent participating in preparations 120

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DEWITT POPULATION:

3,085

COUNTY:

Arkansas (county seat of county’s southern district) DRIVING DISTANCE FROM LITTLE ROCK:

81 miles

WHY YOU’RE GOING THERE:

Seen one fair, and you’ve seen ’em all, right? Not so, friends. In addition to the standard livestock competitions and parades, the Arkansas County Fair, which has been a community staple since 1938, also hosts an annual demolition derby in September.

CLAIM TO FAME:

As the Arkansas Municipal League notes, “The oldest records in Arkansas are kept in the Dewitt Courthouse. They date from 1796 and are written in Spanish.”

Which is somewhat surprising—until you consider that the eponymously named Arkansas County is the oldest in the state.

for the upcoming Hot Springs Renaissance Faire, we love dragons!

This day will be a blessed one, for sure. We are convinced.

Until we begin to see a theme: Public Library, closed.

Senior Citizen Center, closed.

The restaurant called Kelly’s on the Square and Bridget Lane Boutique with its sharply dressed mannequins in the window and The Registry shop with its candles and collectibles? Closed, closed, closed.

We continue our drive to find that the Piggly Wiggly and Kroger are both open, but that hardly seems lucky at all. It’s not what we had hoped for on our special day. But between the growing possibility that there’s nothing to see here and the fact that Rory needs to hit a bathroom as soon as humanly possible, it looks like Kroger will have to suffice. I’m beginning to suspect the tide of

karma has turned, and I can’t figure out why.

A lady parked next to me is loading groceries into her trunk. While Dave escorts Rory inside, I stick my head out my window. “Hey, there!

Can you tell me what good stuff there is to do here in DeWitt? It’s a Saturday, but everything seems to be closed.”

The lady smiles and nods. “Just about everything closes down on Memorial Day weekend.”

Memorial Day weekend! There’s the fly in my ointment. “So what would you recommend?”

“You could do the Catfish Shack across the street. That or Subway or Sonic are about your only choices.”

I thank her aloud and silently curse my luck, then head to the Catfish Shack for lunch when Dave and Rory return.

It’s a little wood-shingled building across the road from Kroger that looks like, well, a shack, and it doesn’t take debit or credit cards. Decorations consist of hornet nests hanging from the ceiling and taxidermied turkey and deer populating the walls, and a whiteboard nearby encourages patrons to “Try our Fresh River Fillet and Buffalo Ribs.” But we don’t. We order alligator, because it seems like the thing to do.

While the waitress is delivering heaping plates of hush puppies and fried pickles and a HALF POUND of alligator, I ask her what things I might have the opportunity to see.

“You could try the city park, I guess, but everybody’s gone today.”

And she’s right. The park is abandoned. The gazebo is empty, and no one is fishing on the pier.

And the nearby Donut Palace has nary a car in its parking lot. What monstrosity is this? Misfortune has descended upon me, and it has come down hard. Lady Luck has left the Delta.

Downtrodden, we return to our car. It’s not as shiny as it was before, it seems. And that sky? Not nearly as blue. We head back out of town the same way we came in, and by golly, there are almost a dozen cars parked in the town square, clustered around a coffee shop that had appeared closed earlier in the day. “Stop!” I command, and Dave obeys (we have been married almost a quarter of a century, after all).

We find ourselves entering the enchanting chamber of 420 & Turnrow Coffee. It’s a brickwalled, stylized-concrete-floored, delicacy-filled oasis in our badbreak badlands. They have Loblolly ice cream and a display case filled with different kinds of cheesecake.

That would be a yes, please.

Kara Ward, the barista, takes me into the adjoining room, where a

baby shower is going on, to show me a Rosebud Coffee mural from the 1920s the owners just happened to discover when they were fixing up the place. Then I get lucky enough to snag Julie Simpson from the party, a longtime resident of Little Rock who moved back to DeWitt in 1997 to run the family business—Cormier Rice Mill— with her brother. She turns out to be a wealth of information about this diamond-in-the-rough town.

“Master Gardeners do all the landscaping for the courthouse and the Union Pacific caboose we have on display. We have a community pantry to feed the needy. And we have Phillips Community College out on the bypass!” And as for Turnrow Coffee? “This is just a little gem. The Hornbecks, who own it, have done a lot to revive downtown.” Apparently, the Hornbecks have even gotten hold of the Veterans Memorial Building and are working to refurbish it, already bringing in some cool musical acts and hosting the Dragons’ prom.

Julie says the best part of DeWitt is, indeed, the people who populate it: “These are the most giving people here. Everybody does what they can to help each other out.”

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Get DeWitt It Need recommendations?

To Witt: Catfish Shack On Arkansas.com’s info page for the Catfish Shack, the writeup is as followed: “What to know: Breakfast, fish, gator, burgers and more.” And while that’s indeed good to know— those items are, in fact, on the menu—that’s not the extent of the place. You’ll go for the vittles, but you’ll stick around for the company. (facebook.com/thecatfishshack)

Great River Road Scenic Byway

I look at the time and realize I’ve stolen her from the baby shower for more than a fair bit. I thank her and head back to my table, where Dave is drinking some ginger tea and Rory is eating some ice cream, and a slice of cheesecake is calling my name. I sit for a minute and look around. On a nearby display, there are body scrubs for sale by Chick -N- Bee, a local familyowned farm that makes products using raw honey from their own hives. I see a Pay It Forward Tree on the bulletin board, where folks who want to pay for somebody else’s coffee can choose a friend and post their name (or just “whoever needs it”) for them to redeem. I see a Free Little Library out front with a selection of books from early readers to adult thriller novels. And I taste a little hint of something in my cheesecake. Is that nutmeg? Cinnamon? It’s a total surprise, and it’s delicious.

Then I see on the wall the definition of “Turnrow”: “noun.

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farm implements during field operations.” W hat are the chances that at the end of my journey, I’ve done just that? That at this fantastic coffee shop and community gathering spot, I’ve made a 180 in my journey? What started off as the devil’s own luck turned into an absolute windfall of wonderful.

“I wish I could thank the girl whose baby shower I crashed,” I tell Dave. “Her lending me Julie made all the difference.”

Dave digs in his wallet and finds a Target gift card he received from a student at the end of the school year for being the awesome teacher he is. He hands it over. This generous spirit, folks—it’s why I married him.

I walk into the party room and hand it to the mother-to-be. She’s having twins.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Julie says, smiling.

Maybe not, I think. But we don’t really need it. I figure if you’re lucky enough to have been to DeWitt, you’re lucky enough.

All told, the Great River Road Scenic Byway stretches some 363 miles along the Mississippi River in Arkansas. Although but a fraction of that runs near DeWitt—Arkansas 1 runs just over 2 miles along the town’s eastern edge—the Big Muddy’s presence, churning some 40 miles to the east, is woven into the place. (experiencemississippiriver.com)

420 & Turnrow Coffee As part of last year’s Best Of feature, we named 420 Turnrow the “Best New Idea That’s Really an Old Idea.”

The reason? Though the venture itself might be new—specifically, fall

2017—Tami and Troy Hornbeck’s efforts on the downtown square aren’t especially novel. At heart, it’s about building a place for the community, young and old. Plus, they’ve got some great sandwiches. (facebook.com/420turnrow)

DeWitt Post Office The post office might be an odd recommendation, no? However, as home to one of the state’s now 19 existing Post Office Murals—a Depression-era project that hired artists all across the country to lend a splash of color to the community hubs—it’s worth seeing this piece of history while you still can. (uca.edu/ postofficemurals/dewitt) arkansaslife.com 123

THE BIRD

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 65

Explore Arkansas

BUTTERMILK WAFFLE BATTER 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 4

1/3 cups flour teaspoon baking powder teaspoon baking soda teaspoon salt tablespoon sugar egg cup buttermilk tablespoons melted shortening

Sift the flour and measure. Add the baking powder, baking soda, salt and sugar. Sift again. Separate the egg yolk and white. Beat the egg yolk, and add to the buttermilk and melted shortening.

Pour into the flour mixture, and stir just enough to moisten the dry ingredients. Fold in the egg white, which has been beaten until stiff but not dry.

4. O Z A R K F R I E D C H I C K E N

Have a deep iron chicken fryer one-third of the way full of steaming hot lard with 2 tablespoons of margarine or butter added. Cut the chicken into 13 pieces after washing well. Place a cup of sifted flour with 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper in a paper bag. Drop the cut-up chicken into it, and shake well.

Place the chicken in the hot fat, and let brown on both sides.

Then pour off only enough fat for the gravy. Place the lid on the fryer, and turn the heat low. Let simmer about one-half hour.

Remove the chicken, and place in hot oven until the gravy and the balance of the dinner is finished. Make the gravy as for Southern Fried Chicken [see below], using milk instead of broth and adding 1 tablespoon of butter to the fat, which always gives a better flavor.

Here is the secret handed down from my Cherokee ancestry that gives your gravies and soups a flavor that is different … a nutty flavor that is delicious. It is called oa-whis-i-tee and is made from pulverized parched corn or hickory or pecan nuts.

It may be kept for months in tin containers with tight lids. Stir in 1 tablespoon or so to a skillet of gravy or a pot of soup. The nuts, or corn, whichever you prefer, are toasted until brown, then pestled in a mortar. A wooden bowl and a wooden potato masher may be used to powder the corn and nuts.

Buffalo National River

FROM MY OZARK CUPBOARD (1950), B Y C O R A P I N K L E Y- C A L L

GRAVY FOR SOUTHERN FRIED CHICKEN: Drain most of the fat from the chicken fryer. Sift enough flour to completely cover the bottom of the fryer. Let brown until bubbles begin to come up; stir with a fork until all the flour is brown, but be sure you don’t scorch it. Pour in 1 pint of hot stock [Editor’s note: or milk, per instructions above], until the mixture is the right thickness.

Simmer until thick as thick cream. Stir in one tablespoon of butter. Salt and pepper, and add in a bit of savory or poultry seasoning. Drop in a piece of parsley, and garnish the platter of chicken generously with parsley.

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SPECIAL ADVERTISING FEATURE

EXPLORE ARKANSAS

MOUNTAIN HARBOR RESORT & SPA

SETTING FOR SUMMER Ouachita Lake resort creates lifelong memories

I

t’s the little things that has made Mountain Harbor Resort & Spa a summer family getaway for three

generations. It’s the sunburned noses, the cool summer breeze that ruffles the beach towels dr ying on the deck rails and the sunset cruises that turn into stargazing. These are the moments a family can cherish for a lifetime.

Mountain Harbor is on the bank of Lake Ouachita and since 1955, families have flocked to the resort to create memories.

This family-owned and -operated resort and its staff are dedicated to providing a unique experience that seeps into the soul.

“Our Harbor families have come here for generations to seek out and experience those moments that become part of their history and culture, because once you have shared the glory of a lake sunset together, splashed and skipped rocks and built campfi res, you will cherish those memories all your life,” said Pati Brown, lodge manager. “I love Mountain Harbor; it’s sacred to me.”

Guests will fi nd a variety of accommodations at Mountain Harbor, from lakeside guest rooms to affordable cabanas and cabins. Mountain Harbor’s cabins have a variety of fl oor plans and amenities for any budget. These cabins feature rustic decor and are designed

to be a home away from home for guests.

Looking for something to do while at Mountain Harbor?

Take a dip in one of the resort’s three crystal-clear swimming pools. Rent a boat, grab a cooler of your favorite beverages, and hit Lake Ouachita for some of the finest fishing that Arkansas has to offer. For high-speed action on the water, the Mountain Harbor Resort Marina and DreamChaser Houseboat & Water Toy Rentals have equipment available for water-skiing and other activities.

For a more relaxed adventure, Mountain Harbor Riding Stables offers 45-minute guided horseback trail rides through the Ouachita National Forest.

After a day of exploring the area, grab a table at the Mountain Harbor Lodge Restaurant, which has fed generations of Mountain Harbor guests and has a diverse menu that can satisfy every member of the family. From juicy, hand-cut steaks to a hearty weekend breakfast buffet, the Lodge is dedicated to quality.

A RELAXING OASIS LOCATED JUST MINUTES FROM HOT SPRINGS

F O R M O R E I N F O R M AT I O N , V I S I T W W W. M O U N TA I N H A R B O R R E S O R T. C O M

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ONE TAKE

In which we gave Bransonbased photographer Henry O. Head a Polaroid, eight frames of film and one take to get the shot.

THINGS LEFT BEHIND: A STUDY “I definitely found the running theme of things that were in decay or being left behind to be an interesting cohesive motif throughout that shooting process. The theme of decay can kind of sound morbid, but one of the things I’ve actually been thinking about the last couple of weeks is that when you see an abandoned house or something that’s in a state of disrepair that’s kind of falling apart—all of the materials that build up those buildings and places—they’re just making a journey back to the ground to become a source of life for what’s to come. So I’ve been trying to view things that are abandoned, or left behind, or decaying, as material on the way to being alive again, kind of the whole circle-of-life thing.”

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