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By the time I pulled into the Hampton Inn just outside Little Rock, the wind had finally quit—but it had left its mark. The women at the front desk looked at me like I’d just walked out of a storm cellar. “You rode through all that?” one of them asked, shaking her head. “We were watching those trees bend.”

I smiled, but my head was still swimming. After days of wrestling crosswinds, I was grateful for a room that didn’t sway. I flopped onto the bed, let the ceiling steady me, then peeled off the day with a long shower and walked to a nearby restaurant. Enough motorcycle travel for one day.

The next morning, I had less than an hour of easy riding ahead. Hot Springs. A town that once promised healing waters and high society. I didn’t know it yet, but this place would have its own way of revealing what still clung. In the air. In the walls. In me.

President Clinton grew up there. Rumor has it that while his mother went to the racetracks on Sundays, Bill went to church with his grandmother, where he first heard the gospel music he came to love. That detail stuck with me—not because it’s quaint, but because it speaks to dualities: sacred and profane, seen and unseen.

Where the Curtain Lifts

I’ve always had an eye for places where surface and substance diverge—where the velvet curtain lifts just enough to show the fly system, the ropes and sandbags, the offstage jumble that brings audiences to their feet on the other side. Bathhouse Row is exactly that kind of place. All theatrical arches and striped awnings on the outside, but beneath the tile and steam lies a buried creek—Hot Springs Creek—piped underground in the late 1800s to hide its sulfur stink and stagnant pools. Once a raw artery through the center of town, now it’s a landscaped promenade—Lombardy poplars, decorative fountains. But the locals say the smell still seeps up in places.

That tension between surface and buried history isn’t confined to architecture. Hot Springs is a town that once sold itself as a place of genteel health and rejuvenation—even as it operated as an open-air boardroom for organized crime. Now the Gangster Museum of America sits just blocks from the bathhouses, preserving that parallel narrative. The contradiction isn’t hidden. It’s a feature. This is a town where healing waters flowed beside corruption, and where past and present still bargain with each other in full view.

That morning, I was drawn to The Buckstaff—not because of the name, but because a friend had recommended it. Built in 1912, it still uses its original equipment and its original bathhouse protocol. The exterior is unmistakable: a Doric colonnade, flat white pediment, tan brick walls trimmed in arched windows and blue-and-white striped awnings. It doesn’t whisper luxury. It asserts purpose.

Inside, the architecture is sturdy and the decor continues the blue-and-white palette in its hand-set tile floors, high ceilings, and furniture that looks like it remembers Prohibition and the Harding Administration. A real human operates the elevator’s levers.

The Work of Clean

Buckstaff is not a spa, not in the modern sense. There are no whispered mantras or tea blends curated for your chakra type. The women who work there aren’t estheticians in dusty pink uniforms made for the Instagram age. They’re workers—dressed for labor in blue-and-white company T-shirts and sneakers, their demeanor professional and grounded.

Modern spa culture often feels like theater—soothing lights, hushed tones, curated playlists. But at the Buckstaff, there’s no stagecraft. No illusion. Just women doing real work—the kind that supports families and leaves shoulders sore by shift’s end. They don’t peddle transcendence or glow. Their mission was to get me clean and exfoliated. And I respect that.

Shadow, my attendant, and the rest of the team moved us patrons through the five-step process with skill and efficiency, preserving our modesty as a first priority. First, the porcelain claw-foot tub with a small turbine in the corner to move the water—deep and steamy, set to 102 degrees. I opted for the loofah mitt scrub, of course, and between the swirling waters and the treatment, I sloughed off more than dead skin. Then came the hot packs—steamed cloths wrapped around my limbs and laid across my back, contrasting with an icy compress on my forehead as I reclined, cocooned in towels. The sitz tub followed—more practical than glamorous, but deeply restorative. And then the steam cabinet: a metal box where only your head pokes out.

Even in that odd little chamber, I could feel the echo of history. Not just the bathhouse’s, but my family's.

Mom was born in a Kentucky coal camp owned by Henry Ford, where a weekly bath meant heating pots of water on a stove before pouring it into a tin washtub. My grandparents climbed out of that life step by step, their ambition matched by exhaustion. But they didn’t do it alone. Their ascent was made possible by scaffolding built during the Progressive Era, when the first protections for working people took root. That foundation grew stronger under FDR’s New Deal, when Papaw found his first foothold in the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression.

I’ll tell that story more fully later, when the landscape opens up and his memory rides with me through New Mexico. But even here, wrapped in towels and steam, I could feel the arc of it—the way policy becomes possibility. The way dignity is built, one job, one generation at a time.

She Wanted Air

Eventually, both of my grandparents landed civil service jobs—modest, but stable. They were grateful. But for my mother, that kind of stability wasn’t the goal—it was just the launchpad. She was driven, yes, but also marked by shame. In her world, being poor wasn’t just hard. It was embarrassing. It meant outhouses, and hand-me-downs. Falling behind. And in postwar America, poverty was framed as a moral failure. If you were still struggling, it was because you hadn’t tried hard enough.

Mom wanted polish. Proof. Some visible marker that she'd made it. She had drive, yes—but also a kind of restlessness. She wanted air. Distance. The chance to step beyond what she'd come from and into who she might become.

And once she found that life, she held on tight. I suspect that’s why she placed so much faith in personal initiative and grew uneasy with public programs. As if turning back might undo her progress. As if remembering the help might reopen the door to shame.

When I was finished with my bath I went upstairs for a facial in a treatment room with just enough space to wedge the spa bed into the corner at an angle. It felt like something out of Upstairs, Downstairs (or its modern analog, Downton Abbey)—a former servant’s quarters where the beds weren’t even twin-sized.

I suppose the young woman who worked on me had been trained not to be too chatty with the guests, so she answered my questions with reserve. When I asked why there were so many children out and about on a school day, she explained that several school districts in Arkansas, including Hot Springs, are now on four-day weeks. She’d graduated from a local high school with about 25 other seniors and went on to a subsidized county cosmetology program before joining the Buckstaff. Her daughter’s care and preschool education are provided by a Head Start program.

Same Uphill Climb

The young facialist—quiet, competent, and stretched a little thin—made me think about class tension again as she ministered to my face. My mother would’ve respected her drive and admired how she was making a life for her daughter.

Mom may not have recognized her own youth in that young mother applying citrus-scented toner to my brow—but I did. A different decade, a different path, but the same uphill climb. That young woman wasn’t asking for handouts—she was doing exactly what Mom had done once: working hard and leaning on the government scaffolding that made life possible. If Mom had met my facialist, she might have overtipped her, offered a grocery card, or even mailed a children’s book for her daughter. But if that same support came from the government? She’d call it a handout.

I’ve seen this in others of her generation: personal generosity, paired with deep skepticism about public systems. A belief that help should be earned. And chosen.

I wanted to tell the facialist I hoped her daughter’s preschool program would survive the political headwinds—that she and her daughter deserved more, not less—but I didn’t want to sound like a woman just passing through with opinions she wouldn’t be around to act on. Still, the truth pressed in on me: America is being gutted by people who will never have enough. Their morality knows no cellar and their greed knows no roof. Programs designed for families without bootstraps—or even boots—are first in line for the chopping block.

What We Choose to Keep

I left the Buckstaff with my skin flushed and my face still faintly slick with the distinctive smell of SPF. By the time I got to BubbaLu’s, a family-owned joint across the street, I had to wipe around my mouth so I wouldn’t taste sunscreen with my hand-pressed all-Angus cheeseburger.

BubbaLu’s is the kind of place I always gravitate to. I can count on the walls to tell a story through pictures—kids with jack-o’-lantern smiles, scouting uniforms, ballerina tutus, and kisses for their grandparents. I recognized the man behind the grill from those pictures and knew he had to be the owner.

I left a nice tip under the napkin dispenser, gathered up my things and headed to my parking space, crossing paths with a National Park Ranger—Hot Springs is part of the system, after all. I asked for directions, and she pulled a map from her cross-body bag and offered it to me as a keepsake. She was generous with her time, cheerful in the way rangers usually are.

As I removed the locking cable that ran through my riding jacket and helmet and tethered it to the bike, I found myself wondering if she’d still have a job by summer. I’ve visited dozens of national park sites over the years, and they’ve taught me more about this country—its landscapes, contradictions, and history—than any textbook ever did. What kind of nation treats its stories, its teachers, and its public lands as expendable?

I swung a leg over the bike, settled into the saddle, and thumbed the ignition.

The answer was clear as day: A nation that has not just forgotten—but is dismantling—what it owes the people who built it.

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