Category: world

Bathhouses of Hot Springs: Buckstaff

Recently Lewis and I took the family to Hot Springs National Park. This little gem of a park is tucked into the Ouachita National Forest, where very, very hot water flows like honey.

It’s also the only national park chockablock full of naked folks who have no idea what’s happening to them.

Beginning in the 19th century, a series of bathhouses appeared, ostensibly to harness the healing powers of the springs. They evolved over the decades until the 1910’s when they pretty much became what they are now. Today, two remain operational as bathhouses. The Arlington Hotel, once the fancy place to stay if you were a mobster, pro-ball player, or Tony Bennett (apparently), also has a bathhouse.

We visited all of these, thanks to our wonderful au pair Jessica, who kept our underage kids in the afternoons. Each steamy, naked experience was it’s own unique mixture of total relaxation, awkward mooning of strangers, and fear that you were more or less naked than you were supposed to be at any given time. If you ever plan to visit the baths, I recommend you stop reading here, because the element of surprise definitely adds to the fun.

Day One, Buckstaff.

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Buckstaff, still outfitted in blue stripe awnings, like a mid-century resort on the French seaside, is the only bathhouse that does not take reservations. It allows entries twice per day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. The line starts forming about an hour in advance, and will extend out the door and down the sidewalk by the time the the first-come-first-bathe service begins. 

There is no other spa service in the world that begins this way, to my knowledge.

While you wait, you can study early 20th century photos of patrons, neatly arranged in rows, shrouded in white, smiling attendants behind them. It looks like an infirmary. Like they are being prepped for organ donation, or sweating out the plague. Behind them in these photos are a few metal boxes with heads sticking out through a hole in the top. The whole thing is as intriguing as it is unsettling.

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The other thing I noticed in line was that the Buckstaff, like every other National Park experience, draws a really eclectic crowd. Like really eclectic. And we were about to get naked together.

The bathers are divided into men and women, women go upstairs in a cage elevator run by a wizened bathhouse attendant in a blue t-shirt rather than a man in a fancy suit and hat. 

Your entire experience is guided by a tiny slip of paper with your name written on it. The elevator operator takes it first, and she hands it to the lady in the second floor lobby, who escorts you into the locker room. Advice: don’t tip every single one of your handlers or you’ll go broke. 

Lest you be picturing rows of lockers and benches, remember that there is nothing modern about a bathhouse, including the locker room, which is a series of curtained stalls, each with two full size, public high school style metal lockers. You go in, take off your clothes, lock them in the locker and poke your head out to let the locker room attendant (your third handler by this point) know that you are naked. She then comes tells you to face the locker, opens the curtain, and wraps you, toga-style, in a sheet. It’s like prison, but instead of a cavity search, you’re dressed for a fraternity party.

Then, you sit with the rest of the Roman senate and wait, trying not to see through anyone’s sheet.

Seated next to me was one nervous NPS visitor whose pre-toga attire had screamed “hiker.” She sat bolt upright, and her eyes darted around the dated (though very clean) room. The whole facility is built on a 1912 activity using 1952 technology and 1972 interior materials.

The hiker, whose heels tapped compulsively, blurted out, “I hope this is worth the wait.”

I shrugged. They’ve been in business since 1912, I wanted to say. But I stuck with, “I’m sure it is…”

“I mean, the line is one thing, but now having us wait in here?” she went on about not having much time in Hot Springs. I shrugged again, trying to look sympathetic. There’s not a lot else to do in Hot Springs National Park, unless I’m missing something.

“Oh well, I just hope the floors are clean,” she said.

Sister, I wanted to say—but didn’t (remember we were wearing sheets. It seemed like civility was of utmost importance during this unfamiliar social situation)—sister, you may have picked the wrong way to relax this afternoon.

Eventually a bath attendant (your fourth handler) steps into the room and calls your name. This is the woman who will be administering all of your…treatments? Rituals?

My confusion over what to call the series of bath activities gets to the heart of the experience. In the United States, we prefer to be by ourselves while naked, and we prefer a total sensory immersion with the right smells, music, and lavender tea accompanying our spa ritual. However, in 1912, being fancy was more Old Worlde, and the baths were billed as a healing treatment, and, if the grainy black and white pictures all over hot springs are any indication, it was one of those highly clinical environments where the well-to-do subject themselves to a lot of undignified pseudoscience in the name of progressive wellness.

And sometime in between, someone invented fluorescent lightbulbs.

Walking into the giant bathing room with marble panels, hanging fluorescent office lighting, the first thing you notice is that there is steam all over the place, and nothing looks particularly luxurious. Piles of towels, the occasional bucket, and pipes everywhere make the place look a bit like an institutional laundry room. Then you remember that you’re wrapped in a sheet, and begin to wonder if you are in fact about to be laundered.

It’s also fair to note that none of the bath attendants are anyone you’d want to cross. My guess is that it takes a particular constitution to usher naked National Parks visitors around in a steamy laundry room all day.

First stop is the whirlpool. The attendant takes away the sheet, which is momentarily awkward, but then you are in the tub. This is a pedestal tub with what looks like a turbine motor dropped into it. I was afraid the entire time that I was going to lose my toe or be electrocuted. This jet/agitator device, however, is not dangerous at all, and, once you slide in, a very well-placed jet stream gives some clue as to why bathhouses may have been so popular in the pre-battery era.

That particular 15 minutes goes by quite quickly, and the water feels glorious. It’s about 102 degrees and has just the right sting as you get in.

The attendant pops back in, however, and then it’s time to get out and put your sheet back on. You shuffle through the Agora of other women in white (now damp) sheets, over to what is essentially a row of massage tables, each the kind one would find in a college athletic facility.

Aha! The row of mummies from the photo in the lounge!

Yes indeed, covered in heat packs (piping hot hand towels) and one ice-cold head towel, I basically took a sublime 15 minute nap.

My attendant managed to wake me without startling me, which tells me I’m not the first one to fall asleep in the mummy lineup.

Now into the Sitz bath. I had assumed sitz was some sort of mineral or something. Now I’m wondering if it’s called that because you sitz in it. It was like a little water throne. My husband compared it to a janitor’s mop sink, which may be because his (male) bath attendant wiped it down with Ajax just before he got in. I can’t say I’m crazy about the sitz. It was nice, and if I had lower back issues, it could have been helpful.

The sitz baths do offer a great view of the room though, so I could observe the system of human laundry, and man what a system.

After the sitz, it was time for steam. My attendent led me to a little closet with a split door. The top was frosted glass, and open. The bottom was stainless steel. She opened it to let me in, and invited me to sit on the little bench inside.

She took my sheet, which made getting adjusted rather unpleasant to watch, I’m sure. But she swung the door shut and then folded two stainless steel panels down over the top of me with just a cut out for my head. Final mystery solved. She wrapped my sheet around my neck, and I sat for five minutes like a disembodied head on a metal box. Inside the metal box, the rest of me was being delightfully sauna’d. Truly, one of the better sauna experiences I have had, as my head was nice and cool.

Because I had opted not to be massaged, I was taken to the needle shower, which is infinitely more pleasant than it sounds.

The needle shower is a web of pipes wrapping almost 360 degrees around you. Water comes out everywhere in pleasant “needles” which are more tickly than prickly. There was a shower curtain, but by this time my attendant had seen my bare ass and twice-post-nursing breasts enough times that she barely made a show of trying to give any privacy, and I made very little show of caring.

The needle shower was delightful and refreshing and I want one very much. In my house. Lewis didn’t even fully inhale before saying “they’re hugely wasteful of water and against code.”

Guess I’ll have to come back, then.

Another blogger writes about racism and where it begins

So every blogger on in America is telling us how to respond to the shootings in Charleston. Everyone is trying to say the one profound thing that’s going to send an arrow straight to the heart of racism and explode it.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Because, like many have said, we need to talk about it. We, the white folks (who seem to all have blogs), need to talk about it. We also need to listen to our black, brown, and everything else friends. To fall back on my grad school vocabulary: it’s time for everyone to interrogate whiteness.

So this blog post does not contain the one nugget that’s going to change racism. …

#ILiketoTravelBut

A friend of mine coined a hashtag that makes me laugh. #ILiketoTravelBut.

I like to travel but…I hate sitting in coach.

I like to travel but…I don’t like losing money to the exchange.

That kind of stuff. But lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about travel’s place in the soul, or at least my soul. About why they call it wanderlust.

I like to travel but…I hate pulling out of the driveway.

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Leaving home always strikes me with the deepest sense of regret. Even if I know I’m coming back. I know I’ll have an amazing adventure as soon as I get over it, but it always catches in my chest, just for a moment.

I like to travel but…it could kill me. …

Friday Night Rant: Social Media is not killing us

Sometimes there are socially vogue rants that make me want to move to Siberia. Hating on social media is one of them.

I’m just as annoyed as the next guy by the constant dinging of my phone (so I turned off my push notifications), the 19 Facebook notifications that have nothing to do with me, and the rivers of unfiltered troll vomit on Nextdoor.

HOWEVER, I find it more tiresome when people whine about social media, and talk about how stupid it is. How over it they are. Everytime I hear that I think, “it’s okay, old man, we know you’re overwhelmed by what the kids are up to these days.” Or “yes, I know, little girl, you’re cooler than God.”

Use it, don’t use it. I don’t really care. But if you use it, own it.

Part of owning social media is understanding how it works. So lets break it down: …

Wanderlists: Best Hotels- Stayed in

My mother raised us to believe that it was not a vacation unless we were staying in a hotel. Simultaneously, however, she earned her title as Mom-Cheapola-Cheapola. I have staying in some serious dives. Serious. What would you expect to find in a Motel 6 on the outskirts of Vegas? Use your imagination.

Or there was the motel in Grove City, Pennsylvania when the snowy gusts rolled in under the 3 inch gap between the door and the floor while I held the phone cord into the wall so we could call home (these were the days of roaming charges).

We stayed in some great places too, don’t get me wrong. Mostly while snow skiing. Mom had the good sense to book comfortable places when the whole family was worn out and wind-burnt. And once we did stay at the nicest hotel in Marfa, just for fun. If I had known I would one day make regular pilgrimages to Marfa, staying in a refurbished Airstream, I think I would have laughed.

Wanderlists: Bookstores

One of the great joys of watching Moira grow has been her fascination with books. She loves them as objects, and she loves them as stories. She could have gotten that from either parent, really. The chief design challenge in our little house has been how to incorporate bookshelves. Every single room in the house (except the bathrooms, because Seinfeld) has a book shelf.

I’m not an anti-ebook essentialist at all. But for me, the tactile experience is part of the transportation. I don’t just love the content of what I am reading, I love the experience of reading it. So a good bookshop, for me, is like confectionary or a spa. If I liked amusement parks, I may draw that parallel. But I don’t, so I won’t.

A visit to the Twig, our local indie, is part of our weekly routine. And nothing is more exciting in a new city than visiting their proudest indie bookshop. Being surrounded by ink and ideas, fabulous graphic design, and that satisfying heft of pages is so peaceful to me.  And a good indie book store is overflowing with possibilities, and like the books themselves, the experience of being there is just as fulfilling as the items you take home.

Lewis and Moira at El Ateneo in Buenos Aires
Lewis and Moira at El Ateneo in Buenos Aires

While I can’t say that I’ve been to all the best book stores in the world (notably missing is Powell’s of Oregon), I do have a list of favorites. (but all the photos below are from our most recent bookshop experience, as I don’t usually take many photos in bookshops…) …

Wanderlists: night lights

I have a thing for lights at night. Maybe because I’m afraid of the dark, and I’m so thankful for any light that alleviates that. Maybe it’s because light seems more precious in the dark. More specific and intentional.

Best I can tell, I’m not alone in that. The world seems to have a love affair with all that twinkles, sparkles, and glows. All things that light does in the dark.

These are my top five encounters with light at night. (Note: I don’t have pictures for most of my favorites, and I’ve always been terrible at night time photography…so I have substituted in other pictures of light at night, which are not favorites, and not particularly good, but the post needs pictures…so….)

These famous lights at night are also nice.
These famous lights at night are also nice.

1) Chiang Rai Night Bazaar– coming from my conservative Christian college, on my first travel abroad, I stumbled into the Chiang Rai Night Bazaar in northern Thailand. A fine mist hung in the air and caught the yellow light from the merchant tents lining the walkways and the string lights over picnic tables where people were eating, among other things, fried grub worms.

Wanderlists: My Top 10

Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t just make my blog a travel blog. I love to travel, I work in travel…

But my travel writing has always been pretty mundane. I’m not good at reflecting on places I’ve only been to once for a brief moment. On the other hand, keeping a diary of where we went and what we ate has just never appealed to me. Not to knock all the travel blogs out there (I consult them frequently for packing tips and restaurant suggestions), but I never get from writing the salty expansion of the soul I get from traveling. For me the world was meant to be seen.

That said, I love lists. Especially lists that inspire wanderlust.

So I’ve decided to list about travel, instead of writing about it. These are my wanderlists.

Wanderlist #1: The 10 Places I Love Most (besides home, of course)

It’s only fair to start out any series of list with the broadest, most general list. So here are my 10 favorite travel destinations. Anything goes: cities, states, parks, countries. There’s no real criteria; those lists will follow. This is just my love list.

1) London – I loved London even before grad school, though that’s definitely when I tucked it deep into my soul, never to be removed. And it’s a place I found I can go back to, with others. London definitely benefits from the good company I had while I was there on visits, but more so, it benefits from its own cosmopolitanism and love of order. London is orderly without forsaking charm, whimsy, and the element of surprise.

Moira Brings the News: MERS

There’s a new health scare, this time coming from the Middle East. As though Americans needed one more reason to be scared of the Middle East.

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) arrived onto US soil via a healthcare worker who had been in Saudi Arabia. According to this Reuters story, the man is improving and all exposed have been quarantined, but worldwide there have been 93 MERS-related deaths.

MERS is a virus-cousin of SARS, which came to us from China, another place Americans didn’t need another reason to fear. And just so you know, MERS is a coronavirus, and it’s spread through the air and through poop. So, two simple precautions for those taking the utmost care not to contract the deadly disease: don’t handle unfamiliar feces and don’t breathe.

For more on the precautions we should be taking to protect ourselves from MERS, we turn to Moira Sage:

Don't breathe on me

 

 

 

Thanksgiving on the Train

This Thanksgiving, Lewis and I headed to West Texas, a favorite destination of ours. My mother in law spearheaded this adventure, and Lewis and I ended up learning a few new variations on the journey. Mainly…train travel.

Here are some tips on train travel.

1) Get a sleeper car. Even if the trip is supposed to take place in daylight hours, get a sleeper car. We boarded the Sunset Express at 2:45 am at the station 4 min from our house. We tucked in an went right to sleep.

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We woke up 5.5 hours later to see this.

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A quick calculation showed that we had moved two blocks, approximately one more minute from our house. Two minutes, if you have to sit at the light because there’s a train crossing.

2) Another advantage of the sleeper car is that your meals are included, and the train food is surprisingly, not bad at all. Trains have that on planes, for sure.

3) On the way to your destination, if there’s daylight (thanks to a 5.5 hour delay), take advantage of the view car. West Texas is lovely when you are not behind the wheel! I enjoyed getting an upclose look at all the train bridges I usually admire from Hwy 90 as we pass over the Pecos River and Lake Amistad.

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4) If you are pregnant, get a room with an en suite bathroom. Ignore the fact that there is a shower in there as well, and the thought of trying to shower on the moving train in a 3 sq.ft stall seems like the recipe for disaster. You will love not having to get up every two hours and walk down the hall with your maternity jeans on backwards, bouncing from wall to wall as you stumble toward the bathroom. Plus, you can reach the sink from the bed.

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If only all sinks were conveniently reached from the bed, making toothbrushing and handwashing far more likely to occur.

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5) Here is a fun game. Train signage is the best. Few enough people travel by Amtrak, that they have not had the mountains of “What IS that?” feedback that have, over time, honed the signage on airplanes and highways. Thus…we have these gems. “Create your own captions” was our favorite train game. (ABC by the Roadside is not so much fun on Highway 90. If you have not gotten past Q by Del Rio, you’re not going to win).

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Apparently damnation awaits those who leave a trail of pee and toilet paper on the floor. As it should
This gave us hours of laughs. Caption for B2, "If you are going to be sick, use the seat for balance and groan loudly."
This gave us hours of laughs. Caption for B2, “If you are going to be sick, use the seat for balance and groan loudly.”