Arkansas Times | June 2021

BANKROLL FREDDIE | KETAMINE FOR DEPRESSION | CUSTOM DRUMS

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SHREVEPORT SHUFFLE: Herby K’s in north Louisiana is among our road trip destinations after more than a year sans travel.

FEATURE

23 ROAD TRIP

Where — and how — to get out of the state when wanderlust takes hold.

By Austin Bailey, Rhett Brinkley, Keith Merckx, Lindsey Millar and Stephanie Smittle ON THE COVER: Open Road Camper Vans is making the #vanlife dream a reality for its clients.

Photography by Novo Studio.

4 JUNE 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

9 THE FRONT

Q&A: With Bankroll Freddie.

The Big Pic: Concert fashion for the post-vaccination era.

13 THE TO-DO LIST

Rodney Block at Wildwood, Rev. Horton Heat at Four Quarter Bar, a Smithsonian exhibit on the ‘Negro Motorist Green Book’ at Mosaic Templars and more.

18 NEWS & POLITICS

The assault on voting rights.

By Ernest Dumas

49 SAVVY KIDS Superdads.

56 CULTURE

60 FOOD & DRINK

The Grumpy Rabbit in Lonoke is field trip-worthy.

By Rhett Brinkley

68 CANNABIZ

Treating intractable depression with ketamine.

Buffalo Drum Co. is turning Ozark hardwood into fine percussion instruments.

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By Leslie Newell Peacock

On superheroes.

74 THE OBSERVER

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THE FRONT Q&A

HELLTOWN, BORN AND RAISED A Q&A WITH BANKROLL FREDDIE.

Pandemic be damned, it’s been a big year for Bankroll Freddie. The Helena-West Helena native made his 2020 debut, “From Trap to Rap,” on Quality Control, a record label that’s credited with fostering the careers of heavy hitters Migos and Lil Yachty — and, more broadly — with cementing Atlanta’s position as the center of the hip-hop universe. Now, Freddie’s jointly signed to QC and Motown Records, and the 26-year-old’s latest, “Big Bank,” features the likes of Gucci Mane, 2 Chainz and Megan Thee Stallion. I caught up with Freddie from his home base in Little Rock, and found on the other end of the phone line a charismatic, playful spirit — ever-ready to dote on his home state and seemingly unfractured by sudden fame or by his storied past, which is marked by brushes with death, high-speed police chases and a turbulent upbringing in Phillips County.

Do you still have family in Helena?

Yeah, actually, my dad stays in Helena.

And you know, my mother’s side of the family, they’re from Marianna, right up the street.

You mentioned God earlier. You know Helena in and out, and you grew up with a lot of upheaval there, and saw a lot of friends die. Do you think about the afterlife, heaven, any of that?

I don’t too much think on death. We livin.’

I understand that your dad was a pretty wild and often successful gambler, and you watched him win a lot of money. Do you think that made you want to take risks, or to set up something sure and secure?

I feel like my dad is the reason I am everything I am today. Dead serious. Watching his lifestyle — the stuff he used to do and the stuff he used to have — it made me want to have money. My dad, he was a — he was a big drug dealer, I ain’t gonna lie.

He was a big gambler also. So he had nice things. He had nice cars. He had money, and it made me want to have money. So I went and got some money.

AGE: 26 REAL NAME: Freddie Gladney

Speaking of, tell me about the “Pop It” video. What was it like working with Megan Thee Stallion?

Man, I love Meg, man. A person with her success, you would probably think she would be stuck-up. She’s so down to earth and so humble. She’s cool. We just had a fun time. She’s cool as hell, man.

WHAT HE DID ON MOTHER’S DAY: You’ve talked a little bit in interviews Bought Mom a new Audi.

— and in your lyrics, like in “Last Real Trap Rapper” — that you had a following FAVORITE GAS STATION FOOD: Sprite, before you became a rapper. To me, it Tom’s Bacon Cheddar Fries sounds like you’re telling the world that you didn’t get here without living the I read an interview with XXL and they life. Like, that you were of the streets were asking you what people might be first, and a rapper second. surprised to know about you, and you For sure. Most definitely. The thing about it — I just became a rapper. said that you can cook. What do you like to cook?

I never thought about rapping in my life. I never wanted to be a rapper.

Oh, yeah, I’m a chef. My family, that’s what we do. ... . Yesterday I made You know? God be having plans for you sometimes. It’s God’s plan. I me a banana pudding. I was bored at the house and had a taste for never planned on it, but I’m pretty good at it. some banana pudding, and I made me a homemade banana pudding.

[Laughs.]

How do you write? What’s your creative process look like?

Usually, when I write a song, I’m on the road. I drive a lot, back and forth What are you cooking if you’re trying to show somebody, like, this is from Atlanta. So from Arkansas to Atlanta, that’s an eight-hour drive. So what my family does? What are you putting on the table?

I jump on the road, listen to a few beats, and by the time I get to Atlanta Oh, yeah. I’m going always Southern. I’m going, like, sweet potato, colI probably have three, four songs, and I can record them as I go. lard greens. Good homestyle fried chicken. Fish. Homemade macaroni and cheese. I’m goin’ that way. I’m goin’ deep. I’m gonna let ‘em know.

I wonder if you feel pressure to keep your old routines. Like, what parts of your daily routine are different now?

Find the full interview at arktimes.com/rock-candy.

Well, now, I try to get my kids during the week — I got five kids — because I don’t have weekends, I’m booked up. So I go from the shows —Stephanie Smittle to home with my kids, and try to spend as much time with them as possible. That’s important.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JUNE 2021 9

THE FRONT BIG PIC

INTERMISSION’S END Little Rock’s live music scene is re-emerging, slowly.

BY DAZZMIN MURRY AND STEPHANIE SMITTLE PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON More than 14 months after the pandemic halted live performance in Little Rock, a marquee above The Weekend Theater still blinked a message in bright red scoreboard letters: “This is only Intermission.” Shows haven’t resumed in the theater’s black box just yet, but across the street at Vino’s Brewpub, William Blackart and Adam Faucett — two stalwarts of the local rock scene — were readying to take the stage for a two-night engagement in mid-May, one of the first major shows this year. We caught up with concertgoers at the door of the beloved pizza dive to take the temperature of post-pandemic concert fashion in Little Rock.

▼

▼

“Well, I finally changed out of the track suit I’ve been wearing for a year.”

Adrian Bozeman and Nancy Miller

Holli Rockitt and Dakota Hileert, Little Rock

▼

Ellen Strickland and Matt Rice, Little Rock 10 JUNE 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

“I kinda go for utilitarian and neutrals. I wear these boots, like, every day!”

Myriam Saavedra, North Little Rock, creative

“New hat from Screw Misery to go with my jeans, shirt and cowboy boots.”

Michael Hall, North Little Rock, musician

Jennifer Lewis and Sally Anderson, Little Rock

▼

Shawn Hood, musician

CAMILLE: “I just got this Wolfenstein 3D tee! It was the first video game I ever played with my grandpa.”

Levi Coffman, musician; and Camille Richoux, public health professional

Ryan Robinett and Kristen Warner, Russellville

Janet Jennings and Phoenix Mcentarffer, Little Rock

Justin Hill and Emilee Sneed, Heber Springs

▼

LAURA: “It’s teacher weekend wear!”

CHRIS: “But she wore it because she’s a Hanson fan.”

Chris and Laura Terry, Sherwood

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ARKANSAS TIMES

the TO-DO list

FREDRICK BALTIMORE

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

RODNEY BLOCK

FRIDAY 6/4. WILDWOOD PARK FOR THE ARTS. 8 P.M. $25.

“Everybody is multi-dimensional,” trumpeter and bandleader Rodney Block told us. “If you see me today, I have on khakis and Oxford shoes and a button-up shirt and a jacket. This is professional Rodney Block.

But if you catch me on the weekend, I may have on a tank top, and I have tattoos. I have a septum piercing.

I have a nose piercing. That’s another dimension of me.” Maybe that multidimensionality is what made it inevitable that a musician like Block, who works by day in pharmaceutical and medical sales, would adopt alter egos for himself as his music has shifted shapes over the years — “Black Superman,” for example, a moniker Block adopted a few years back. His forthcoming record is called “Percival Jenkins,” and it takes its name from Andre 3000’s character in the film “Idlewild,” who Block sees as a kindred spirit. “I really identify with him; he’s a music guy, but he’s kinda nerdy. He loves his music.” Expect to be charmed; Block in any of his

dimensions is ever adept at breaking the ice in a room (or on Wildwood’s verdant grounds, in this case) with sheer charisma and lyricism; he’s the sort of performer whose even-keeled energy seems to emanate from the bell of his trumpet and set audiences at ease. Admission is $25, and soda, wine and beer options are available at Wildwood’s donation-based bar. Dress is picnic casual. Bring blankets and chairs and grab tickets at wildwoodpark.org. In case of rain, the show moves to the park’s pavilion. And if you can’t catch Block this time around, catch him the following evening at The Library in the Little Rock River Market for a show celebrating the birthday of Block’s keyboardist, Andre Franklin, on June 17 in Fort Smith for the city’s Levitt Amp Music Series, or here in Little Rock on July 4 at Pops on the River, where Block’s performance precedes the annual riverside concert by the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JUNE 2021 13

COURTESY WANN RADIO STATION RECORDS, ARCHIVES CENTER, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION.

the TO-DO list

‘THE NEGRO MOTORIST GREEN BOOK’ THROUGH 8/1. MOSAIC TEMPLARS CULTURAL CENTER. FREE.

Maybe you know it from “Lovecraft Country,” or from Peter Farrelly’s 2018 Oscar winner “Green Book.” Those who were alive in Jim Crow-era America knew Harlem postman Victor H. Green’s “Negro Motorist Green Book” because it was an essential, indispensable guide to traveling while Black — and skirting violence or disaster along the way. Here, the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center serves as the second stop for the Smithsonian’s exhibit of the same name, with enormous panels that paint in vivid detail what it was like for the Black middle class to travel cross-country in 1936, when the book was published, what Black-owned business culture looked like as it built itself up despite its segregated context, and how the Green Book functioned, as the Smithsonian puts it, as “a shield, empowering Black people to explore their world with more dignity than fear, more elegance than embarrassment.” Wall-sized quotes from Aretha Franklin and James Baldwin are situated next to automotive and cosmetic items of the day, as well as ominous photos of signs indicating the boundaries of “sundown towns,” many of which were right here in Arkansas. Split across two floors, the exhibit is hailed with a series of adjacent events; mark your calendars for a July 17 visit to Mosaic Templars from the exhibit’s curator, author and documentarian Candacy Taylor, who developed the collection along with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES).

REVEREND HORTON HEAT, DALE WATSON TUESDAY 6/15. FOUR QUARTER BAR. 7 P.M. $25.

Solo sets from two of country music’s foremost rockabilly reinventors, with the two joining forces for some duo numbers? Sounds like a pandemic fever dream from a show-starved music fan, but you are indeed awake.

Texas-turned-Tennessee Prince of the Road Dale Watson (at left) and Dallas’ Reverend of Freakout are landing at Four Quarter Bar in Argenta, where the amount of rowdy you can fit on the stage is inversely proportional to its teeny square footage. Get tickets at centralarkansastickets.com.

14 JUNE 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

TAILS AND TUNES

THURSDAY 6/3, 6/10, 6/17, 6/24. LITTLE ROCK ZOO. 6 P.M. $13 ADMISSION FOR ADULTS, $10 ADMISSION FOR CHILDREN 3-12, $3 PARKING. Every Thursday night in June, the Little Rock Zoo is trotting out some of its fauna for after-hours fun, with wine, beer and food vendors onsite and live music at the Civitan Elephant Stage from 6 p.m.-9 p.m.: Cliff and Susan Erwin Prowse, June 3; The Rodney Block Collective, June 10; The Juice, June 17; and Off the Cuff featuring vocalist LaSheena Gordon, June 24. Sidle up to the omnivorous sloth bears, feed the fish and admire the alpacas until 9 p.m., when all sensible animals quit their revelry and get some shut-eye.

PRIDE GAY-LLERY WALK

FRIDAY 6/4. DOWNTOWN HOT SPRINGS. FREE-$30.

From Emergent Arts, the Hot Springs LGBT Alliance, Central Theater and the PrideHawks — the student-led gaystraight alliance at National Park College — comes the Pride Gay-llery Walk, a Friday night stroll through downtown Hot Springs. Meet up at Emergent Arts at 5 p.m. for Pride-themed crafts, face painting and refreshments, and to see the “Equilateral Project,” a multi-media art installation created by the PrideHawks and art students at National Park College in celebration of Pride Month. At 6:30 p.m., congregants will follow the sidewalks down Whittington Avenue and onward down Bathhouse Row and to the lawn at the Arlington Hotel, where Superior Bathhouse Brewery will sell you some of the best beer in the state (if you ask us). At 8 p.m., the Mr. and Miss Spa City Pride Pageant commences at Central Theater; get tickets on Eventbrite by searching “Spa City Pride Pageant.” Let’s face it, the best way to counter a hate-filled 2021 legislative session is through community, visibility and maybe some rainbow-hued pageantry; this event boasts all of the above.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JUNE 2021 15

the TO-DO list

BIG RED BALL HOMEBREW CONTEST

SATURDAY 6/12. SIXTH AND SCOTT STREET PARKING GARAGE. 6-9 P.M. $30 ADVANCE, $35 AT THE DOOR. Stone’s Throw Brewing, the Little Rock Kickball Association and Downtown Little Rock Partnership are hosting this long-running homebrewer’s contest, with proceeds benefiting CARE (Central Arkansas Rescue Effort for Animals); drink for a good cause and meet some adoptable pets while you sip. Get tickets at the-big-red-ballcharitable-foundation.square.site.

BAGGO, BRATS N’ BLUES

EAST VILLAGE STREET PARTY

SUNDAY 6/13. THE RAIL YARD. 3-6 P.M. $35.

This benefit for Central Arkansas Habitat for Humanity goes up in the openair Rail Yard on a Sunday afternoon, and features live music from soul singer Charlotte Taylor (pictured) and Bill “Bluesboy Jag” Jagitsch, not to mention one of the best fundraiser rituals we’ve ever heard of: a ceremonial “note” burning for three homeowners who have successfully paid off their mortgages this year through Habitat’s HomeBuyer program. Habitat’s Central Arkansas chapter partners with low-to-moderate-income individuals to make housing more accessible and affordable and to help build the sort of generational wealth that comes along with home ownership, and it’s built more than 200 such homes since it was founded in 1989. Attendees to the event, sponsored

by Bank OZK, will receive a grilled brat, one free beer and happy hour drink specials throughout the afternoon. Get tickets and register your Baggo team at habitatcentralar.org/baggo.

SATURDAY 6/19. SIXTH AND SHALL STREETS, LITTLE ROCK. FREE. Whether you call it Hangar Hill or the East Village, call it home for an afternoon for this street party from Downtown Little Rock Partnership, which begins at the corner of Sixth and Shall streets, caps off with a 6 p.m. set from Mayday by Midnight and commences to The Rail Yard for an afterparty. Among the reasons to attend: to hear heavy blues tunes peppered with references to Newport and Dogtown and Oaklawn from Ben “Swamp Donkey” Brenner’s new record “Fonky Donkey.” Lost Forty brews will be available for purchase and food trucks will be onsite.

AMERICAN AQUARIUM

TAB BENOIT

SATURDAY 6/26. FIRST FINANCIAL MUSIC HALL, MURPHY ARTS DISTRICT, EL DORADO. 7 P.M. $5.

This Raleigh, North Carolina, rock band’s Arkansas connections run deep — in part because they’ve launched music on the Little Rock-based Last Chance label, in part because they’ve played here so many times that fans have turned into friends. Frontman BJ Barham, a hard-touring partyer now living the married and sober life, lent a thoughtful set last December to the Arkansas Times/ White Water Tavern collaboration on a virtual Holiday Hang Out festival and returns with the full band for this show at the Rev Room. Get tickets at revroom. com.

16 JUNE 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

JOSHUA BLACK WILKINS

FRIDAY 6/25. REV ROOM. 8:30 P.M. $20-$100.

Terrebonne Parish native, Louisiana Hall of Famer and wetlands preservation advocate Tab Benoit has been playing swampinformed, guitar-based blues since 1987, and he’s dipping down into south Arkansas on a leg of an extensive 2021 tour for this indoor show, which will have seating in socially distanced pods. Get tickets at eldomad.com or by calling the box office at 870-444-3007.

First responders and health care workers can show identification at the entrance for free admission.

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) prohibits discrimination in all its programs and activities on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity (including gender expression), sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, familial/ parental status, income derived from a public assistance program, political beliefs, reprisal or retaliation for prior civil rights activity. (Not all prohibited bases apply to all programs.) Program information may be made available in languages other than English. Persons with disabilities who require alternative means of communication for program information (e.g., Braille, large print, audiotape, and American Sign Language) should contact the responsible Mission Area, agency, staff office, or USDA’s TARGET Center at (202) 720-2600 (voice and TTY) or contact USDA through the Federal Relay Service at (800) 877-8339. To file a program discrimination complaint, a complainant should complete a Form AD 3027, USDA Program Discrimination Complaint Form, which can be obtained online, from any USDA office, by calling (866) 632-9992, or by writing a letter addressed to USDA. The letter must contain the complainant’s name, address, telephone number and a written description of the alleged discriminatory action in sufficient detail to inform the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights (ASCR) about the nature and date of an alleged civil rights violation. The completed AD-3027 form or letter must be submitted to USDA by: mail: U.S. Department of Agriculture Office of the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights 1400 Independence Avenue, SW Washington, D.C. 20250-9410; or fax: (833) 256-1665 or (202) 690-7442; email: program.intake@usda.gov. USDA is an equal opportunity provider, employer, and lender.

NEWS & POLITICS

THE ASSAULT ON VOTING RIGHTS

BRIAN CHILSON

DISCOURAGING VOTING: The Arkansas Generaly Assembly.

IN SERVICE OF TRUMP’S LIES.

BY ERNEST DUMAS

A

ssessing the work of the Arkansas legislature, now a solidly Republican legion, calls to mind many descriptors — moronic, wacky, cunning, cynical, deceitful, immoral, mean, devilish — depending upon whether you’re talking about the laws or nearlaws punishing racial, religious, ethnic, sexual or gender minorities, or children and women, or else the laws protecting slaughter and mayhem by gun-toting patriots. The Arkansas Democrat–Gazette’s prolific Republican columnist Rex Nelson had a few other tags the other day for your consideration: “clownish,” “Know Nothings,” “coffee-shop loudmouths.” He was talking about Republicans.

The courts will in due time take care of many, perhaps most, of those idiocies because Republican justices going back to Roe v. Wade have declared those kinds of discriminatory acts unconstitutional.

But all those appellations would apply as well to another, but potentially more dangerous campaign by Republican lawmakers in Arkansas and in many other GOP legislatures — to impair that most fundamental of American rights: the right of citizens to choose their government by 18 JUNE 2021

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voting. The flood of bills and acts to discourage voting all had dual purposes: to come to the aid of Donald Trump, who can’t accept his landslide loss, and to see to it that Republicans don’t lose again. They are a continuation of the greatest treason in 160 years, the presidential summoning of a mob to overwhelm the nation’s Capitol, cancel a democratic election and the rule of law, and keep a defeated president in office, perhaps for life.

Richard Nixon came within 112,000 votes of beating John F. Kennedy in 1960, but few Republicans anywhere — not even Nixon — claimed that the election was stolen from him.

Al Gore actually beat George W. Bush by 500,000 votes in 2000 but shrugged and congratulated Bush for having won the Electoral College, which hands extra votes to states with few inhabitants, like Wyoming and Alaska, and which four other times in history has made the loser the president.

Trump lost decisively in 2016 and again in 2020 by a landslide. Ten million more Americans voted against Trump than for him on Nov. 3. But he and his slavish party claim that he actually won big and that dark, unidentifiable saboteurs

somehow stole millions of votes from him.

There may be sensible people who, in spite of his thoroughly immoral life and serial failures in his personal, business and governmental phases, preferred Donald Trump to Joe Biden or any of the also-rans, but it is hard to believe that anyone beyond the religiously transfixed — the “cult of personality,” as Liz Cheney now calls much of her party — actually believes that Trump won the election. In four years as president, Trump’s job-approval rating, as recorded by the ancient and thoroughly reliable Gallup Poll, never in a single week reached as high as 50 percent. He left office Jan. 20 with an approval rating of 34 percent.

No president in the history of polling ever had such a continually wretched performance in the judgment of American voters, just as no president since Herbert Hoover racked up a more disastrous economic record. From long before the 2020 campaign started until Election Day, every reliable national poll, including Fox News’ survey at the end, showed Trump losing to Biden. Pre-election polls showed Trump losing in Georgia and Arizona, the battleground states that he has counted on to demonstrate

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that he won the election big.

Never was there any doubt about what he would do on election night. A psychopath cannot be defeated at anything; he can never admit defeat, to being wrong, to having told an untruth, to having screwed up on anything. On Trump’s very first election night in 2016 — the Iowa Republican caucuses — when Sen. Ted Cruz defeated him, Trump claimed that Cruz somehow had stolen votes that were intended for Trump and he wanted a new election, knowing that it was impossible. He repeated the charge over and over and then warned on the day of the general election that Democrats were herding buses full of unregistered immigrants from Massachusetts and New York into New Hampshire to vote against him and other Republicans, a bit of nonsense that even New Hampshire Republicans ridiculed. Other Republicans won New Hampshire that day. All the immigrant bandits apparently voted for other Republicans, but not for Trump.

Every American who followed the news at all beyond Trump’s tweets and Facebook posts and Fox News had to know what was coming in 2020.

Especially Arkansans. After the crafty Texan (“Lyin’ Ted Cruz” Trump called him) won the Arkansas Republican primary on March 1, 2016, by a 9,000-vote margin over Trump and the rest of the field, Trump complained that he had won Arkansas but Cruz had stolen it. Republicans controlled the Arkansas election machinery. No one believed such nonsense then; now nearly every Republican accepts Trump lies as gospel.

You can understand why Republicans in traditionally Republican Georgia and Arizona were obliged to contest the results and even the repeated recounts since Trump had to carry those states to have even a remote chance of staying in office. They owed it to him to back his lies. But what motivates the Arkansas party and its lawmakers? Like nearly every Republican running for office, Trump carried Arkansas easily with 62.4% with not a hint of fraud or misconduct anywhere in the state. Like nearly every other state last spring, Arkansas expanded the times and ways to vote in 2020 because the pandemic was going to keep even Trump voters away from the crowded precincts on Election Day. Trump benefited from the expanded voting in Arkansas even more than Biden, raising his share of the vote from 2016 by 2 percent while Biden’s share exceeded Hillary Clinton’s by only 1 percent. It was the largest vote turnout in Arkansas history — 88,000 more than in 2016 — and it benefited Trump and other Republicans at least as much if not more than Biden and Arkansas Democrats. That was true in most of the rest of the country.

So why were Arkansas Republicans in such a panic to shut off voting in future elections by restricting access to absentee, early and mail voting and to empower state (Republican) officials to take over when there is a little dispute over counting ballots in one of the six or

seven counties where a Democrat can compete for an office?

Part of it is national. Only once in the last 33 years has the Republican candidate for president won the popular vote, which determines the winner in every other electoral contest from freshman-class president to Congress. National demographic trends do not encourage a better outlook for Republicans in future elections.

But Republicans learned an important lesson in 2000. Florida, a 50/50 state with a large share of Electoral College votes, was crucial for George W. Bush’s election. Reducing the turnout in Democratic strongholds was the critical strategy to put Florida in Bush’s column. In heavily Black urban areas, the numbers of voting places and voting machines were reduced. On election night, the lines at overwhelmed precincts ran for blocks and far into the night for voters,

be someone else who isn’t showing up that day, forging the person’s signature and casting an illegal vote. The few instances of actual voter fraud in the 2020 election turned out to be for Trump, like the Colorado man who allegedly murdered and disposed of his wife, obtained an absentee ballot for her and then cast it for Trump. He was sure that his wife had loved Trump as much as he did and would have voted for him.

Requiring people to produce an official identification with a photo and follow other rigmaroles was supposed to keep people from trying to cast an absent person’s vote. Blacks, especially women, were known to often have no driver’s license or passport, nor the will to fight through the steps at a polling site to mark a “provisional” ballot if they didn’t have photographic proof that they were the person

NONE OF THE VOTING LAWS IN ARKANSAS, GEORGIA OR ELSEWHERE WILL PREVENT A SINGLE INSTANCE OF ELECTION FRAUD. mostly old or Black, who were determined to stay and vote. Thousands who went to the polls after work just went home. The Republican headquarters in Washington sent a squad, including Arkansas’s dirty tricks expert, Tim Griffin, to Florida to try a few strategies, like voter caging, to reduce the turnout. Knowing the frequency with which people moved, they got the addresses of registered voters in Democraticleaning Black communities and sent them mail, which was to be returned if the voter was not currently at that address. The returned envelopes from old addresses, including those of men in uniform, were given to the county voter registrar to cancel the registrations. Voters learned too late that they were ineligible. In the end, the Republican majority on the Supreme Court halted the recounting of votes from precincts where overwhelmed voting machines malfunctioned and declared Bush the winner in Florida. The unhappy but gallant Gore conceded and congratulated Bush.

After the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the Florida example gave the GOP a strategy for the future: discourage Blacks from voting.

Voter fraud became the cry in Republicancontrolled states and it resounds today in half the states, including Arkansas. Voter fraud — illegal voting by individuals — has never been a problem in Arkansas or anywhere else, for the simple reason that there is no impetus for an individual, unless he or she has something personal at stake in the election, to risk the crime of going to a precinct and pretending to

they claimed to be.

On the other hand, election fraud — the illegal handling of votes by election officials such as the sheriff or county clerk — was endemic in the state for a century until voters amended the Arkansas Constitution in 1964 to end the poll tax and other strictures aimed at deterring Blacks from voting. People would qualify and register once and then be eligible to vote in every election for the rest of their lives. The constitution specified that neither the legislature nor local officials could ever add any other requirement to vote, like all the Jim Crow voting laws passed in the 1890s and afterward had done to discourage minority voting. Republicans amended the constitution in 2018 to weaken the voter-registration law to allow such requirements as photo IDs to vote. The legislature has added a few more in a hapless attempt to discourage Democraticleaning voters.

Many fewer Americans will cast ballots in 2022 and 2024, but none of the voting laws here, Georgia or elsewhere will prevent a single instance of election fraud. The Democratic nominee in 2024 — Biden or someone else — will not get the 81 million votes he got in 2020, but neither will Trump, the unlikeliest nominee, or some stand-in like Marjorie Taylor Greene, get the 74 million votes that Trump boasted about. Barring some economic or physical catastrophe, the betrayed American electorate will not reward Republicans for their perfidies.

That is my happy thought for today.

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In 1957, like many federal employees before him, Frank Kameny was fired for being gay. Unlike many others, he fought back. Harvard- and Cambridge-trained historian Dr. Eric Cervini reveals the secret history of the fight for gay rights that began a generation before Stonewall.

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WE GOTTA GET OUTTA THIS PLACE. Well, well, well — we got a little domestic there for a moment, didn’t we? And cerebral! Reading our longform think pieces about the nature of “home” and forking over $15 a month for the Calm app. Googling the city of Little Rock’s rules about backyard chickens.

Finding virtual therapists. Adopting pets — or coddling sourdough starters as if they were pets. Hovering over jigsaw puzzles or pricing Pelotons. Shopping aspirationally on Amazon for polymer clay or dried flower resin kits.

And for all who managed to stave off medical and economic tragedy, it was alright for a while. But somewhere between “Tiger King” and “Lovecraft Country,” the walls started to close in a little — even for those with enough backyard space to potentially fill with

chickens. And after all that pious talk about how we’d recommit to minimalism and carry this slower, introspective pace with us into the new post-vaccine world, one thing became abundantly clear: We gotta get outta this state if it’s the last thing we ever do. Herd immunity prospects be damned, there’s a big old world out there, and it beckons beguilingly with gas station Slurpees and charming Airbnb hosts and draft beer and fried pickles.

Or, in our case: custom camper vans, late-night Tonkotsu ramen, a freshwater-fishing celebrity, the best burger Colin Farrell has ever eaten, 100-year-old eastern red cedars and a solid affirmation that attitudes about masks in our neighboring states are as motley as they are in Arkansas.

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OLD SHREVEPORT: Testifying to Caddo Parish’s vibrant music history are the Strand Theater (pictured), and the Shreveport Municipal Auditorium, home to the “Louisiana Hayride.”

RED RIVER RAMBLE

AN ODE TO THE DELIGHTS OF SHREVEPORT, LOUISIANA, CULINARY AND OTHERWISE. WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

“S

hreveport’s historic downtown was first built out of wood, and boy, did it burn, baby, burn. Kerosene and wood stoves and bar fights were not a good mix.” That’s the Downtown Development Authority on Shreveport’s fiery architectural history, and though the skyline today is formed of less flammable stuff, the feeling that the city’s been through the wringer lingers.

Before the oil and gas industry chewed it up and spat it out, Shreveport was once home to the biggest Red Light District in the state of Louisiana. Decriminalization of sex work in the early 1900s allowed bordellos to flourish in the low-lying “St. Paul’s bottoms” along the

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banks of the Red River, and madams like Annie McCune gave New Orleans’ bawdy Storyville a run for its money — until outcry from the church contingent eventually squelched the enterprise in 1917.

These days, an outpost of Larry Flynt’s Hustler strip club chain is the most visible offshoot of Shreveport’s brothel heyday, and the vice business belongs mostly to another cornerstone of riverboat culture: gambling.

Blinking marquees cast a glittery reflection on the salty river water that divides Shreveport from Bossier City, announcing valet-attended casinos like Margaritaville and Sam’s Town and the Eldorado — all of which, by the way, are next-door neighbors to Shreveport’s more

G-rated attractions, an aquarium, a riverwalk trail, farmers market pavilions, the Robinson Film Center and the SciPort Discovery Center’s planetarium and IMAX theater among them.

West of the river district, old neighborhoods mingle with new endeavors. A barbecue spot doubles as an auto detail business, or maybe the other way around. A sign announces that the vacant building behind it once housed the Shreveport Macaroni Company. Down the street is a Baptist church, the grand dome at the Strand Theater and the legendary Shreveport Municipal Auditorium, where the “Louisiana Hayride” show launched the careers of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, and where promoter Horace Logan coined the phrase “Elvis has left

STROLL, SHOP, NIBBLE, REPEAT: Grab a bouchon stenciled in powdered sugar at Whisk Dessert Bar (below), shop for local art and curiosities at Agora Borealis (top right) and pay homage to 12-string guitar legend Lead Belly (bottom right).

the building.” Not far away, there’s the manmade Cross Lake, where old growth cypress trees bulge at the base of their trunks, frogs hold sway over the nighttime soundtrack, bluecollar crowds fish from lawnchairs after work on Friday and lakeside estates might be anything from modest 1970s budget digs to soupedup mansions with mulched palm trees and manicured lawns.

Some parts of Shreveport share hallmarks with Greater Little Rock. Both areas are bisected by a river. Both are stubbornly car-centric in their transportation infrastructure. Both are gentrified in patches. Both punch above their weight in their food scenes. Both have been scrutinized at a national level for their crime rates. And both have an old school psychic/ fortune teller who’s occupied prime real estate downtown through good economic times and bad, even as restaurants and bars on the same block have come and gone. But Shreveport is a hybrid of ArkLaTex elements and therefore its own thing entirely — too Cajun to resemble its geographical neighbors in East Texas, too landlocked to feel like New Orleans, too libertine to feel like the Bible belt. Here are a few ways to take it in.

ASK FOR THE BABY SHRIMP BUSTER AT HERBY-K’S A quick left turn off of Texas Avenue lands you at a Shreveport culinary institution — and one of the last businesses left standing in an economically ravaged part of town. Herby K’s is named after its late gregarious owner, Herbert J. Busi Jr. In the 1920s and ’30s, it was a package store called Flying Crow, where you could buy tobacco, candy and 15-cent fried oyster sandwiches, and it’s been owned by the

same family since 1936, when Busi took it over and christened it with his college nickname.

Today, you’re likely to be ushered into the canopied patio as I was, with a “How many you got? Getchoo a seat!” and then directed to a chain of long wooden picnic tables underneath a “Believe Dat!” flag and beside an antique clawfoot bathtub crowded with bus tubs.

Go for the Baby Shrimp Buster ($9.95), the miniature version of Herby K’s butterfly shrimp signature ($14.95), two shrimp butterflied and smashed flat until they’re the size of your palm, then fried crisp and laid atop hunks of crusty French bread, with cole slaw, Herby-K sauce and some seriously delectable onion rings.

GRAB A SEAT AND A SAISON AT GREAT RAFT BREWERY Taking its name from the Red River logjam that created Shreveport in the first place, Great Raft’s brews are ubiquitous on taps all over town at Shreveport staples like Marilynn’s, Orlandeaux’s and Ki Mexico (see below), and for good reason. Open only four days a week, this spacious brewery boasts its offerings with a grid of colorful rotating signs along its back wall, which range from the easy drinking 318 Golden Ale, to the fruity Walker Melon Texas Ranger, to the funky, mayhaw-infused Future Self wild ale. Meanwhile, a painting of Jeff Bridges as Lebowski against a silhouette of Louisiana hangs on the wall, inviting patrons to abide likewise. There’s no patio, per se, but if the place is too crowded for your comfort, grab a growler or some cold ones to take home; the canned and bottled offerings are different than what’s on tap, so check both the wall signs and the cooler up front for options.

FEED A STINGRAY AT THE SHREVEPORT AQUARIUM Built in 2017, this aquarium manages to straddle the fence between its dual roles as novel amusement and ecological steward. Dwarfed by the Riverside casinos that flank it on most sides and lit solely by eco-conscious LED lighting, the aquarium is home to sharks, lionfish, seahorses, a mesmerizing group of diaphanous sea nettles, and to Sunshine, an adorable rescue albino red-ear slider turtle. Especially kid-friendly are the newer interactive exhibits where, after a mandatory hand rinse, you can feed a snack to a stingray or use a gentle two-finger touch to pet an anemone or a starfish.

GET A GLASS OF MALBEC AND A DUCKSCALLION PANCAKE AT LUCKY PALACE Lucky Palace isn’t the secret it once was; word tends to get out when your beloved owner’s life ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JUNE 2021 25

story appears in The New York Times, or when the James Beard Foundation takes note of your wine program, or when ESPN’s “TrueSouth” features you on an episode. Maybe more of a secret, though, is how to find the front door.

Lucky Palace, bizarrely, occupies a sequestered portion of a budget motel in Bossier City called Bossier Inn & Suites. Likely, you’ll do what I did, which was follow my phone’s GPS to 750 Diamond Jack Blvd. and become immediately disoriented by mixed messages on a building next to an Oyo gas station, which bears both a vintage neon “Lucky Palace” sign on the top and vinyl wrap on its windows printed with the words “Rack 2 Rack Billiards.” You might then wander into a dark, smoky pool joint, turning every head at the bar. The jukebox may grind to a halt. Don’t worry. Someone will eventually take pity on you and yell out, “You looking for the restaurant?” You’ll make your way through the haze to an exit behind the pool tables, then through a dim corridor to the hotel lobby, at the back corner of which you might manage to spot the big black sign on the wall indicating that Lucky Palace does indeed exist. Finally, you’ll step in. When the server comes, utter these magic words: “We’d like the duck and scallion pancake.” Out will come a platter ($22) with chili crisp at its center, the perimeter lined with wedges of warm, doughy scallion pancake topped

with long shards of green onion, duck sauce and generous hunks of uncommonly succulent Peking duck breast. The wine list clocks in at 24 pages, dwarfing the tiny food menu and offering — after a formal letter of introduction by Lucky Palace patriarch Kuan Lim — an enormous list of wines Lim has selected from all over the world. You can’t go wrong here, so just follow the mandates of your palate and your pocketbook; you’ll find everything from a $5 glass of Malbec to a $1,400 bottle of 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon from Rutherford Harlan Estate.

SHRIMP BUSTERS, SEA NETTLE: Eat at the historic Herby K’s (top), share some Cauli Bites at Fat Calf Brasserie (bottom left) and visit the Shreveport Aquarium (right).

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GIVE A NOD TO LEAD BELLY Downtown in front of the Shreve Memorial Library — an impressive feat of architecture itself — stands a monument to folk music godfather Huddie William Ledbetter, better

known as Lead Belly. Though he was a multiinstrumentalist, he’s best known for developing a signature style on the 12-string guitar, and is responsible for recording (and preserving, probably) bedrock blues tunes like “Midnight Special,” “Goodnight, Irene,” “Black Betty,” “The Gallows Pole” and “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” He’s also cited by the likes of Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger and Kurt Cobain and Odetta as a catalyst for much of the rock music that sprung from the blues in its formative days.

Here at the corner of Texas and Marshall streets his likeness stands, created by artist Jessie Pitts and installed in 1996.

EAT A BOWL OF TONKOTSU RAMEN AT NOBLE SAVAGE TAVERN Across the street from the Lead Belly statue, you’ll find a shotgun tavern called Noble Savage, where a painting of Frank Zappa reigns over the beautiful bar, and they’re likely to be cranking Esperanza Spalding or the like if it’s too early for the nightly live music to have started. And why would you want to visit a late-night bar before late-night hours? It’s the ramen. Made daily from scratch under the name Ghost Ramen, Noble Savage’s head chef John Ortiz and crew send out tediously rolled wheat noodles crowned with chili oil, soft-boiled egg, bean sprouts, roasted artichoke or Kobe steak well into the evening, sought out for the slowsimmered broths that bolster each bowl. Ramen is served until 10 p.m., but my AirBnB host, who recommended the spot, said they often sell out well before that hour.

HIT THE PENNY SLOTS AT SAM’S TOWN If you can stand the smoke (and maybe the desperation) in the air at Shreveport’s riverboat casinos, the glittering marquee lights at Sam’s Town beckon until the wee hours of the morning, offering blackjack, Mississippi Stud and three floors of slots and table games.

Though the laws that restricted Louisiana casino operations to the water — and required casinos to keep a mariner on staff as well as an operating paddle wheel — went by the wayside in 2018, the district remains river-centric, and is the chief contributor to the state’s tax revenue.

GRAB BEIGNETS AND COFFEE AT MARILYNN’S PLACE Situated in an old gas station in a residential area of town, Marilynn’s is your fix for a piping-hot beignet sitting under a mountain of powdered sugar, or for a punchy Bloody Mary.

Or grab a styrofoam cup and fill up on locally roasted Rhino Coffee at the bar. With its open-air layout and predominantly outdoor seating, it’s a great place for those of us who are vaccinated but not yet ready to cram into a crowded dining room. Other than the pillowy beignets, you’ll find one of the most impressive lists of po’ boy fillings (Cochon de Lait! Curry fried catfish!

Brisket! Bell pepper and eggplant!), any of which can be shoved into beignets for the Bill Weiner Experience ($13.95). Brunch seekers: Sunday’s your chance. Otherwise, you’ll have to go down the street to Marilynn’s sister (brother?) restaurant, Ralph’s Place, where breakfast is served all day.

SHOP FOR ART AT AGORA BOREALIS Across from the offices of the Shreveport Times in an industrial area downtown sits Agora Borealis, a storefront art market for local and state talent, with a few regional artists thrown into the mix. Hand-carved wooden canes, homemade soaps, metal sculpture, laptop stickers, pewter earrings and a variety of prints await, and this is absolutely your best bet for toting home a functional and/or delightful souvenir.

EAT TACOS AND ELOTE AT KI MEXICO Ki Mexico is what happens when a family business ethos blends a flash tattoo aesthetic with a breezy tent patio and killer diller tacos stuffed with fresh inventive stuff like cactus and redfish. Don’t skip the elote ($4.81), served with a monster knife and fork in a Ki-branded metal tin so you can slide the cotija-coated kernels off and eat ’em with a fork. This is not Tex-Mex, so don’t expect chips and salsa to materialize upon entry, but do go for the Guacamole Show ($10.77), which offers a flight of four of the spot’s six house-made salsas. When it comes to a taco, everything is laid bare, and that’s great for Ki Mexico, which has absolutely nothing to hide and everything to boast about. If you love The Fold in Little Rock, you’ll love Ki Mexico. (Also, do as the sign instructs and “wear your pinche mask,” y’all.)

SAUNTER THROUGH THE BOTANICAL GARDEN AT R.W. NORTON ART GALLERY This is Shreveport’s Central Park, nestled between retail strips and residences and home to lazy picnics, outdoor classrooms for local schools and late-morning joggers in athletic wear. Here, Japanese maple and ferns and camellia hover close to the ground, under a canopy of towering pines and oaks and around a babbling stream, and the sloping hills make for a scenic way to spend a morning. The shady path around the 40-acre garden, dotted with sago palm and azalea and jessamine, is laid out in brick and flat enough to be accessible to slower walkers or to wheelchairs, but has enough of an incline that if you want to kick your heart rate up a little after those beignets, you can. Take a good book along with you, and maybe a Claritin, and note the hours at rwnaf.org; the garden is currently only open for daytime walks on Thursday through Saturday.

NIBBLE A BOUCHON AT WHISK DESSERT BAR When a place does only desserts, best believe they do them well. Sharing a space off of Line Avenue thoroughfare with a gentlemen’s clothing store and a construction firm is Whisk Dessert Bar, a tiny treasure that we suspect is on speed dial for Shreveport wedding planners.

There’s gelato and sorbet, and the pastry case is loaded with kitschy cookies and delicate Frenchinformed confections like the impossibly dense, fudgy bouchons, sporting a powdered-sugar stencil of the bar’s signature whisk design on their tiny tops. You can also grab heftier stuff; on our visit, they were slicing up a lemon pound cake cheesecake while the kitchen buzzed with orders for custom graduation cakes.

LOUISIANA CLASSICS: Grab some beignets on the patio at Marilynn’s (top) and some spicy stuffed shrimp at Orlandeaux’s (below).

SCORE SOME STUFFED SHRIMP AT ORLANDEAUX’S CAFE This standalone eatery off of Louisiana Highway 20 is a historic staple of Shreveport and one of the oldest continuously operated Black family restaurants in the nation. I visited at 1 p.m on a sunny Friday and found the place nearly obscured by the sea of cars crammed into its parking lot, with a wait for dine-in seating, music pumping and business hopping. No patio seating here; our suggestion is to grab three stuffed shrimp to go, or to sit at the bar and pair the gumbeaux with a Louisiana-brewed pilsner from Cane River in Natchitoches with a wedge of lime. $12.50 gets you three enormous shrimp, sturdy and boldly spiced and hot as hell from the fryer. Primed by a lifetime of mildly spiced menu items masquerading as “spicy,” I requested a side of hot sauce and was sent on my way with several packets of Louisiana pepper sauce tucked into my to-go box; it was superfluous.

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FILL YOUR INSTAGRAM FEED WITH BEAUTY AT THE AMERICAN ROSE CENTER Just outside of Shreveport in the suburbs of Greenwood sit 118 acres of lush forest with a massive, sunny rose garden at its core, and its gorgeous labyrinthian paths seem to feature sensory balms at every turn, with a reflecting pool, an Asian teahouse, tinkling wind chimes and a series of metal sculptures. The American Rose Center’s mission is all roses, all the time, with a visitors center that boasts a library full of rose reference books and walls lined with prints of bygone USPS postage stamps that featured the beloved flower. (Oh, and big, clean bathrooms; always a plus.) Bring a hat and sunscreen, as only a portion of the garden is shaded, and watch for poison ivy seedlings when you venture off of the paved paths; the landscaping team here is dogged, but so is Mother Nature. Bring $5 per person to drop into the donation box, or donate at rose.org.

SIT A SPELL FOR SOCIAL HOUR AT THE FAT CALF This neighborhood brasserie in the Highlands can be a pricey dinner if you’re on a budget, but their social hour from 4-6 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday is a perfect way to dabble. With ample patio space and a thoughtful cocktail menu, you can sit outside for a spritzy aperitif and munch on $6 appetizers — a heaping bowl of fried cauliflower florets, for one, tossed in garlic and chili oil and topped with Parmesan and lemon zest, or the equally decadent Crispy Brussels Sprouts, flash-fried and coated with Korean vinaigrette, pumpkin seeds and golden raisins. Reservations are recommended, but if you’re there ahead of dinner hour, you can probably nab a patio seat or a spot at the bar.

ROSES AND CONTEMPLATION: Get meditative in the lush corners of the American Rose Center.

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EAT A SLICE OF STRAWBERRY PIE AT STRAWN’S This old school breakfast and burger diner has become so adored for its icebox pies that the strawberry has become a sort of Strawn’s logo.

With a crispy, crackly graham cracker crust that lends a perfect hint of salt to the otherwise syrupy setup, the pie’s famous filling is a bed of cold strawberries and a thick blanket of house whipped cream. If you don’t grab one of the handful of parking spots in front, don’t fret; swing around back, where parking is plentiful and a not-so-secret staircase entrance leads you right into the main dining room. We had a slice on a Saturday morning in lieu of eggs and bacon, and regret nothing.

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JUNE 2021 29

BRIAN CHILSON

LOOK FAMILIAR?: Wide shots of Lake of the Ozarks are just about the only clips of “Ozark” actually filmed in Missouri.

FISH STORY

CHASING BYRDES AND GETTING BIT AT LAKE OF THE OZARKS. WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUSTIN BAILEY

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child’s imagination is a great vessel for escape, sure. But after the pandemic kept us homebound for more than a year, the youngest boy in my house needed something less fanciful, more concrete.

That became clear this spring when my 10-yearold son tied a metal washer to his fishing line as a weight, then stationed himself in the driveway to practice his cast for hours and days on end.

The new reel he’d gotten for Christmas needed breaking in. And watching Puck toss his line down an asphalt river to hook imaginary bass made clear that we needed to break out.

After that odious legislative session, skipping the state never sounded so good. But Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Mississippi? Arkansas’s 30 JUNE 2021

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neighbors don’t offer much reprieve as far as politics go. Still, distance affords perspective.

Southern Missouri is no hotbed of progressivism, but we heard the fishing was pretty good. Also, the chance of a Jason Bateman sighting was greater than zero. We packed our bags.

A key consideration with all road trips is the road itself. You could do far worse than the drive from Central Arkansas to southern Missouri, which routes you through some of the greenest and prettiest parts of The Natural State. Time it right and you can get lunch from the sandwich counter at Coursey’s Smoked Meats in St. Joe. You might need to stop there anyway to recover from car sickness that hits on that particularly wiggly section of I-65. It’s a 5 1/2-hour drive from

Little Rock to Lake of the Ozarks, and patience wanes right around the state border. Puck turned down an admittedly lame challenge to look for interesting license plates, but was more than happy to pass the time by keeping eyes peeled for Uranus Fudge Factory billboards (“The best fudge comes from Uranus”).

Right when car sickness threatened a comeback and mutiny was at the door, we rolled up at our first stop. Bridal Cave in Camdenton, Missouri, is a series of limestone and onyx chambers with soaring ceilings and candle drip walls. Called Bridal Cave because of a Native American wedding ceremony thought to have been held there and its many wedding dress-like rock formations, the cave is still a

HIDDEN GEMS: Rock formations that look like melted mozzarella drape the walls at Bridal Cave in Camdenton (top). Campers at the eclectic Cross Creek RV Park can rent paddle boats, fish shoreside (right) or play minigolf on the 18-hole gnome-themed course (bottom).

popular wedding spot. The hour-long guided tour, well-lit and easy to navigate on textured cement walkways, is well worth the $10 price of admission. “Cave kiss” water drops rain down on visitors as they shuffle through in single file. It’s these water drops, which started as rainwater on the mountaintop overhead and seeped through the earth, picking up minerals as it went, that built up the cave’s rock formations over millions of years. The tour dead-ends at what’s known as Magic Lake, a deep blue pool that brings to mind a particular Horcrux hiding place from the “Harry Potter” series. The remains of a raft is visible near the lake’s bottom, an artifact from

and some overhead footage of the lake itself, the show is filmed almost entirely in Georgia.

Which is honestly surprising, because the series gets so many things about the region exactly right. Expansive glass-front compounds line the shore, but trailer homes hide back in the trees. A section of the lake known as Party Cove really does fill up with boats and party barges clustered tightly enough to create sprawling bacchanalian islands of underage debauchery.

Those turkey vultures always circling overhead the Byrde family’s misadventures are indeed ubiquitous. At no point did we stumble on illicit poppy fields or sinister operatives for Mexican

an unknown explorer from long ago. No bones, though, so it’s reasonable to assume Magic Lake was not the explorer’s final resting place.

Our takeaways from the tour include a series of blurry pictures captured inexpertly with a selfie stick, and also a pro tip from our guide on how to finally remember the difference between stalactites and stalagmites. Stalactites have to hold on Tight to the ceiling so they don’t fall.

Once you reach Camdenton you’re ostensibly in Marty Byrde territory, but don’t get too excited. If your pandemic Netflix queue included “Ozark” and you’re anxiously awaiting the fourth season, you’ll be slightly disappointed to learn that very little of the show was actually filmed in Missouri. Aside from some shots of Bagnell Dam, built in 1931 to create Lake of the Ozarks (much to the Snell family’s chagrin)

drug cartels, but the handful of locals I asked confirmed that yes, aside from the heroin storyline, the show gets more right than it gets wrong.

Missouri State Parks offers some reasonably priced cabins and yurts, along with regular campsites, but yurt and cabin reservations go fast. If you’re scrambling for last-minute reservations for a weekend trip, don’t bank on these bargain $55-a-night yurts to come through. A desperate online reservation for a treehouse with no bathroom at a pond-side RV park could have gone either way. It panned out for us. In fact, if you’re traveling with a 10-yearold sidekick, you’ll find nothing better.

The Sycamore is one of five treehouses at Cross Creek RV Park in Eldon, on the north side of the lake. The RV park is at the end of a long dirt road ARKANSASTIMES.COM

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wending through a clump of trailers that exude what “Ozark” fans will recognize as a distinctly Langmore vibe. The road dead-ends at a village of campers, campsites, cabins and treehouses that feels a lot like an all-ages summer camp.

Some of the guests keep their RVs there yearround, some stay for weeks or months at a time.

Visitors can rent paddle boats to toodle around the pond and work out muscles knotted from a long drive. Fish off the dock, play 18 holes of the garden gnome-themed miniature golf course or commune with the ducks that waddle throughout. The showers are hot, the bath house is clean and social distance is a given.

Every campground everywhere has a meemaw, an older woman who stays put in her campsite to man the fire and tend the grandkids. We were lucky enough to witness our campground meemaw flip herself over backward after settling in on a poorly balanced picnic table. It was great entertainment, as soon as we all knew she was OK (but honestly, also before).

The treehouse itself offers a kitchen sink with cold running water, a wall-unit air conditioner, a ceiling fan and two full-sized beds. No ladder 32 JUNE 2021

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climbing required; the treehouse is accessible by stairs. It has a deck with two big trees poking through, a great spot to watch the pond (and any meemaw-related shenanigans). Sheets, blankets and towels aren’t provided, and guests are expected to sweep up and take the trash out when they go. The bathroom is an aerobic hill climb away, although enterprising young boys in treetop perches know some tricks to avoid the trip. There’s plenty of room for four if we want to bring the rest of the family next time.

But after a year of constant togetherness against our will, no one complained about having extra elbow room.

An extensive network of fishing guides ply their trade on Lake of the Ozarks, and they stay busy nearly year-round. Luckily these guys all seem to know each other, and they’re so genuinely pumped to get you out on the water that they’ll make some calls to make it happen.

James Dill was already spoken for when I inquired about an outing for my 10-year-old and me, having picked his name based on nothing but a Google search and pictures on his website of happy customers gripping largemouth

OZARK OFFERINGS: Why not stay in a treehouse? No toilet, but it has air conditioning.

Randy’s frozen custard, the second-best part of the whole trip. Tour ruins of a 60-room castle, the busted dream of a Kansas City millionaire, at Ha Ha Tonka State Park. (Opposite page) The view from Ha Ha Tonka that convinced millionaire Robert M. Snyder to start construction on his doomed castle. Puck reels in a big one, with just a little bit of help from fishing pro Terry Blankenship.

bass. Dill was booked but promised to figure something out and call me back. And he did!

Half an hour later, I had one on the line.

Anyone with an eponymous website is either wildly overconfident or legitimately badass.

Terry Blankenship of terryblankenship.com is among the coolest people I’ve ever met. Featured multiple times on the covers of every crappie fishing magazine out there (surprisingly, there are quite a few), Blankenship spends most days on the water in his high-tech, hyperbranded boat equipped with depth finders, fish sensors and multiple monitors to help ensure his customers get their money’s worth. If you don’t catch anything, the trip is free. All of his customers have paid in full since 1978. You’ll pull in a few bass, but crappie is Blankenship’s specialty. “Crappie fishing is my passion,” he said. “I’ve done it since I was a kid, and I’ll do it until I can’t cast again.” He throws back most of what he catches, but counts crappie as the tastiest of freshwater fish, and he eats it for dinner once a week. His perfect recipe: filet the fish, coat in a 50/50 mix of mustard and sour cream, then dredge in fish batter mix and deep fry.

The fishing guides at Lake of the Ozarks all charge about the same, with $350 getting you a 4-hour tour for one or two people, and the average tip is $50. Six- and 8-hour tours are available, but 4 hours gave us enough time to practice our casts, sightsee a good bit of the lake and reel in 16 fish (Puck easily beat his all-time record of seven fish and went on to claim 13 catches, all before noon. I gave it my all but landed only three). Be prepared to pay with cash. Blankenship supplies rods, reels and know-how. He’ll show you how to cast, where to cast and how to close the deal when you “get bit.” The niftiest trick we picked up is called “dock shooting,” and involves precision

slingshotting your bait under boat docks and into the clouds of fish hiding there.

Blankenship also provides lots of star power.

His flashy boat with a branded wrap and thousands of dollars worth of gadgetry attracts loads of attention. People on other boats took pictures of us while we fished, and a pontoon full of bros whooped and raised their Bud Lights to help my son celebrate a catch. It was 10 a.m. at the time; maybe they were headed to Party Cove.

Before we set out that morning I fretted about the price, worried that dropping a few hundred dollars for a half a day of fun was too indulgent.

By the time we stepped back on dry land I was proud of myself for minting a memory for a lifetime; I would have gladly paid more. “I was not expecting that,” Puck told me. He figured we would be puttering around in a poky old jon boat, not zooming along on a glamorous speedboat and having paparazzi snap our pictures with a freshwater-fishing superstar. “My expectations were high but it was better,” Puck said, all glittery eyed and clearly elated. “He’s a really nice guy. He knows his way around the lake and he knows where to find the fish.”

Tapped out of both cash and energy after our epic fishing adventure, Lake of the Ozarks State Park Grand Glaize Beach made for the perfect free spot to cool off and watch the public boat ramp hopping with trailers rolling slick, Miami Vice-worthy speedboats into the water.

The CDC hadn’t yet relaxed its masking guidelines at the time of our trip, but Missourians certainly had. The restaurants we hoped to try were packed, with all outdoor seating taken and dining rooms filled to the brim. With an unvaccinated child in tow, it was a no-go. An early morning attempt to try out Stewart’s Restaurant (“Biggest and Best Homemade Breakfast at Lake of the Ozarks!”)

ended in humiliation when we discovered the road to the restaurant closed off for the Magic Dragons Street Meet car show. A wrong turn took us beyond the barriers and into the heart of the show, where we found our Honda CRV flanked by antique pickups and muscle cars.

We had no choice but to pull into a snail-paced parade of vintage vehicles to get free. Already virtually immobilized by the shame of being possibly the only people in Missouri to still be wearing masks, Puck weathered this latest indignity without comment.

Luckily, beef jerky and granola bars can get you a long way, and Randy’s Frozen Custard in Osage Beach offers a walk-up window with ample al fresco seating. Their specialties include the mysteriously spelled “Strawanna,” a cup of vanilla custard with strawberry sauce and banana slices, and the popular Ozark Turtle, with hot fudge, caramel and pecans. Both are solid, although a basic cone of vanilla custard is hard to beat. After the fishing excursion, Puck ranked Randy’s as the best part of the trip.

When it’s time to head back south, Ha Ha Tonka State Park is on your way out of town and well worth the visit, imbued as it is with a history of wasted riches and tragic death. An easy trail leads to the ruins of a 60-room stone castle that was the dream of Kansas City millionaire Robert M. Snyder. Construction started in 1905 and stopped in 1906 when Snyder died in one of Missouri’s very first automobile accidents.

His sons finished the castle in 1922 and turned it into a hotel, but a spark from a chimney ignited the roof and gutted the entire structure in 1942.

We visited on a quiet Sunday morning when not many other visitors were around, but we did see plenty of turkey vultures circling overhead.

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COURTESY EISCHEN’S

HOT CHICKEN, COLD BEER: Eischen’s, famous for its fried chicken, is said to be the oldest operating bar in Oklahoma.

SUPPING IN THE SOONER STATE A CENTRAL OKLAHOMA DINING GUIDE.

BY KEITH MERCKX

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s an Arkansas expat, I have learned many things about my home state, oddly enough, by being in other places.

Nothing stands out more clearly than the realization that The Natural State boasts a disproportionate number of outstanding restaurants. Truly, it boggles my mind. It was the case when I lived there, and the restaurant scene has only gotten better in the two decades since I packed up the U-Haul and made off for Texas on a snowy New Year’s Day in 2001.

I now live in central Oklahoma, and find that it boasts more than its fair share of great places to eat, too. If you’re ready for a trip but nervous about straying too far from home (both literally and conceptually), look west.

For every Oark Store and Tommy’s Famous, Oklahoma boasts a Lucille’s Roadhouse (Weatherford) and a Baker’s Pizza (Maysville).

For each Taylor’s steakhouse or Pasquale’s Tamales, we have a Click’s Steakhouse (Pawnee) and a Pete’s Place (McAlester). I still haven’t found the Oklahoma answer to venerable barbecue destinations like Craig’s or Jones or McClard’s — but the search is half the fun.

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Should you find yourself over this way, you could do a lot worse than to stop at these — my quite subjective list of the 10 (or so) best places to grub in and around Oklahoma City.

EISCHEN’S (OKARCHE) Located just to the northwest of Oklahoma City, Eischen’s is said to be the oldest operating bar in Oklahoma. But it is far more famous for its fried chicken, which draws people from around the state. The family is not sharing the secret recipe, but all of the chickens are tossed whole into a line of deep fryers and served up crispy and piping hot. There is other food on the menu but it is generally regarded as a complement to the chicken as opposed to something to have instead.

CARICAN FLAVORS (OKLAHOMA CITY) It’s true. Excellent Caribbean eats are here for the having in Oklahoma City. The restaurant is owned and run by a native of the islands and the food is traditional fare like curried chicken and goat, stewed oxtail and lamb stew. The jerk chicken is not to be missed. On the side, enjoy

rice and beans, sweet potatoes, plantains and some amazing mac and cheese. If you’re lucky enough to land here on a Friday or Saturday you can enjoy some first-rate callaloo, the delicious Caribbean vegetable dish anchored by taro leaf.

GABERINO’S (NORMAN) Fresh, house-made pasta is the calling card at this outstanding Italian mainstay on I-35.

The couple who runs this place started out in a nearby strip mall but soon needed more space to accommodate the hungry diners. They settled into a building that once housed an outpost of a popular Tex-Mex chain. Diners cannot miss with any of the pasta dishes here; it’s all great. The meatballs are simply outstanding, and anyone fortunate enough to hit Gaberino’s during Sunday Brunch should just go ahead and order the spaghetti carbonara with crispy prosciutto. It is perfect.

NIC’S GRILL (OKLAHOMA CITY) Burgers are the name of the game here.

Because that’s the menu. Nic is manning the grill and he offers both kinds: onion burgers or

THE INCREDIBLE not-onion burgers. The space is a former Steak ‘n’ Egg Kitchen and anyone remembering the venerable breakfast spot will recall that there isn’t much room. But that’s not the only reason that people are lined up outside. These burgers are that good. Actor Colin Farrell, for one, calls this the best burger he’s eaten.

THE SERVICE STATION (NORMAN) If your preference in burgers runs to the char-grilled variety, this is often seen as the best in Oklahoma. The fresh-cut fries (on the Service Station menu as dipsticks — get it?) are almost worth the visit by themselves. But unlike Nic’s, there is much more on the menu here and it is all good. The green chili stew is often on the specials board and it stands up to most of its New Mexican counterparts. The Alfa is a sandwich with turkey, avocado, tomato and spinach served with a sublime dill sauce on fresh-baked wheatberry bread.

BUTCHER BARBECUE (WELLSTON) This outdoor barbecue stand on Route 66 northeast of Oklahoma City sprang from the efforts of the Butcher Barbecue competition team. After winning most of the big honors in the barbecue world, they decided that competition judges shouldn’t be the only ones who get to sample their food. At first it may seem strange to see people lined up outside of a converted shipping container in such a rural area. One taste of the meat and it all makes sense. Don’t miss the burnt ends, which are on par with most of those offered in Kansas City.

The most popular of the many excellent sides?

Apple pie beans.

STONE SISTERS PIZZA BAR (OKLAHOMA CITY) One does not have to be gluten-intolerant to enjoy the signature sprouted spelt crust at this family-owned pizzeria located just a stone’s throw from the state capitol. The actual sisters, whose titles are chief penny pincher, chief enchantment officer and chief optimism officer, are also serving up salads and pasta.

Recommended: the West Coast Party in Your Mouth Pie. It starts with a crust brushed with bacon fat and is topped with Lovera’s Original Caciovera cheese (from Lovera’s Grocery in Krebs), grass-fed ground beef, uncured bacon, chipotle adobo mayo, yellow mustard, avocado mash, grape tomatoes and a pastured sunnyside-up egg. Also, three … count ‘em THREE vegan pies.

GUYUTE’S (OKLAHOMA CITY) This Phish-themed eatery in the re-emerging Uptown 23rd Street district has the jam going with items such as the Hey Big Guy Home Fryz on the brunch menu. It is sausage, egg, jalapeno and cheddar with bacon curry gravy and a sriracha wine reduction. Hollandazed & Confused is falafel, tomato, avocado and a poached egg topped with hollandaise, with a side of home fries. Peace in the Middle East is a wrap with hummus, falafel, roasted cauliflower,

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Message brought to you by the Arkansas Department of Transportation and the Arkansas State Police Highway Safety Office.

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Now Open!

Former Markham Street Grill & Pub is now non-smoking and Dockside Bar and Grill!

Open Wed-Sun Kitchen Open COURTESY GORO RAMEN + IZAKAYA

4pm-12am

Happy Hour Wed-Sun 4-7pm

Live Trivia Every Wednesday Live Music Every Fri & Sat 9-11pm

Late night menu with small plates, fresh ground burgers, seafood, steak, wings, etc. Full Bar

11321 W Markham St (501) 379-9367 36 JUNE 2021

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BIG BOWLS: Goro Ramen + Izakaya serves up myriad bowls of ramen, plus matcha ice cream to finish. couscous/quinoa blend and pickled carrot with lemon vinaigrette, twisted up snug in a whole wheat tortilla. Find those anywhere else.

GORO RAMEN + IZAKAYA (OKLAHOMA CITY) Sitting in the Paseo Arts District just to the east of OKC’s substantial Asian district is this venerable establishment serving up some of the best noodles in the region. The Kare Mazemen is a favorite, with thick noodles, chicken confit, beet pickled ginger, negi, goma and a housemade curry sauce. This also comes in a vegan mushroom version where the shiitake sauce and fried shallots replace the chicken and curry sauce. Pork Belly Nikuman is cooked just right with plum sauce, pickled cucumbers and negi.

The matcha ice cream is a refreshing way to cap off the meal.

JUAN DEL FUEGO MEXI DINER (NORMAN) Juan’s is one of those places we hate to share because the crowds are already large enough.

But this hidden gem is a go-to for breakfast and lunch comfort food. The family affair came to be when patriarch Juan — seen in the

background working his magic in his floor show on an earlier episode of “Diners, DriveIns and Dives” — decided to go it on his own after leaving Norman’s century-old Diner. He took the opportunity to add some of his own Mexican favorites to the traditional American menu. The end result is rib-sticking favorites like pork tamales and eggs covered by any of the house-made sauces and served along with the signature fuego fries. The food here is made in-house from scratch, including the sausage patties, fluffy pancakes and specials such as the South of the Border Eggs Benedict. Pro tip: Try the chorito or the Santa Fe papas. Or anything else, really. You can’t go wrong.

ALSO: CHEEVER’S, OKLAHOMA CITY NASHBIRD, OKC/NORMAN LIBBY’S CAFE, GOLDSBY BIG TRUCK TACOS, OKLAHOMA CITY KEN’S STEAK AND RIBS, AMBER CONEY ISLAND, OKLAHOMA CITY MICKEY MANTLE’S STEAKHOUSE, OKLAHOMA CITY PANANG 5 THAI, EDMOND SID’S DINER, EL RENO

Some things just speak for themselves.

Brought to you by Arkansas beef farmers and ranchers and the Arkansas Beef Council ARKANSASTIMES.COM

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PURVEYORS OF ADVENTURE: James Henson (left) and Bill Harris live in a van down by the river, but in a good way.

VAN LIFE

FAYETTEVILLE-BASED COMPANY OPEN ROAD CAMPER VANS PROVIDES CUSTOM VAN BUILD-OUTS FOR LIFE ON THE ROAD.

BY RHETT BRINKLEY PHOTOGRAPHY NOVO STUDIO

W

hen Northwest Arkansas residents Bill Harris and James Henson bought a few cargo vans to convert into campers in the early months of 2020, their plan was to rent them out to people as a fun side project. Harris’ background is in residential home building and Henson’s is in electrical engineering. They posted pictures of their comprehensively stylish apartment-style van conversions on social media, and it wasn’t long before it became apparent that there was quite a demand for what they were doing.

“We just started getting hit up from all over the place about doing custom builds,” Harris said. So, they transitioned into full-time van building, hired four other mechanically inclined builders and set up shop in west Fayetteville.

While living out of vans has been a movement for quite some time, it’s starting to tap into the mainstream, and the biggest difference is that people want professional, Instagram-ready builds for their #vanlife, as opposed to DIY projects, Harris said. If you look up the hashtag #customvanbuild, you’ll find well over 1,000 photos. The appeal of the van as opposed to campers or RVs is mobility, Harris said. “They still have enough room for all your hobbies, all of your gear. All the vans that we build come with a full list of appliances: refrigerator, stove, sink, solar … so you can get all the basics that you would have in an RV in a much smaller, easier-to-maneuver package.”

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Right now the three most commonly used vans for custom build-out projects are the Dodge Ram ProMaster, the Ford Transit and the Mercedes-Benz four-wheel-drive Sprinter. What makes those vans so special for build-outs? For one, unless you stand over 6 feet 2 inches, you’ll be able to stand upright inside. Also, the vans are “basically like a blank canvas,” Harris said.

“They’re just blank metal cargo vans. We can deck them out with whatever the customer wants.”

Full custom builds can range anywhere from $25,000 on the low end to up to $75,000 on the higher end, Harris said. Open Road has done about 15 builds thus far, not including several partial builds for customers that didn’t want to tackle the complete build by themselves, Harris said.

One of Open Road Camper Vans’ first clients was a family of five. Matt and Sarah Elder had been dreaming of van life for a long time.

Inspired by Foster Huntington’s book, “Home Is Where You Park It,” the Elders originally planned on traveling internationally with their three children, Jackson (6), Maeve (5) and Margot (2), before embarking on a 50-state van adventure. They sold their house in Northwest Arkansas and had reservations to leave the U.S. last April for a year of international travel, but the pandemic put the plan on an indefinite hold. The U.S. banned travel to Europe the same day the Elders’ kids’ passports arrived. So they decided to buy a home on wheels. But nothing’s

easy in the time of COVID, and manufacturing shutdowns made finding the Mercedes Sprinter they wanted — the 2500 model weight class with a 170-inch wheelbase — a complicated search.

A dealership in Bentonville located one for them in Florida and it was shipped to Northwest Arkansas. It was the only 170-inch four-wheeldrive model the dealership could find in the entire country at the time.

The Elders initially thought they could handle the build-out themselves. They knew what specifications they wanted, and Matt is a residential home builder. Sarah follows other local home builders on Instagram and inquired about some cabinets she liked and thought they could have outsourced, and that’s how she was put in touch with Henson and Harris. Matt and Sarah realized after talking with them that they were “a lot more competent than we were to handle the electrical system and the plumbing and all that, so we just decided to do the whole build with them.”

What kind of specifications would a family of five need for life in an 85-square-foot van?

“We had a huge list, basically a PowerPoint of all the things we needed, but the main thing for me was the safety of the children,” Sarah said.

It was for that reason that they opted for the crew van as opposed to the cargo van because it had a factory-installed bench seat that was Department of Transportation-approved “so there weren’t any issues with safety with the car

“WE CAN JUST BUCKLE THE KIDS IN CAR SEATS AND TAKE OFF. IT’S NICE TO JUST BE ABLE TO GO WHEREVER YOU WANT TO GO ON A WHIM.” —SARAH ELDER

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COURTESY OF ELDER FAMILY

COURTESY OF ELDER FAMILY

ROLLING OUT: (clockwise from top) The Elder family of five chucked it all and hit the road. Open Road Campers of Fayetteville tricked out the family’s live-in van with a kitchen, bathrom and sleeping spaces. Travel nurse Mary Mickler finds that van life suits her perfectly. The Elder children are homeschooling as they travel the country. Custom van builders leave their mark.

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HAILEY SETLEY

seat hookups,” Sarah said. Also on their list: a sink, kitchen, stove, refrigerator, compost toilet, full shower and bunk beds.

Using a switch-operated system called the HappiJac lift, the kids’ bed can be raised all the way to the ceiling during the day. “The lower bed is the bench and table setup, which folds out at night.

“They were great to work with,” Sarah said of Open Road.

“We came with a pretty heavy wishlist and we got it all in here.”

Delays sourcing materials kept the Elders from hitting the road until November. After spending some time with family in Northwest Arkansas over the holidays, they spent midJanuary through February in Florida visiting Disney World and all the state’s national parks.

One of the perks, aside from seeing new places and terrains every day, Sarah said, is that they’re learning a lot.

“The kids are doing the Junior Ranger program at every national park. I’m helping them through the books and it’s very informative,” she said.

One of their favorite national parks they visited: Dry Tortugas, which consists of seven small islands about 70 miles west of Key West and can only be reached by ferry or seaplane.

The van’s four-wheel-drive was put to the test during the snowstorm that hit in February when the Elders were travelling back through Arkansas.

“I had no issues through it. [It’s] probably the best vehicle I’ve driven in snow,” Matt said.

The Elders were hard-pressed to find any tough challenges they’ve faced since taking off in their new home. Parking can be challenging if they’re in a major city. Sometimes they have to look around for diesel fuel. Overall, though, they love the van and van life. They don’t have to hook up to a sewer system to dump waste, they only have to fill up their water tank about once a week and their battery system and solar panels keep them from having to hook into the electrical grid. With an RV, it takes time to hook up or unhook and get everything ready to go, Sarah said. “We can just buckle the kids in car seats and take off. It’s nice to just be able to go wherever you want to go on a whim.”

The hardest part isn’t a technical component, but the lack of privacy, Sarah said. “It’s a lot of togetherness, but that’s good, that’s what we wanted. That’s the reason we’re doing this, so we can spend this time with our children while they’re young.”

“The kids are at the age where we thought we could do the homeschool with the older ones and still travel before they get too caught up in friends or sports or whatever,” Matt said.

The Elders plan on being on this current trip until November (see them dig up shark teeth and climb into lighthouses at eldersaway.com). They’ll come back to Arkansas for the holidays and then hit the road again for another four to six months, Matt said. The goal is to visit every state and national park in the country. “We have the van. We need to use it,” Sarah said. *** Mary Mickler’s first job out of nursing school was in the intensive care unit at Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville, where she started just a few months before the pandemic hit. She was there the night the hospital’s ICU was transformed into a COVID unit and worked constantly the next few months, doing night shifts and acquiring a lot of overtime hours. And while the experience of working on the front lines during a novel pandemic was at times “heavy,” she’s grateful for all that she learned. “It made me a better nurse,” she said.

While Mickler was in Fayetteville, she found herself drawn to the professional van conversions she was seeing on Instagram, and “started obsessively researching,” she said.

“I didn’t think I was going to be a travel nurse, honestly,” she said from a grocery store parking lot in Modesto,

California, when reached by phone. “I was like, ‘I’m tired of moving, and I’m ready to plant in a place and build deep friendships and just stay put.’ ” But not a lot of deep friendships were being built during a time of social distancing, and Mickler realized she could be a nurse while being paid to travel. She could work day shifts and visit the other 90% of the country she had yet to see.

While researching, she came across an Open Road rental that was for sale. She liked the price, so she looked them up and was shocked to find that they were located in Fayetteville.

“I was stoked because a lot of these van companies were in Utah and California and so far away,” she said. The van she was interested in wasn’t available, but Harris and Henson told her that if she bought a van, they’d build it out for her.

She decided on the Dodge Ram ProMaster. It was a little cheaper than the Mercedes Sprinter, she said. Much like the Elders’ experience, finding one wasn’t easy, but Mickler located a van in Bryant and had it delivered to Harris and Henson’s shop. Together they came up with a plan for the 75-square-foot living space. While Open Road executed the build, Mickler continued to work long hours to pay for it.

Mickler’s first contract was in Henderson, Nevada. On off days, she visited national parks like Zion in Utah, Death Valley in California and Valley of Fire in Nevada.

Between her previous contract in Barstow and her current one in Modesto, she spent nearly a month hanging out with a crew of rock climbers in Yosemite Valley.

“We’d all wake up and either go climb rocks or hike all day or spend the night in caves or go to random hidden waterfalls and springs. … That whole experience felt like paradise,” she said. One of Mickler’s reservations about living in a van was not being able to host like she would in a more traditional home space. But her van became the “Yosemite living room” among her new friends. “All my friends show up at my door for coffee [and] breakfast in the morning, we all go climbing in the day and at night we always come back for what we call family dinner. ... I wanted to be able to host and do things like that, but I had no idea how much I would actually use this space,” she said.

A nice endorsement for her custom build-out was the long pause when asked about challenges she’s faced on the road.

“I’m so low maintenance. It’s just like normal life living in a van,” she said. The van has a toilet, but she has to get creative sometimes to find a place to shower or park for the night. Those things, though, “have always worked out for me whether it’s showering at the hospital or finding a co-worker who I can pay to use their utilities …”

The hardest challenge is finding a hose to fill her 20-gallon water tank. Everything else is self-contained.

“I don’t want to hook something up,” she said.

Mickler has no plans to stop traveling any time soon and sees herself doing this for at least two more years. She wants to visit the Pacific Northwest but not quite yet. “A lot of people say that once travel nurses get up to Washington, they just resign contracts and just eventually get a staff job because it’s so great. So I’ve been trying to hold off,” she said. *** Harris said that since they did Mickler’s build-out, they’ve had other traveling nurses reach out to them. For those who want to try out van life or go on an adventure, renting is a more affordable option and a good place to start.

“It’s usually a really basic package,” Harris said, “but it kind of gives you a taste of what the possibilities are, and they’re super fun to take out for a weekend.

“One of the things, if you get into it and you buy a cargo van and you outfit it yourself, it’s almost a guarantee, even with all the information that’s out there now, you’re going to ... have things that you really like about it and then you’re going to have things that you wish you’d done differently. So it’s nice to start with a basic package, learn how you’re going to use it and then kind of dial it in from there.”

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ROLLING THROUGH THE VELVET DITCH TWENTY-FOUR HOURS IN OXFORD. WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY LINDSEY MILLAR

H

ow many cities were aspirationally founded to become a college town? That’s the story of Oxford, Mississippi, chartered 184 years ago and named after the British university city in hopes that the state of Mississippi would locate its first university there. Today, Oxford is home to around 28,000 people, and roughly 24,000 temporary residents who attend the University of Mississippi. That’s a dynamic present in many small college towns, but most similarly situated burgs get subsumed by their university. Oxford’s fortunes may be inextricably linked to Ole Miss and the money and people and culture it brings, but the town is more than the university.

Twenty years ago, my wife, Caroline, lived in Oxford for a summer and remembers the folks she ran with at the time describing the city as a bubble from which no one escaped. Oxonians have since improved the metaphor (or her memory is bad). Locals now call it the velvet ditch, a place you fall into and get comfortable.

On a Thursday and Friday in May, a week after graduation and just before freshman orientation, the allure was easy to recognize. The city is small and largely walkable. The downtown square, oriented around the county courthouse, remains the center of commerce. It’s perhaps the smallest city in the country with a celebrity chef — John Currence, a James Beard ARKANSASTIMES.COM

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Award winner, cookbook author and owner of City Grocery, Bouré, Big Bad Breakfast and Snackbar. There’s a vibrant music scene with longtime venue Proud Larry’s bringing in club acts and The Lyric theater and annual Double Decker Arts Festival attracting big names. Fat Possum Records, founded in Oxford in 1992, helped bring North Mississippi blues legends R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough to wide prominence. It’s since expanded its reach into indie rock, while local label Big Legal Mess now focuses on Southern music of all stripes.

Then there’s the literary draw. Of course, Oxford was famously the home of William Faulkner. Also, the late greats Willie Morris and Larry Brown. John Grisham lives there part time. Kiese Laymon, Beth Ann Fennelly, Tom Franklin and Chris Offutt all teach in the Ole Miss English Department. Jesmyn Ward used to.

All those people have written for the Oxford American magazine, which was founded in

ANTEBELLUM OXFORD: The J.E. Neilson Co. claims to be the oldest extant store in the South. Tour the grounds of Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s famous home place.

Oxford in 1992 and lasted there for almost 10 years until Grisham got tired of pumping money into it and it found new life in Little Rock and now in Conway. My first job after college was at the reborn magazine in Little Rock. Caroline accepted a position at the magazine while it was on its way out but still in Oxford. It’s where we met and the reason I’ve spent my professional life in journalism.

Until our recent trip, my memories of spending time in Oxford were old and booze colored, but I’d often thought of it dreamily and vaguely as the setting of the prologue to my adult life in which I played no part.

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motivation to visit. Also, it seemed like an ideal place to ease back into travel slowly: short drive, good food, easy pace.

The first thing we did was drive by the home, just off the square, where Caroline had rented a room from two biddies who were so old they declined to shop at one grocery store in town because it was a place “that weirdo” William Faulkner, dead since 1962, had frequented. The house was gone, replaced by new construction.

Oxford’s population has grown by at least 50% in the last decade and that’s led to the same sort of affordable housing crisis Fayetteville is grappling with. But as a tourist, wandering around the square and downtown neighborhoods, it was easy to be seduced by it all. There are many palatial Italianate and Victorian mansions on lots that could accommodate several football games at once.

It’s common even in smaller homes to spot that wavy window pane glass that suggests 19th century construction. There’s been a lot of infill in the square and nearby, but the new buildings, heavy on bricks and balconies, resemble the old.

We stayed in some of that new brick construction: the Graduate Oxford, a 136-room hotel just north of the square that opened in 2015. The decor is funky Southern school spirit.

Silhouettes of famous football parents Archie Manning, beloved Ole Miss quarterback of yore, and his wife, Olivia, a former homecoming queen, decorated our room, along with a

portrait of R.L. Burnside and Kenny Brown. You can borrow a cruiser bike from the front desk and must, regardless of where you’re staying, have a drink at The Coop, the rooftop bar that looks out onto the square.

Union troops burned much of downtown in 1864, but plenty of antebellum trees survive.

After driving from Little Rock through flat Delta farmland, Oxford was a sylvan oasis. On nearly every block is a majestic willow oak or modest skyscraper-sized magnolia. That’s not by happenstance. Oxford has a tree master plan, tree-related ordinances and even a city tree board. On the city’s website, you can find a map to identify every species of tree along the municipal right of way.

The Grove, the setting for the most celebrated campus tailgate party in the country, is probably the most well-known spot in town.

It’s named for a 10-acre clump of elm, walnut, oak, maple, magnolia and Southern catalpa trees that line the university lawn. Its rival, in terms of public recognition, is Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s former homeplace. The rowan is a mythical tree, which Faulkner chose for a name because it symbolizes security and peace. But real trees also star in the 4 landscaped acres surrounding the Greek Revival mansion. The walkway is lined with 100-year-old eastern red cedars, planted after a yellow fever epidemic because they were believed to cleanse the air.

The house was closed to tours because of the pandemic, but shuffling around the grounds

BLUES, BUMPS, BREAKFAST AND BIKES: (Left) The End of All Music has a deep selection of blues vinyl. (Below) The Creole Omelette at Big Bad Breakfast. At the Graduate, the front desk will loan you a bike.

and the ancient outbuildings on a cloudless day was a dream. Our only company were birds and a pair of young women picnicking with fresh cut flowers and champagne.

Currence, the local culinary star, owns perhaps the most in-demand balconies in town. His fine-dining restaurant City Grocery anchors one end of the square with a casual bar upstairs that has a separate entrance and is the longtime local hangout. Opposite sits Bouré, a more casual restaurant and bar that serves Creole-flavored bar food downstairs and beer and cocktails on the balcony. We got an early dinner at Bouré that started with cocktails. I sipped on a Lane Train (Four Roses bourbon, Cointreau, lemon and bitters) while I overheard a middle-aged man who looked like an off-brand Lane Kiffin successfully playing the name game with a server. “That’s what’s so great about Mississippi,” he said. “I mean aside from the obvious problems.”

(Laymon, a member of the UM English faculty with several acclaimed books, has written about his grandmother declining to visit him in Oxford, the memory of violence that accompanied James Meredith’s desegregation of Ole Miss in 1962 still fresh on her mind. You can still find bullet holes from white rioters on the outside of The Lyceum, the Greek Revival centerpiece of campus constructed just before the Civil War. Also, until very recently the university’s mascot was Colonel Reb, an old white guy in Confederate garb who looked like a caricature of a plantation owner. Etc.) Back at dinner, we got the special: pecancoated catfish on rice topped with chunks of perfectly cured bacon and a slightly creamy Cajun red sauce, and crab cakes with sweet potato fries and coleslaw. It looked like the same upscale bar slop that’s fairly ubiquitous, but it was all perfectly executed and delicious.

Afterward, we got beers upstairs at City Grocery, ARKANSASTIMES.COM

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where we saw one of the girls from the Rowan Oak picnic, still in her swimsuit, and a childhood friend of mine who’d attended Ole Miss and then returned to live. It’s a small town.

If you are in the market for a monogrammed Ole Miss polo shirt, many retail shops in downtown Oxford have you covered, including J.E. Neilson Co., a department store that opened in 1839 and bills itself as the oldest documented store in the South. There are also many, many places to buy short party dresses. For my shopping interests, Square Books is reason enough for a visit. Located in a historic twostory brick building on the square (natch), it’s surely the nicest bookstore in the South and so popular that it has three additional outposts downtown: Square Books Jr., a delightful and well-stocked children’s bookstore; Rare Square books, home of vintage collectibles and located above Square Books Jr.; and Off Square Books, seller of bargain and used books and the venue 46 JUNE 2021

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where, at least in normal times, Square Books hosts frequent author readings and events and produces Thacker Mountain Radio, a public radio show. The End of All Music, a second-floor record store on the square, is also a required stop for vinyl collectors.

The highlight of the trip, for me at least, came on our way out of town at Big Bad Breakfast, another Currence joint, this one located in a strip mall a short walk from downtown. It appears to be standard high-end decadent breakfast fare, but like our experience at Bouré, the ingredients and execution were just about flawless. I got the Creole omelette, impossibly fluffy and filled with “all of the chef’s favorite ingredients”: shrimp, andouille sausage, onions, tomatoes and cheddar and topped with tomato gravy and green onions. I got it with a perfect biscuit, a hashbrown cake, strong coffee and a Bloody Mary made from scratch. It carried me all the way through to dinnertime.

BLISS: Square Books (left) is probably the South’s best bookstore. A pocket park in Water Valley is a great spot to eat egg and olive salad from B.T.C. Old Fashioned Grocery.

DETOURS

Louisiana Purchase State Park I like poking along under the big sky of the Delta and watching the cropdusters and combines and emptiness roll by. But it’s easy to forget that land wasn’t always tamed. Or it was for us until we stopped at Louisiana Purchase State Park, about halfway between Clarendon and Marvell. The entirety of the park is a 950-foot-long boardwalk that snakes through a swamp as far as you can see of water tupelo, cypress, frogs, turtles and birdsong. It ends at a stone marker commemorating the point from which the Louisiana Purchase survey began.

Getting lost in the vastness of an inhospitable swamp and contemplating the charting of our wild, wild country is a necessary diversion to any road trip that takes you nearby.

Water Valley, Mississippi The housing shortage in Oxford has led many former residents to decamp to Water Valley, a former railroad depot that’s now home to some 3,300 people, where sprawling Victorian homes can be had far cheaper than in Oxford. The B.T.C. Old Fashioned Grocery is the central hub.

You can find fresh vegetables, meats and locally ground grits there, along with an adjoining cafe that sells fancy sandwiches at reasonable prices and down-home lunch specials. We stopped by after the cafe had closed, but happened to be there as Clarksdale’s Big River Bagels was dropping off a shipment. We ate everything bagels and a tub of B.T.C.’s homemade egg and olive salad in a nearby pocket park and watched Water Valley slowly pass by.

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SUPER DADS DADS WHO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

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IT’S A BIRD! IT’S A PLANE!

IT’S A...

Dads who make a difference.

BY KATHERINE WYRICK PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON

I

n honor of Father’s Day, we’re celebrating three dads who show up for their communities and their families. They’re devoted, engaged and civic-minded. But their greatest superpower? Being awesome parents!

When we talked to Bill Kopsky, he was working from home while his two sons, Izzy (10) and Elliott (8), quietly read a book and worked on a painting in the background. They are currently in virtual school but attend Gibbs Magnet Elementary in normal times. When I remarked upon the wholesomeness of the scene — I often park my son in front of a screen while working — Kopsky said that they limit screen time as best they can, though the pandemic has made that more challenging, especially since he and his wife — Liz Smith, a ceramic artist and professor at UCA — work full time.

He then went on to recount a story that parents frustrated with constantly negotiating screen time will appreciate: “When I was a kid, my mom and dad tried to limit our TV time. I had a bunch of siblings. At first they just told us not to do it, and of course we did it. My dad worked during the day, and my mom worked at night so slept a lot during the day. The first time they caught us watching TV, they hid the power cord.” His mother, however, was such a deep sleeper, she divulged where it was hidden. His parents then put the power cord under lock and key. His brother picked the lock. “I was 10. My dad came home, and we were all watching TV. He didn’t say a word; he just picked up the TV, went out the back door and dropped it in the backyard and it broke into pieces.” It was only years later that they got another one. That made an impression. “It was very dramatic.” Kopsky hasn’t taken such extreme measures with his own kids. Granted, there are fewer to wrangle. But, like their dad, they’re growing up with more bike rides and outdoor play and fewer TV shows and video games.

Kopsky grew up in Tulsa, one of five siblings, and moved to Little Rock in 1996 to work for the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, where he serves as executive director today.

We asked him how he instills a sense of social justice in his own kids and how he talks to them about tough issues. “It’s just part of our reality,” he said. “Both kids have gone up to the legislature or gone to community meetings with me since they were infants. So that’s just a normal part of their lives. Our members have been really gracious about putting up with them being at meetings.”

Both kids have taken naturally to activism. On his own accord, Izzy testified before the state House and Senate education committees for the legislation to extend recess. “He did great. I didn’t push him into that at all. He even wrote his

BILL AND HIS BOYS IZZY AND ELLIOTT — IN A RARE MOMENT NOT ON THEIR BIKES

(Continued on page 54) ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JUNE 2021 51

WE ARE MORE “Best Parent Ever ” moments .

Jump on a virtual storytime, take home a craft kit, or make learning fun (and easy) again with homework help programs and resources. All free with your library card so you can get back to being the “Best Parent Ever.”

Follow us on Facebook or visit www.SalineCountyLibrary.org to view full calendar.

Great Things Happening at LRSD

Building STRONG SCHOOLS and Even STRONGER COMMUNITIES

OPTIONS TO MEET EVERY NEED

Visit: LRSD.org – Student Registration (K-12) or LRSD.org/earlychildhood (Pre-K) Great THINGS are still happening at LRSD! The Little Rock School District is proud of its 3,500 dedicated professionals who remain committed to meeting the needs of each student, even during a pandemic. From rigorous academic engagement for those identified as gifted and talented to support for those facing learning, speech or physical challenges, LRSD — the state’s second largest district — offers unique, comprehensive educational approaches for pre-K to 12thgrade students.

LRSD takes pride in its highly qualified teachers — nearly half of all classroom teachers have a masters or doctoral degree and 155 have National Board Certification — among the most in the state. LRSD continues to operate the state’s only K-8 STEM campus, eight magnet schools and a uniquely-focused language and literacy elementary academy, and last year, continued to expand Little Rock West High School of Innovation, adding a 10th grade class.

Subsequent grades will be added each year for a 9-12 delivery. Little Rock Hall STEAM Academy was also introduced, enhancing its focus on science and engineering academies under the Academies of Central Arkansas (Ford NGL) umbrella. High school college preparatory programs, including pre-AP, AP, classes with local universities and the District’s 52 JUNE 2021

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EXCEL program, provide multiple options for families. These programs allow students to align their educational experience with their interests, preparing them for college and career and equipping them to meet the challenges of a global society. LRSD consistently places among the top tier of state schools with National Merit Semifinalists, as well as Commended, National Hispanic and AP Scholars.

LRSD is proud of its highly accomplished students and the community partnerships that enhance their educational experiences.

Students will continue taking their learning to the next level at the newly constructed careerfocused Little Rock Southwest High School.

LRSD is also the state’s largest provider of public preschool programs with certified teachers in every class. The District’s pre-K students continue to outperform students who do not use LRSD’s pre-K program in every skill area. The District maintains its mission to provide students with equitable access to educational opportunities, equipping them with what they need to succeed.

SAVVY kids PUBLISHER BROOKE WALLACE | brooke@arktimes.com EDITOR KATHERINE WYRICK | katherinewyrick@ arktimes.com SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE LESA THOMAS ART DIRECTOR KATIE HASSELL

FIND MORE AT SAVVYKIDSAR.COM

Originally from San Antonio, Gregory Hays landed in Little Rock, family in tow, just over 10 years ago from Washington state. As the housing manager of Our House, he runs the shelter and transitional housing programs. As a single dad, he works tirelessly to provide for his three kids. To that end, in addition to his full-time position at Our House, he also works night shifts at Esporta Fitness. At Our House he has a reputation for being positive and outgoing; his kids have inherited these traits and his strong work ethic. In conversation, it’s clear that Hays is one devoted, supportive dad.

His eldest daughter, Gabrielle (26), lives and works in Alabama, but Hays proves that parenting doesn’t end in adulthood or adhere to state lines. He continues to help guide and be there for her from afar as she navigates the working world. Ariel (21) is a senior at UCA with a double major in psychology and art. She’s considering pursuing her Ph.D., but Hays is gently encouraging her to get a masters and then reassess.

His youngest, Emmanuel, who soon turns 16, attends the Arkansas School for Math, Sciences and the Arts, a residential high school in Hot Springs for gifted students. When we spoke, Hays had just returned from dropping him off back at school. He applauds his son’s perseverance. “Here he was 15 year old, away from home for the first time, during the pandemic. It wasn’t easy,” Hays said, recalling his son’s first year. But Hays has also instilled in his kids the belief that they can do hard things and succeed. He and Emmanuel are already deep into the college search process. Emmanuel has his sights set on attending an Ivy League college, but regardless, intends to move out of state. “All my kids are smart,” Hays said. “But this kid is SO smart.”

Though Hays places a high value on education, he believes that many of life’s most valuable lessons are taught at home. He made it a priority to equip his children with life skills that would hold them in good stead as they transitioned to adulthood — something a lot of kids today don’t have.

“We taught the kids early on, you need to have an account and debit card,” he said. They also came up with creative ways to impart financial lessons that the kids would not soon forget. “We would go out to eat sometimes, and I’d make them pay. It helped them understand money and got them thinking.” They quickly learned to order off the kids’ menu if they were footing the bill.

“We never gave them money for grades, but we did give them allowance and work assignments to prepare them for life after school,” Hays said. He taught them about investing, managing money and credit. Hays was also adamant, however, that while they were students, that was to be their primary focus. “We told them, ‘Your job is school. As long as you’re working hard, we’ll support you, but if your demand for things outweighs what I feel is necessary, then you’re going to have to go out and get a job.’ ” In addition to learning to budget and be fiscally responsible, the kids learned early on how to do their own laundry, take care of themselves and cook (with varying degrees of success). Hays was quick to add, “I have to qualify that. Emmanuel is a great microwave cooker.” As for household chores, Hays explained to them, “We can help you, but we’re not your maids.”

From refereeing between the girls when they would fight over clothes to teaching teenagers how to drive, Hays has dealt with a wide variety of parenting issues during his time as a dad — and he’s done it with grace and steadfastness.

The result is three kids who have seamlessly transitioned, or are in the process of transitioning, into life beyond home. And isn’t that what we all hope for as parents? That we’ll be able to teach them well enough, and raise them right enough, to someday live without us?

GREGORY HAYS — ON THE CAMPUS OF OUR HOUSE ARKANSASTIMES.COM

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(Continued from page 51)

GUY CHOATE — CHECK OUT CHOATE’S BLOGS AND OTHER WRITINGS AT GUYCHOATE.COM. IT’S WHERE HE DOCUMENTS HIS LIFE AS A DAD AND CITIZEN OF THE WORLD

Guy Choate took a circuitous route to fatherhood — one that landed him back in his home state, not his intended destination but one that ended up being just the right place to start a family. “We love Little Rock and have roots here now,” he said in a recent conversation from his Hillcrest home.

Not long after his return, Choate — who has an MFA from the University of New Orleans and is a writer and blogger — noticed that though there was a supportive literary community in Central Arkansas, there wasn’t an easy way to connect writers directly with their readers. He set out to right that. The result was the Argenta Reading Series, which he founded in 2017. Pre-pandemic, it offered free monthly readings at Argenta United Methodist Church. “I’m a big proponent of making the community what you want it to be,” Choate said.

In addition to being a writer and director of the Argenta Reading Series, Choate is also an army veteran and communications manager at Garver, an engineering firm. But after many years of adventures and misadventures, he’s discovered his most cherished role to date — that of dad of Gus (and baby on the way) and husband of Liz. Gus just turned 4, and by press time might have been joined by a baby brother. When they first informed him that he was going to be a big brother, Gus was “anti-anything baby, not just the baby brother on the way, but all babies. Thankfully, he’s starting to come around.”

Choate grew up in Beebe and, to the surprise of his friends and family, joined the army at 17.

In 2003, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina 54 JUNE 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

where he served as a NATO peacekeeper. Then in 2005, he set out to walk across the country, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. He ended up hitchhiking much of it and amassing a collection of wild stories that could (and do) fill a book that’s still in revisions. “I got the mid-life crisis out of the way early on,” joked Choate.

“People always said parenting was hard, and I never believed them, but, I have to say, parenting knocked me on my ass,” Choate said, laughing. “I was not prepared for just how much it would alter our lives.” But can anything really prepare you for the joys and challenges of parenthood? It’s a seismic shift — and also an experience that causes you to reflect on your relationship with your own parents.

Choate lost his dad in 2017 just months before his son was born, “which was really hard.” He found himself in the position of processing his feelings about his own dad while becoming one. “My dad was a politician, and he was a great communicator, but he was not good at intimacy. I never knew where I stood with him. I always wanted his approval, and I never knew if I had it.” Choate has explored some of these issues in his blog, where he writes eloquently about fatherhood among other things. He started his photoa-day blog over 10 years ago, whose significance has become more apparent and poignant after his father’s death and the birth of his son.

Right before his death, his dad’s house burned to the ground, taking with it any records that could help Choate gain more insight into his father’s world. “[The blog is] part of my legacy, part of the kind of parent I want to be. I want them to know who I was through and through so they don’t have to question like I question.”

It’s what any child wants from a parent — no matter how old they are — to be seen and accepted.

Right now, Gus is a guy who loves dinosaurs, animals and insects. A guy who likes to take leisurely strolls with his parents in hopes of spotting these things. He likes sleepovers at his grandparents’ house. He likes to let his imagination run wild. And his dad is there — present — for all of it.

own testimony. ... We don’t push it on them like a doctrine, but they’re both curious kids, well-read kids … and the [Little Rock School District] has been really good about teaching about Black history and social justice, particularly at Gibbs. It’s a consistent part of the curriculum.

They’ve picked it up from there.

They have a diverse set of friends.

It’s just how it is.”

Last year, they were talking about the pandemic, and the boys decided they wanted to do something to help. They were, in part, inspired by Captain Tom Moore, or “Captain Tom,” the British Army officer who raised money for charity in the run-up to his 100th birthday by walking around his garden.

“So, we talked about it a little and together came up with the idea of doing a bikeathon and donating the money to the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance.

I was amazed. I didn’t know how it would go, but Izzy ended up riding 67 miles, and Elliot rode 32.7. We practiced for it, and they ended up raising $13,000.”

Kopsky, a life-long, seasoned cyclist, takes his boys mountain biking once or twice a week.

Their favorite place is Mt. Nebo, followed by Northwoods in Hot Springs, the new trails at Pinnacle Mountain State Park and Rattlesnake Ridge. He taught them on strider bikes at a very young age and advises bypassing training wheels altogether. “I could get most kids riding a bike in 5 minutes,” he said with confidence. They also enjoy camping and hiking and, prepandemic, liked taking art and theater classes at the Arts Center.

“Arkansas is such a beautiful place, you gotta take advantage of that stuff.” And they do.

The boys have also been contemplating another fundraiser, though it hasn’t taken shape as of yet. With their energy, empathy and passion (for cycling and social issues) — and with the example set by their dad — there’s no limit to how far they’ll go.

STARTING IN THE 2021-2022 SCHOOL YEAR, the Pulaski County Special School District (PCSSD) is opening a new virtual academy for students interested in continuing their education online. DRIVEN Virtual Academy (DVA) will be a 100% virtual school available for students K-12.

DVA will provide flexibility in coursework with selfpaced options, mentoring programs, and curriculum delivery flexibility. Students will be able to work at their own pace to best fit their educational needs in order to

involved in extracurricular activities and desire a more

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student mentor program which will pair students with

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a teacher to be a point of contact and help develop

activities upon meeting academic requirements.

and accomplish individual growl plans. The mentors will fill any gaps and maintain parent and community

the virtual academy, provides a school of opportunity.

relationships. Students with the online curriculum will

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curriculum, along with face-to-face interaction

Students in homeschool or who are homebound due to health or social-emotional issues could benefit from an online learning environment. DVA will also serve students whose families must travel often or are

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with teachers and mentors to deliver a personalized learning environment for each student.

More information about both platforms and applications are available at pcssd.org.

ABOUT PCSSD

Pulaski County Special School District spans more than 600 square miles in central Arkansas and requires highly skilled and passionate personnel to adapt educational policies and personalization to 25 schools. Every school is accredited by the Arkansas State Board of Education. PCSSD has served schools across Pulaski County since July 1927.

PCSSD is committed to creating a nationally recognized school district that assures that all students achieve at their maximum potential through collaborative, supportive and continuous efforts of all stakeholders.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JUNE 2021 55

CULTURE

DIFFERENT DRUMS A FAYETTEVILLE COUPLE TURNS HARDWOODS INTO FINE PERCUSSION INSTRUMENTS.

BY LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK PHOTOGRAPHY BY HUTCH AND FUTCH

56 JUNE 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

DRUM-MAKING DUO: Darian Paige and Zach Coger.

S

ay you’re a reporter who doesn’t know a rack tom from a tomcat, or a snare drum from a sugarplum. There’s a rare source in Arkansas for the percussion-ignorant: Buffalo Drum Co. in Fayetteville, where Zach Coger and Darian Paige labor in a warehouse across the street from a brewery to build drums from hardwoods turned on a 1918 lathe.

Funk Factory musician and Smoothman Music Production owner Anthony Ball has a Buffalo Drum snare drum, and here’s how he would describe it to another drummer: His snare — “the drum you dance to” — is a musician’s “one-stop shop” thanks to Buffalo’s craftsmanship: Ball said he can tune it high for jazz, a “low boogie” for Southern rock; a middle pitch for gospel tunes. The sounds that the wooden — and not wood veneer — drums make are “authentic,” and Ball said he’s so “hooked” he hopes to buy a whole (sort of pricey) kit.

“I was shocked he could do that with scraps of wood,” Ball said of Coger’s work, and also surprised that the business was right there in Fayetteville.

Over at his shop, thumping on a shell and turning screws to change the tension and pitch on a drumhead, Coger explained how drums are tuned to a reporter who didn’t know that drums were tuned. “The shell has a pitch, it resonates at a certain pitch, that note you’re hearing,” Coger explained. The tighter the grain of wood, the higher the possible pitch.

Coger and Paige make every bit of their drums, right down to the brass lugs holding the tension rods. Beautiful as well as giving a good sound, Buffalo drums are constructed of 24 beveled staves of Ozark hardwoods — maple, walnut, cherry and oak — in the manner of a bucket or a banjo. Unlike veneer-sided drums, which are glued layers, the 3/4-inch wood staves allow for a richer resonance, Coger and Paige said. And because variations in wood mean variations in sound, “we typically try to make ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JUNE 2021 57

“BECAUSE VARIATIONS IN WOOD MEAN VARIATIONS IN SOUND, “WE TYPICALLY TRY TO MAKE ENTIRE DRUM KITS OUT OF ONE TREE.” ­ —ZACH COGER

58 JUNE 2021

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entire drum kits out of one tree,” Coger said, such as the black walnut used in the kit that The Cate Brothers played on the main stage at the Fayetteville Roots Festival in the before times, in August 2019. The drum kit — rack toms, bass drum and snare drum — was the first full kit assembled, serial No. 1 in the Buffalo Native Series. Another kit went to Jake Lynn, drummer for Texas country singer Jason Boland; the second, made of cherry, was being made for Northwest Arkansas jazz musician Darren Novotny. Six more kits were on order.

Coger, who said he was “obsessed with drums” as a kid, played with blues-rock band Shawn James and the Shapeshifters for a year. Then, as a teacher at the School of Rock in Bentonville and Rogers, he started bringing old drums to life, as he put it, working out of 200 square feet in a shed behind his house. Paige, who is also Coger’s partner in life, started working with him when she tired of the restaurant business. She gets a lot of kidding — “You can use a hammer?”

— from people not used to seeing a woman in a drum-making shop, but her grandfather was a woodworker and she is “comfortable” there. In the four years since Buffalo Drum was established, Coger and Paige have turned out around 60 drums, they estimate.

Some of Buffalo Drum’s wood comes from cherry cut 70 years ago; it was given to Coger and Paige by a furniture maker. Paige said it

takes about eight to 12 weeks to make a drum.

Weeks must pass between cutting and stavemaking for the wood “to reach equilibrium,” Coger explained. The final product is oiled.

Affixed to the drums are metal Buffalo badges made at Shire Post Mint, another iconoclastic Arkansas business, located just up the road in Springdale.

A full kit is $2,500; snares alone are $850.

Buffalo also makes custom drums in what it calls an heirloom series, which cost a bit more.

The COVID-19 pandemic has almost stilled live drum beats on stages across the state, and at one point Coger and Paige thought they might have to give up their fledgling business. “Our business model is based off musicians having money to spend,” Coger said. But, he said, he’s been lucky to have “good customers” who have helped out, giving Buffalo repair business and new drum orders that the buyers could have put off to another time.

Too, Coger said, he and Paige work in a process he calls “slow-made,” attending to detail and constantly tweaking their process.

That means that even in a normal year, Buffalo Drum is not turning out drum kits left and right.

But in a period of even slower-made, Coger remains optimistic. Though the year has been trying, “We’re feeling good about the future,” he said, which will include expanding the drum lessons they hold in the shop.

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Call 501-375-2985 ask for Luis or send your quote request by email at: luis@arktimes.com ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JUNE 2021 59

FOOD& DRINK HISTORIC PROPERTY: The Grumpy Rabbit is located in a former mercantile designed by famed archtiect Charles Thompson and built in 1905.

T

LONOKE COUNTY’S FINEST THE GRUMPY RABBIT IS DESTINATION DINING.

BY RHETT BRINKLEY PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON

60 JUNE 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

here’s a fantastic new restaurant in Central Arkansas, and it isn’t located in the Heights, Hillcrest, SoMa or Argenta.

It’s a fun field trip distance away — about 30 miles east of Little Rock in historic downtown Lonoke, a city of fewer than 5,000 people — where its native owner Gina “Gigi” Cox can quickly name off every restaurant in town that’s not fast food.

Cox grew up in Lonoke and later moved to Memphis, where she stayed for 31 years. Five years ago, she moved back to Lonoke with her husband, Jim Wiertelak, and noticed that the downtown historic area of Lonoke was deteriorating.

“It was just a heartbreaker,” she said. Once she moved back, she and Wiertelak started paying attention to the reasons they’d visit Little Rock or North Little Rock, and it was almost always to visit restaurants. The idea behind The Grumpy Rabbit was to provide locals with a place to eat and connect, but the couple harbored dreams of it becoming a destination restaurant, even an anchor for the revitalization of downtown Lonoke.

This is both Cox and Wiertelak’s first time owning a restaurant. Cox worked in finance and human resources for 25 years, and Wiertelak served as chief operating officer of an insurance brokerage company.

“We have no idea what we’re doing in the restaurant industry,” Cox said. “We just hire people smarter than us.”

They’ve certainly hired a capable executive chef in James Hale, who was the owner/chef of Acadia in Hillcrest from 1999-2015. Hale was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2008 in the “Chef of the South” category, and he was working at the Capital Hotel up until the shutdown last March.

The name Grumpy Rabbit is a combination of Wiertelak’s grandpa name, “Grumpy” — Cox assured me that no one who actually knows him

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The two-story red brick building that houses the restaurant at 105 Front St. is situated in a downtown square that looks forgotten. One of my dining companions compared the new eatery to a scene in the movie “Blast from the Past” in which one piece of the town is in color and the rest is in black and white. The building was designed by Charles L. Thompson and built in 1905 to be a mercantile. Thompson designed myriad Arkansas buildings that are now on the National Historic Registry, including Little Rock City Hall, the Washington County Courthouse in Fayetteville and the North Little Rock Post Office in Argenta (now the Argenta Branch Library).

When Cox was growing up, the building housed Lonoke Abstract Company, and it’s housed different businesses over the years: Pickin’ and Grinnin’ Flea Market, a barber shop and a comedy club.

Cox and Wiertelak bought the building in December of 2019 and expected the renovations to take six months. But the pandemic hit, causing delays, and the project was bigger in scope than Cox had imagined. Judging by the before and after photos, it looks like a complete overhaul and a restaurant renovation success story made for reality television. The architect in charge of the project, Ryan Biles, a Lonoke native and city alderman, is the director of development for Thrive, a nonprofit design firm based in Helena-West Helena. The Thrive team did all the branding, graphic design related to the Grumpy Rabbit logo and the typeface. Biles’ wife, Natalie, and partner Stacey Breezeel of Shine Interior Design Studios of Lonoke handled the interior design. “There was really a clear vision from the beginning on the part of Gina and Jim as to how they wanted the restaurant to be a welcome spot for our whole community —

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62 JUNE 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

RHETT BRINKLEY

KEESHA BASS

LUXE IN LONOKE: (clockwise from top) The Grumpy Rabbit serves American standards like the club. Call ahead to reserve a patio spot. Meals come with roasted carrots, a nod to the theme, and “The Board” features rabbit sausage. An aquarium in the dining room pays homage to Lonoke’s own Pool Fisheries Inc., one of the largest goldfish hatcheries in the world.

basically just kind of space for their hospitality to be extended to the whole town and visitors who come through Lonoke,” Biles said. “So our goal was to really just put their personality in the design, and their vision to do an adaptive reuse project in this historic building was something that spoke to our hearts as designers.”

When Cox and I spoke, she’d just signed the papers to have the restaurant listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s already on the state’s historic registry.

The restaurant opened Jan. 19 of this year to 66% capacity. Cox said they installed air purifiers on all of the heating, ventilation and air conditioning units. Dividers were placed between tables and the restaurant closed between the hours of 2-4 p.m. every day for cleaning. Cox said they didn’t publish the opening date in January because they just wanted to try it out for a day or two. She said that waiters were successfully flagging down passing motorists to come in and eat. Soon after, the snowstorm hit in February and they closed for 10 days and were forced to cancel a big event she had planned for Valentine’s Day. She said that things have really picked up since the weather warmed up and people started getting vaccinated. Masks are no longer required for customers at The Grumpy Rabbit and Cox said they just recently made maskwearing optional for employees. “Some do, some don’t,” she said. If you prefer to dine outside, call for seating; the patio availability on OpenTable is unreliable.

One nod to Lonoke you’ll notice among the modern lighting and hardwood floors: a goldfish aquarium separating the back of the bar from the front room dining area. Lonoke is home to one of the largest goldfish hatcheries in the world, Pool Fisheries Inc. The prominent wall feature above the fish tank is made of reclaimed materials salvaged from the demolition of the older interior parts of the building — not from the original build, Biles said, but from the 1930s and ’40s.

The “Supper Menu” is a blend of American fare with some Cajun influences, fitting because Hale’s culinary career started in New Orleans.

We started off with “The Board” ($20), which featured grilled rabbit sausage links with fennel and onion confit, a thick slice of grilled Petit Jean bologna topped with Guinness honey mustard, a house-made savory cheesecake topped with a tomato puree, a smoky egg salad with bacon, crostinis and pickled veggies. The highlight of the board was the rabbit sausage.

My friend, impressed, said it wasn’t gamey but obviously homemade, and that he’s never had sausage quite like it.

Our waitress was friendly and knowledgeable about the menu, specials and cocktails, even though she wasn’t old enough to serve them.

(She informed us that she’d just recently attended her senior prom.) We ordered one of the specials, the “Redneck Surf ’n’ Turf” — a ribeye topped with crawfish and a creole cream sauce. From the menu we tried the blackened redfish ($22), with cheddar grits, crawfish and tomato creole cream sauce. We enquired about the short ribs, but they weren’t available that evening, so we settled for the braised chicken thighs ($16) with herbed demi-glace served on a creamy leek orzo pasta.

The ribeye was cooked medium rare consistently throughout, and the crawfish cream sauce complemented it nicely. My friend who ordered the redfish said it was some of the best fish he’s ever had, and it sparked a debate between him and his girlfriend as to which redfish was better, Cypress Social or The Grumpy Rabbit. The chicken thighs were good, but the star of the dish was the creamy leek orzo pasta. Each entree came with a grilled carrot.

The dinner menu also features a nice blend of salads and sandwiches, all under $15.

For dessert we went for the chocolate sheet cake ($6). The cake was fluffy and fresh, topped with a layer of icing about a quarter-inch thick, almost like a creme brulee crust but thicker and chilled.

Cox said she thinks word of mouth is starting to spread. She often asks where diners are from, and there’s a map in the restaurant with pins tacked on to guests’ hometowns. She said visitors have come from Little Rock, Conway, Cabot, Searcy and Lake Village. She’s also met travelers from Dallas, Michigan and a couple relocating from North Carolina to Montana.

The Grumpy Rabbit’s Mother’s Day brunch was the busiest brunch they’ve had since opening.

Wiertelak wanted to do something for all the moms, so Cox contacted a florist in town who made up 80 bud vases with roses for all the mothers. The moms also received chocolatecovered strawberries served in carrot-shaped boxes.

I told Cox that The Grumpy Rabbit is one of the first restaurants I’ve visited since getting vaccinated and started venturing out again. She shared that her father is a part of a longstanding McDonald’s breakfast crew that would meet for coffee at 7:30 a.m. before the pandemic shut it down.

“After they all got double-vaccinated, I was setting up the bar upstairs with Grumpy, and 12 of the McDonald’s crew came in and ate in the conference room, which we named ‘Randy’s Room’ after my deceased brother. And I was sitting there and my dad and all of his friends — who are all in their 70s and 80s — were laughing and carrying on, and I said [that] this just makes all this construction and everything we’ve been through … worthwhile … I love being able to have a place for people to come.”

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LIVE TRIVIA EVERY TUESDAY AT 6 P.M. 1316 MAIN ST. • (501) 372-9990 ARKANSASTIMES.COM

JUNE 2021 63

THE ARKANSAS TIMES MEDICAL CANNABIS WELLNESS EXPO Come learn about medical marijuana and its potential health benefits.

AUGUST 28 • 9AM-5PM ALBERT PIKE MEMORIAL TEMPLE 712 SCOTT ST, LITTLE ROCK

ADMISSION IS $10.

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Must be 21 or over to attend Event Sponsor

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Other speakers include:

DR. BRIAN NICHOL

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An expert panel of local dispensary managers, industry experts and CATHIE HIEGEL research & education specialist.

Marijuana is for use by qualified patients only. Keep out of reach of children. Marijuana use during pregnancy or breastfeeding poses potential harms.

Marijuana is not approved by the FDA to treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of marijuana.

64 JUNE 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

BRIAN CHILSON

MARGARITA MADNESS

Y

ou snooze you lose, margarita fans. After a year of cocktail kits to-go and socially distant backyard hangouts, Arkansas Times readers are apparently ready to mix and mingle. More than one thousand of them scooped up all the tickets to the Arkansas Times Margarita Festival, presented by Leyenda del Milagro Tequila, more than a month before the event.

Here’s what you’re missing: From 6-9 p.m., Friday, June 18, at the River Market Pavilions, guests will get to sample inventive takes on the classic cocktail from Bar Louie, Big Whiskey’s, Black Apple Crossing, Ciao Baci, Copper Grill, Copper Mule Table & Tap, EJ’s Eats and Drinks, Graffiti’s Italian Restaurant, Hill Station, JJ’s Grill, La Terraza Rum & Lounge, Lucky’s Sports Bar & Grill, Midtown Billiards, Red Moon Tavern, Rock ’n’ Roll Sushi, Sauced Bar and Oven, Skinny J’s, The Hangout and Willy D’s. Each attendee will get

to vote for their favorite ’rita, and at the end of the night, we’ll crown the best of the fest. Food will be available to purchase from Low Ivy Catering and La Terraza Rum and Lounge.

Want to make sure you don’t miss out on future events? Step one, go to arktimes.com and sign up for our events newsletter (may as well sign up for our Daily Update and Weekly Bites newsletters while you’re at it). Step two, go ahead and get your tickets for our next blowout, Arkansas Times Pig & Swig, presented by Saracen Casino Resort. It’s happening from 6-9 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 19, at the River Market Pavilions. Tickets are $25 and entry gets you high-end whiskey tastings from Knob Creek and samples of pork-based delicacies from 15 of Central Arkansas’s finest restaurants. Reserve your spot at centralarkansastickets.com.

We’ve got many more events planned but not yet announced, so stay vigilant, readers.

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JUNE 2021 65

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JUNE 2021 67

DRUGS

THE ANTIMEDICATION MEDICATION

COURTESY OF MARK HOLAWAY

KETAMINE TREATMENT FOR DEEP DEPRESSION RISING IN ARKANSAS.

BY JACQUELINE FROELICH

LOOKING UP: Former firefighter Mark Holaway (pictured with Coco, the family cat) beat intractable depression with prescription ketamine.

M

ark Holaway abruptly ended his 20-year career as a paramedic and firefighter after suffering a breakdown and being diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

Decades of responding to horrific fires, destroyed lives and property, mixed up with unresolved personal trauma, had buried him into what felt like inextricable depression. “It feels like you’re trapped in a nightmare,” he said.

He sought cognitive therapy, which helped him to learn a new way of thinking. But it didn’t help resolve his chronic despair. That’s when his therapist asked him to consider ketamine therapy.

Years back while working as a paramedic, Holaway had injected ketamine — a widely used inexpensive surgical anesthetic — into critically injured people. “I would administer it for extreme pain to safely help accident victims disassociate from their physical injuries — putting them in a far better place,” Holaway said.

But he’d never heard of ketamine being used to treat depression.

After an especially bad episode, Holaway decided to give it a shot. His therapist referred him to Dr. Kathleen Wong, a psychiatrist who operates an outpatient ketamine therapy clinic in Fayetteville, part of a group mental health practice called Bridges to Wellbeing.

Holaway said the treatment lifted him out of 68 JUNE 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

profound suffering. “I hadn’t been in that safe of a space since I was a young child,” he said.

A neurology fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and an American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology Diplomate, Wong is among the first physicians in Arkansas to pioneer the use of ketamine therapy to improve mental health. She started offering the treatment more than five years ago. “I base my ketamine infusion protocol on those developed by the National Institute of Mental Health,” she said. “I offer ketamine infusions for refractory, or treatment-resistant, depression, as well as anxiety disorders.”

Ketamine hydrochloride was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1970 for use as an anesthetic agent. But more physicians are administering it off-label to treat psychiatric disorders.

After assessing needs and determining proper dosage based on weight, Wong settles patients into one of several private infusion suites. “My nurse starts an IV while the patient sits quietly in a recliner with an ambient spa playlist on headphones, wearing a sleep mask,” she explained. Treatments last around 40 minutes.

Patients never lose consciousness. Some may experience unusual thoughts, euphoria or outof-body experiences. They may see bright colors or unusual visions. Side effects may include a slight rise in blood pressure and wooziness or nausea, which can be treated with medication, Wong said, and quickly subside. Patients are

advised to not drive for 24 hours post treatment.

Wong typically prescribes six low-dose infusions over several weeks. Patients report rapid improvements in mood, sleep, social engagement and appetite. Ketamine infusion may also relieve self-destructive thinking.

“What has been exciting and promising is research out of Europe [showing ketamine] to be very powerful in helping people with alcohol misuse disorders,” Wong said. “And there’s some fascinating research with borderline personality disorder and autism spectrum disorder — although that’s tentative.”

Despite promising research, Wong said it’s unlikely that ketamine will win FDA approval for psychiatric treatment in the United States.

That’s because such approval would require expensive and extensive studies subject to publication and peer review. The U.S. patent on ketamine expired in 2002, so costly clinical trials for the compound won’t yield any financial returns on pharmaceutical investment. “The vial of ketamine is generic,” Wong said. “There is not money to be made in researching it.”

But two years ago, Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, won FDA approval for Spravato, an esketamine nasal spray for treatment-resistant depression.

Generic ketamine contains both R-ketamine and S-ketamine enantiomers (or mirror image molecules). Janssen isolated the S-ketamine, or esketamine in order to patent and monetize Spravato, one of the first antidepressant drugs

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THE SCRIPT: Dr. Kathleen Wong deploys IV infusions of ketamine to help patients form new brain connections to overcome depression.

CHRONIC MENTAL ILLNESS, LIFE STRESS, CHEMICAL OR SUBSTANCE DEPENDENCE CAN IMPAIR BRAIN FUNCTION. KETAMINE HAS BEEN SHOWN TO PROMOTE BOTH NEUROGENESIS — THE FORMATION OF NEW BRAIN NEURONS — AND SYNAPTOGENESIS, THE FORMATION OF NEW CONNECTIONS BETWEEN NEURONS. 70 JUNE 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

to come on the market in decades. The drug is typically administered in a clinical setting twice a week for the first month, then maintained once a week, or as needed. As an FDA-approved treatment, Spravato may be covered by medical insurance, depending on the provider.

Spravato is taken in combination with oral antidepressants, according to the label.

Dr. Eric Ross, a psychiatry resident at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital, said Spravato’s high price is a barrier.

The drug costs around $300 per dose, and would need to fall to $140 or less per dose to be cost-effective, he calculated.

Scant research exists comparing nasal esketamine to its parent IV compound ketamine, due to the latter’s generic status. But according to National Institute of Mental Health research, a six-ketamine IV infusion series has been shown to have more than a 70% success rate in the treatment of major depression.

A single IV infusion of ketamine typically will cost between $400 and $800, depending on the clinic, administered on average six times over a span of weeks. Unlike with Spravato, insurance providers do not reimburse for ketamine infusion therapy because it’s deemed experimental and off-label.

So how does it work? Chronic mental illness, life stress, chemical or substance dependence can impair brain function. Ketamine has been shown to promote both neurogenesis — the formation of new brain neurons — and synaptogenesis, the formation of new connections between neurons. “These effects can be seen within the brain within 110 minutes of the first infusion,” Wong said, “and a series of six can set that person in a whole new place from a structural standpoint.”

A report published two years ago in Yale Medicine magazine referred to ketamine as an “anti-medication” medication. Conventional antidepressant drugs slowly release chemicals such as serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine providing relief over time. Because ketamine has been shown to prompt formation of new neural connections, it may offer a more permanent solution. Ketamine may make the brain more adaptable and able to create new pathways, giving patients the opportunity to develop more positive thoughts and behaviors.

More than a half-dozen clinics in Arkansas offer off-label ketamine infusion therapy for depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, postpartum depression, bipolar

disorder and pain. The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock started offering ketamine treatment at its Psychiatric Research Institute eight years ago. Dr. Jeffrey Clothier, institute director, described ketamine as “a remarkable addition to our armamentarium.”

Still, the drug has its detractors. Ketamine has a decades-long history as an underground club drug. Nicknamed “Special K,” users either snort the white powdery compound or inject it. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, ketamine acts on brain receptors to cause dissociative states, hallucinations and delirium. Illegal use of ketamine in high doses can impair motor function, trigger high blood pressure and may cause respiratory failure.

Increasing availability of illegal opioid drugs in the 2000s led to a decline in recreational ketamine use, just as its clinical psychiatric benefits were beginning to be seriously studied.

Those benefits were a life changer for Sarah James, a 50-year-old writer in Northwest Arkansas who opted to not use her real name here to protect her identity. She is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. “It’s like extreme waves of depression, darkness and suicidal ideations, combined, for me, with agitation, extreme anxious feelings, like I have to do something,” she said.

James tried various psychiatric meds, which didn’t help. “I was in a dangerous place,” she said. “I had made plans to burn all my possessions, ramping up to attempting suicide again.”

That was until James’ psychotherapist referred her to Dr. Wong. “It’s an amazing experience,” she said about her first ketamine infusion. “It’s sort of like a hallucinogenic high, and it has the quality of a sweeping uplift. Right from the start.”

After her first treatment she returned home to her family, who were hosting out-of-town guests. “Normally I would seclude myself in my room,” she said. “It would have been too much stimulation, thrown me into a bad spinout.”

This time, though, James said she spent the evening cross-legged on the living room floor, chatting with everyone. “I wasn’t jubilant, but I was happy and engaged,” she said.

That was in late 2017. James continues with occasional booster infusions and recommends ketamine therapy to anyone who is dangerously depressed. “I honestly don’t think I would be walking around on the planet Earth if not for

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ketamine,” James said. “I tried meds for 15 years, like many bipolar people. The despair starts to emerge when you try yet another thing that doesn’t work. It’s cumulative. It’s horrible. I wasn’t functioning.”

Retired firefighter Mark Holaway said ketamine saved his life as well. His mind started working again once he started treatments, which was a challenge in itself, he said. “After suffering with PTSD for so long, it was disorienting, unfamiliar.” Processing treatment outcomes with his ketamineinformed psychotherapist helped him sort out the experience. Looking back now, Holaway said, he’s surprised by how far he’s come. “I didn’t understand the depth of where I was until I was out of that hole.”

Compounding pharmacies are increasingly offering prescription generic ketamine in troches (fast-dissolving lozenges), tablets and intranasal sprays to treat depression and pain.

To help save IV infusion treatment costs, Holaway said his primary care physician suggested he try a compounded ketamine nasal spray dispensed by Westside Health Mart Pharmacy in Springdale. “A month’s supply, which provides up to five sprays per day, costs around $45,” pharmacist and owner John Ragan said. At first Holaway used the spray once a day. “I was doing that for a while,” he said, “but with time I was needing less and less, and less and less.”

Since his medical retirement from firefighting, Holaway operates an independent remodeling and building company. He practices yoga, meditation and breathwork to alleviate stray PTSD symptoms.

“But if I have a stressful day, or stress insult, and my nervous system doesn’t feel balanced, I will take a small dose of ketamine before bed and will wake up in the morning, reset.”

Holaway said insurance providers for first responders in Arkansas need to be convinced about the benefits of psychiatric ketamine treatment. “The rigors of my job almost cost me my life,” he said. “I am convinced that ketamine is one of the cheapest options for treating PTSD. The money I invested was the best money I ever spent. It increased my productivity, my interactions with my family and community, tremendously.”

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THE OBSERVER

JUST SOUTH OF GOTHAM ...

W

hile The Observer has no cape, radioactive spider bite or fetching mask, Yours Truly is no stranger to the joys and burden of having a Secret Identity known to only a few — or, for that matter, using the element of stealth and surprise in the eternal struggle for truth, justice and the American way.

Given that, we have been both amused and emboldened recently to learn that, for reasons unknown, North Little Rock appears to be teeming with a colorful ecosystem of real-life superheroes.

Rest easy, Citizens of Dogtown, knowing that MasterLegend, ShadowVision, Tothian — and possibly several other heroes who haven’t perfected their look yet enough for Instagram — are protecting your fair city. Maybe a few supervillains, too. No foolin’. You can find them on Facebook if you dare visit Silicon Valley’s most fetid digital hive of scum and villainy.

They’re not just sitting around lint-rolling their capes and scoring cool points from their homemade outfits on Tha ’Gram, either. They’re out there fighting the good fight!

Our favorite we’ve discovered so far is ShadowVision, Defender of Argenta. His outfit looks to be a future anime-based totalitarian government’s secret police uniform, complete with twin katanas. ShadowVision has a Facebook account that is seriously a true joy. Through that Facebook page, in recently months, ShadowVision has: *Threatened a League of Shadows-sized ass whoopin’ on Little Rock’s deadly serial killer, 74 JUNE 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

who ShadowVision claims is monitoring the official ShadowVision Facebook page. *Crowdfunded for a Scion XD, a compact car that hasn’t been manufactured since 2014, which ShadowVision says he wants in part because the Scion XD is “agile and can take corners at high speed.” Good thing he has that featureless black helmet on at all times. *Acknowledged that he has both heard and will heed the call for assistance by the citizens of Rose City (Editor’s note: That phone has been ringing a long, long while, S.V.) *Announced the emergence of another RLSH (Real-Life Super Hero) in Crossett. Supername: “Rupture.” *Visually documented a meet-and-greet trip to the Kum & Go store on JFK with fellow RLSH MasterLegend And so on, and so forth.

The Observer sincerely doesn’t mean to make fun of ShadowVision or any of the RLSHC (RLSH community). Lord knows we’ve sat through enough long, terrible trials over short, terrible crimes to know that there are much worse things to be in the world than somebody who just wants to dress up in a costume and rush to help anybody who screams “help!” within earshot.

While we never got our Rich Uncle Alan to spring for a Zorro mask and a snazzy unitard with a big “O” on the front, The Observer was seemingly like our pal ShadowVision at heart for many, many years. Great Caesar’s Ghost! What do you think made our cripplingly introverted ass keep putting a pen and a notebook in our

pocket and going to talk to actual human beings, sometimes in dangerous places, for all those years? Sure wasn’t the salary or the perks, which stopped at “seriously?” and “all the coffee you can drink!” respectively. Must’ve been a heart full of help, which some poor fools come equipped with from time to time.

We would encourage you to go to ShadowVision’s Facebook page and give it a follow, and don’t feel guilty to have a chuckle if something catches you funny in the desperate earnestness and honest absurdity there. But we must warn you, citizen: If we see you giving him some shit over the way he is expressing his heart full of help, we may just have to give you some back.

There are plenty of wiseacres on his page who do that, who come there to tear down instead of lift up. He bears it with the grace of Bruce Wayne, often ending his gentle retorts with “I only want to help.”

The Observer only wants to help as well. So on ShadowVision’s behalf, from our seat behind the typewriter of a major metropolitan magazine that was a minor metropolitan newspaper when we did the bulk of our own attempts at saving the world from this chair, we say: What does it matter if a person dresses up in a costume; if they only want to be of use to others; if they only want to help? It’s the “want to help” that’s the important part. It’s also what could lift us outta so many of the self-made messes our society has found itself in if we only had more of it.

Now ask yourself: What the hell have I done to help today?

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