Last night, we set our alarms for 5:30 a.m., with a plan to get on the road by 6 a.m. We had 9 hours to cover 600 miles.
If you looked closely at the photos that I posted last night of our Blue Swallow motel room, maybe you noticed the air conditioning unit mounted on the wall above the bed. That thing was working so hard last night; we might as well have slept directly under a roaring jet engine.
After a fitful night of sleep (did I mention the jet engine?), I finally opened my eyes and checked the time. It was 5:55 a.m. Both of our alarms had been going off for almost 30 minutes, and neither of us heard them over the blast of the A/C.
While I threw on my clothes, Dad called a little bakery down the street and ordered coffee and breakfast burritos to-go. They were waiting for us when we pulled into the parking lot, and we were on the road by 6:15.
Maybe because it was so early, or maybe because (in eastern New Mexico) we were about a million miles away from anything else, but traffic was light, and the drive was easy. And the early-morning light turned the canopy of clouds left over from last night’s storm into a luscious Dreamsicle swirl.
On a mission to move, we sped along Interstate 40 through Amarillo, TX, to OKC, then on I-44 past Tulsa. At some point between New Mexico and the Oklahoma border, we left the desert behind – the sand, the rock and the scrub brush – and entered … where are we now? The Midwest? Wherever we are, there are now trees and grass alongside the road. I’ve missed them.
This has been a fantastic and interesting journey, filled with beautiful scenery, visits to breathtaking national parks … and … what else? At some point, I have realized that it’s just not the same without you guys. I miss your wry observations and your wit. I miss National Park Matching Game. I miss our family playlists. I even miss your bickering!
More than anything, I miss seeing the landscape through your eyes. I miss seeing you light up at an impressive vista or an exciting opportunity. Observing Natalie dive into rattlesnake sausage at Mesa Verde National Park. Witnessing the wonder on Charlie’s face at the Grand Canyon. Watching Clare conquer the Harding Icefield Trail. That’s what guided me throughout our travels to all the different corners of the country, and so I packed the itineraries with sights and experiences. To challenge you. To mind-boggle you. To surprise you. To delight you. To engage you. To expose you to the world. To teach you. And so I could write it all down in this blog.
But surely readers of this blog have noticed how this year’s installments are a little thin. I mean, I only have so many words to describe the desert landscape, breakfast tacos and the fact that we got out the door by 7 a.m. It turns out that you kids, your adventures, and your observations are what make this blog so captivating (to me).
So, this trip has been different than all the others that have come before it – with a different tempo and a different energy. It definitely has been easier – and also, for better or worse, it has been quieter and less eventful. Slower in some ways, like the afternoons that Dad and I spent lounging at the hotel in San Diego. And faster in others – like our race across the desert today. Maybe we needed you guys to speed us up, to force us to pack it all in – and, at the same time, to slow us down, to force us to savor the pace. After five decades on this Earth, have Dad and I lost our desire to wonder and marvel and explore? Are our travels now just about getting from Point A to Point B?
So, I was thinking about all this as we blazed a trail across the Southwest United States today, stopping only twice in nine hours, for a total of 20 minutes, for gas and pee-breaks. With you guys, I could have broken up the drive with stops at Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona; the Acoma Pueblo, the Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum, the Sandia Peak Tramway, or the Meow Wolf interactive art exhibit in New Mexico; the Cherokee Heritage Center or the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma. Today, as we raced past all those sights, I wondered, “What are even doing this for? And what’s our rush, anyway?” (Note to self: Plan another itinerary that incorporates all these things we missed.)
And then we landed in Bentonville, Arkansas, which was exactly the stop I needed to reignite my enthusiasm and remind myself why we’re doing this.
*** (Gah! This post is so long that I feel like I have to break it up.)
Our last Arkansas experience, as you know, kind of ruined the state for us. And it’s not like there was a high bar. Who has expectations for Arkansas? What even IS Arkansas? Is it the South? The Midwest? Is it just a flyover state? When I think about Arkansas, I think of … I don’t know, because I don’t ever think about Arkansas. Before 2013, Dad and I last spent time in Arkansas in 1996, when we were moving back to Lafayette from Los Angeles and stopped in Little Rock for the night. I remember only that the highway was in a serious state of neglect, and that we ate at a Sizzler. A fucking Sizzler. There was not much to be inspired by, and certainly not much beckoning us to return.
But today I remembered why we travel: to experience the unexpected, to challenge our perceptions and to open our minds. Arkansas totally redeemed. Not in an earth-shaking way. It’s not like we just returned from a St. Olaf Global Semester and now smugly proclaim our unique empathy and understanding of the human condition. Just … in a nice-surprise kind of way. Before today, I didn’t think there was anything interesting in Arkansas besides Donald Roller Wilson artwork and the strip club outside of Hot Springs National Park. And now … well, I’ve learned a lot, and I just might come back someday.
We got off the interstate in Tulsa and drove the rest of the way to Bentonville on smaller state highways, so the town seemed to rise out of fields and forests like Brigadoon. We felt as if we had been swept into a different dimension or magically dropped onto a movie set.
Indeed, Bentonville seems like something straight out of “Pleasantville,” or “The Truman Show.” The historic downtown is not much bigger than, say, Delphi, at maybe ten or 12 square blocks, and the adorable courthouse square, with its sparkling fountain centerpiece, is festooned with overflowing flowerbeds and dozens of American flags.
In every direction, there are chic restaurants and charming bakeries, bars and coffee shops – as well as upscale retail stores and no fewer than five high-end mountain bike shops. (With 70 miles of mountain bike trails in town, connecting to 400 miles of trails in northwest Arkansas, Bentonville calls itself the Mountain Bike Capital of the World.) There is public art everywhere we look: sculpture, murals and neon installations. And on every street corner: spiffily dressed professionals walking their dogs, or camping out at bistro tables with their laptops, or slurping on the double-dips they picked up from the ice cream truck parked on the square. Here’s what’s not in downtown Bentonville: Vape shops, CBD emporia, tattoo parlors, Check-Into-Cash outlets, or anything boarded up or otherwise abandoned.
Dad kept remarking that the scene seems eerily artificial. But I was instantly enchanted – maybe because I expected NWA (as they call Northwest Arkansas) to be a not much more than a nest of rabid racoons.
***
In the early 1800s, settlers from Appalachian areas in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee found the Ozark Mountains to be familiar and hospitable – and they brought the “hillbilly” stereotype with them. In the 1920s, Arkansas was a hotbed of Klan activity, with 10 chapters in NWA alone, and at least 162 men – including the mayor, a circuit judge, the Benton County sheriff and half the city council – on the Bentonville roster. So, I suppose that, due to its relatively remote location in the Ozarks, Bentonville could still be a kind of rough and backward place today, if Sam Walton had not opened a five and dime store on the courthouse square in 1951, an enterprise that would forever alter the identity of the region and put Bentonville on the map.
As Sam Walton’s business grew, his wife, Helen Walton, insisted on remaining in Bentonville to raise their family. By the time Walmart became the #1 Fortune 500 company in 2002, the company was still based here. Today, the Walmart offices consist of about 20 buildings in and around the downtown. And as I write, Walmart is developing a 350-acre Home Office campus just south of downtown, complete with a 73,000-square-foot childcare facility, a hotel, a food hall, a food truck pavilion, seven different coffee shops, walking and cycling trails, and the 360,000 square-foot Walton Family Whole Health and Fitness Center. Oh, and their offices.
Walmart – which is, by the way, the largest retailer in the world -- employs about 15,000 people in Bentonville, which is more than a quarter of the population of the town itself. And Walmart’s economic impact in the area is magnified by the fact that more than 1,200 vendors (companies like PepsiCo, Hershey, Mattel and Chobani) have set up local offices for boots-on-the-ground access to Walmart managers and meetings. What’s more, Fortune 500 companies J.B. Hunt and Tyson Foods are also based in northwest Arkansas.
Much of the Bentonville boom has happened in the last dozen or so years, as the population shot up from 36,000 (in 2010) to 58,000 (in 2022), and the region continues to grow by 36 people per day, according to estimates by the Northwest Arkansas Council. In general, those people are younger, wealthier and more educated than the United States population as a whole. The average age in Bentonville is 32, seven years younger than the national average. Bentonville’s median household income is $99,000 per year, compared to the statewide average of $55,432, and the national average of $74,755. And about 52% of residents hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 36% nationally.
In this interesting CNBC article, which is where I found most of the figures I cited above, a Sotheby’s Realtor noted that, ten years ago, there were 14 homes that sold for over one million dollars. In 2023, 244 homes in the Bentonville area sold for more than a million dollars. Let that sink in. That’s not a tally of how many homes are worth more than a million dollars. It’s a just tally of how many homes sold for more than a million dollars. In one year. In this community of 60,000 people.
Also in the last 10 or 12 years, the Walmart money has trickled down to the Waltons’ children and grandchildren, who, in turn, have invested in local real estate, arts and culture, outdoor recreation and hospitality, boosting quality of life for current residents and making Bentonville extremely attractive to prospective employees considering relocation. In 2011, Sam Walton’s daughter, Alice Walton, founded the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art – a $450 million-dollar museum featuring works by Charles Wilson Peale, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Stuart Davis, Jasper Johns, Chuck Close and more – where admission is always free. She also founded the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, a nonprofit, four-year MD program that expects to enroll its first class next year. (How much money do you have to have to build a medical school as a vanity project?)
Today, Bentonville resembles a handful of much larger cities – like Austin, Texas, or Boise, Idaho – that have experienced booming economies and exploding populations, and are managing the upsides (great schools, abundant jobs, a proliferation of cultural and recreational activities) as well as the downsides (strained infrastructure, godawful traffic, lack of affordable housing). Myriad local nonprofit agencies are tasked with planning for and managing the growth to boost the quality of life. Walmart even has a director of workplace mobility, whose sole job is to get 10% of its local workforce to commute on bikes, scooter and in carpools.
To be clear: I haven’t consumed ALL of the Bentonville Kool-Aid. I recognize the deep disparity between the wealth of Bentonville and the wages paid to average Walmart employees – and the irony that, in small towns across the rest of the country, the arrival of a Walmart signals the beginning of the decline of the downtown as it puts small local shops out of business.
Walmart has poured billions of dollars into northwest Arkansas to make it seem like they champion left-leaning policies that support diversity, promote opportunity and protect the environment, but the region’s electoral politics are still very far-right, while the Walmart corporation itself – the world’s largest employer behind the American and Chinese armies – has been accused of unfair labor practices, including low wages, poor working conditions, inadequate healthcare, racial and gender discrimination, forced overtime and unpaid overtime.
And that picture-perfect courthouse square? A Confederate statue loomed over it until only four years ago. And just beyond the immaculate downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods of multimillion-dollar homes are residents who experience food insecurity or housing instability, for whom prosperity remains out of reach.
(For more, read this.)
Corporation vs. little guy. Profits vs. people. Big city vs. small town. Cosmopolitan vs. close-minded. Progressive politics vs. southern Evangelical ideology. Bentonville exemplifies these clashes and contradictions – and it exists in the vast middle ground between each of these extremes. It is absolutely fascinating to see this play out in small-town fly-over USA and to compare it to cities and towns we know in Indiana – which is why I just devoted more than 1,200 words to it. Whew.
***
I routed us through Bentonville on the way home from San Diego because I had heard that there’s an amazing art museum here. We’re headed there tomorrow. I knew we’d have some free time tonight, though, and rather than roam around Bentonville aimlessly looking for a good spot to eat, I figured I’d let an expert guide us. So, I booked a food tour, and it was the best decision ever.
Erin Rowe, a personal chef who owns and operates Ozark Culinary Tours, took us to four different restaurants and gave us the lowdown on northwest Arkansas cuisine, which, for generations, has been based on fish, game and foraged produce. An absolute force of nature, Erin also filled us in on the Bentonville boom (see 1,200 words, above) and gave us a good feel for the pulse of the area, talking a million miles a minute about local arts, history and culture. She was a wealth of information, and it was the perfect way to get oriented in a very short time.
Erin leads tours in Bentonville, as well as in nearby towns of Rogers, Springdale, Siloam Springs and Fayetteville, and each tour has a different focus or vibe. While the Bentonville tour covers a few of the upscale chef-driven eateries in and around the historic downtown, the tour of Rogers, about 8 miles west of Bentonville, features Latin American flavors, and the Fayetteville tour takes guests to more hippy-dippy college-town haunts near the University of Arkansas campus, 25 miles south of here.
Lucky us – ours turned out to be a private tour; no one else had signed up for tonight’s event. I guess it is a Wednesday evening. Even so, all of the restaurants were packed with people, and crowds spilled out onto the sidewalks – mostly large groups of post-work locals still dressed in their Walmart-blue polos. At each stop, Erin escorted us to the front of the line, and we were shown straight to our table. No hassle. Easy peasy.
Our first stop was Flying Fish right in the heart of downtown – with a campy diner vibe, an extensive menu of fresh fish and seafood served fast casual-style, and walls loaded with fishing memorabilia, photos and trophies – where we enjoyed fried catfish tacos and margaritas. We were surprised to find out that this place is part of a chain! Wish we could open one in Lafayette!
Next stop was Tavola Trattoria, a bustling Italian bistro, for chianti and house-crafted meatballs.
Then we went around the corner to Table Mesa – Drew Barrymore’s favorite restaurant, according to Erin – for pork tamales and mezcal cocktails. (Walmart sells a line of Drew Barrymore-branded home goods, so maybe Drew herself keeps an office in town, too, just like Hershey and Chobani.)
We wrapped it up at Superfine Sweet Shop, a trippy ice cream parlor done up in iridescent orange and pink.
Before she left us, Erin pointed us in the direction of a speakeasy bar called Lady Slipper, an elegant lounge in the basement of one of the historic downtown buildings. Dad and I each had another drink while we marveled at the swanky décor and the young clientele. So many young, beautiful people! We feel like we’re hanging out on a set at The CW Network.
Tonight we are staying at the 21C Museum Hotel, just steps from the courthouse square. The entire first floor is a contemporary art museum with more than 12,000 square-feet of exhibition space, rotating exhibitions and regular cultural programming. This town freaking blows my mind.
***
Postscript: As we were driving into town earlier today, Dad and I noticed a lot of downed trees, damaged buildings and clean-up crews, and we learned that, on May 26, the county experienced severe storms with seven tornado touch-downs. Two of the tornadoes were more than a mile and a half wide. One of those, an F3 with winds of 155 mph, measured 3,200 yards across and was the widest tornado in Arkansas history. The damage, of course, was widespread, and cleanup continues even today. We found several roads closed and detours posted to make room for cleanup crews and equipment. Crazy.
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