Michele and I wanted to go for a walk, after going to the Native American Museum, and the only place we really knew would be good is the natural area around Crystal Bridges. The Museum was closed but the garden paths are open for walkers, it was surprisingly crowded, with people and art. My favorite piece of art was a Deborah Butterfield, Redstick, which looks to be made of Madrone.

After our walk, we went to an early dinner at The Preacher’s Son, a restaurant in a converted church. It was terrific! (And I’m glad to say they had both Tacos and Brussel Spouts, the one constant across America in hip, new, restaurants in the rebuilt downtown or arts districts.) There were two openings, 5:30 and 8:00, and we choose the earlier so we could see the church in natural light. When we got there, the restaurant was almost empty and it was almost full when we left. The early dinner crowd – crowd being generous – would almost fit in to San Francisco or Silicon Valley. Almost being the operative word, the people are neater here and, somehow, brighter, not as edgy, still, Michele and I felt like we fit it. We had beets in smoked cashew butter – I think they were the best beets I’ve ever had – Chickpea Panisse, and a pork shank with Hanna grits all items that could be on any one of a half dozen restaurants in the Bay Area. Bentonville seems to be in the same Universe as Silicon Valley although in a different corner.

After dinner, we went to the Walton – or Walmart, they seem to be almost one and the same – Museum. For Michele and me, it was slightly interesting but I didn’t walk away with any revelations as to how Sam Walton became so rich (the family is worth about 145 billion). Well, maybe one, Walmart still seems hungry, they are not resting on their laurels. All over town are Walmart Neighborhood Marts and the most notable feature to me was the conspicuous Pickup area which suggests people shop online, just like Amazon, and then pick up what they ordered on the way home. Walking through the museum, the other visitors talked in hushed voices as if they were at a pilgrimage site – especially when looking at The Great One’s office or truck – and I think they thought they were. I walked away more aware of how Sam Walton from Kingfisher, Oklahoma completely changed the retail business. I liked it before the change but that doesn’t negate the fact that he changed our National Landscape and the organization still wants to change it.

We got to Crystal Bridges American Art Museum in the late afternoon in time to see Men of Steel Women of Wonder. It was a nice show, several of the pieces – like the Norman Rockwell, above – were terrific but, for me, the biggest and best surprise was a Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian house.

The Usonian House, in its siting and presentation, reminded me of the Temple of Dendur which the Metropolitan Museum of New York moved, stone by stone, from Eygpt to its special room, overlooking Central Park. As an aside, Egypt gave the Temple to the United States as a thank you for spending more than any other country in helping to save and catalog the hundreds of irreplaceable artifacts that were drowned by the construction of the Aswan Dam (Lydon Johnson was President and we were a different country then). Johnson, in turn, gave the Temple to The Met with the condition that they protect it. The Met built a marvelous glass room to house the Temple, paid for by the Sacklers – or paid for by the addicts they created, depending on your point of view – and the entire display is stunning. I love it! although a little less now that I know about the Sacklers. End aside.

The Usonian House, originally known as the Bachman-Wilson House, was also in an area with flooding problems, in this case, the river the house overlooked now frequently floods. Crystal Bridges bought the house from the, then current owners, the Tarantino family – no relation, BTW – to move to a safer place. They then built a new location for the house by first building a rough-cut, local-stone, retaining wall to make a flat site overlooking a small stream. They dismantled the house, meticulously restored it, and moved it, board by board, to the new site. It is as lovingly placed as Dendur and equally stunning even in the flat light.

I don’t think that Frank Lloyd Wright is the most influential architect of the last century and a half – his branch has sort of dead-ended – but he is the most American and the Usonian houses were his very American try at an inexpensive house for everyman so it is a perfect fit for a Museum of American Art.

Walking around the grounds of Crystal Bridges, I am starting to see the beauty in these bare woods. They look lifeless but the sound of birds is everywhere and the woods feel like they are on the very edge of exploding into spring. The blue water, BTW, is natural and a result dissolved limestone.

We had dinner at a restaurant, Saiwok, that bills itself as Vietnamese street food. It was excellent and Bentonville was more interesting than we expected so we ditched our itinerary. We decided to stay in Bentonville for another night so we could see the town, go see the Museum of Native American History, and go to a mega Walmart. The Museum of Native American History looked unimpressive on the outside but it was terrific inside. On entering, we are greeted by a Mastodon skeleton and displays that showed the probable immigration routes from Asia to the New World, including the latest theories on a coastal route. From there it followed the evolution and differentiation of the various tribes. I’ve seen a lot of Native American artifacts, but the tools and pottery in this museum were a revelation, especially the pottery. I had no idea that it was that acomplished.

The Greater Bentonville area, itself, was equally revelatory, it reminded me of the Santa Clara Valley in the 1950s. There are two downtown-like clusters of buildings, but, mostly, it seems that one story buildings and strip malls go on forever, intermixed with light manufacturing, like a structural plastic factory, and big churches. Including Fayetteville, which we never got to, ten miles to the south, the area has about 500,000 people, all of whom seem to be working for or on something to do with Walmart. This is a company town and there are Walmarts everywhere – we did not see a regular grocery store in three days – plus Walmart corporate buildings. It is the kind of town where you can see a dude on a muddy thousand dollar dirt bike wearing – unironically, I think – a sweatshirt that says: Trinity Bible College.

To be continued.

.

Our plan, using the term plan very loosely, was to return to the Mississippi Delta after the Memorial Service and wander around listening to Blues and eating Barbeque. But first, Michele wanted to go back to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to see a show on the influence of Superman and Wonder Woman on culture. We had driven from Memphis to the retirement community of Fairfield Bay, first across the rice-growing area of the Arkansas Delta, and then into the Ozarks.

After spending a couple of days with the Hoenigsbergs and Hilsenraths in Fairfield Bay, we drove through more of the Ozarks to Bentonville, the home of Crystal Bridges. The light was flat with the temperature was still dropping down to freezing at night, and the Ozarks looked poor and uninviting.

To be continued….

Michele and I are near the small town of Fairfield Bay on Greers Ferry Lake in the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas. We have joined a gathering of the Hoenigsberg and Hilsenrath families who have come together to say “Goodbye” to the family’s patriarch, Manfred Hilsenrath, who we know as Michele’s cousin Fred. Fred was one of those truly unusual people who is loved and touched by everybody who meets him. He was born In Germany in 1929 and came of age in a Romanian ghetto camp in Ukraine. His journey from there to being married to Eleanor, a woman he was madly in love with, in a beautiful home in the Ozarks, via Saratoga California, is both emblematic of the postwar Jewish journey and particular to him. Yesterday, at an event that was nominally a Memorial Service, each speaker – fighting off tears as they talked about their connection to Fred – wove a tapestry that was a celebration of an extraordinary life. A life that exemplified hope, triumph over adversity, the power of connection, and the power of passion. I am aware that I am an inlaw in this family, but the warmth and love of the family are all-inclusive just like Fred and Eleanor.