Wandering America: Hot Springs and OKC

First stop on my Journey Across America is perhaps one of the least-National-Park-ish National Parks: Hot Springs. Hot Springs is arguably more along the lines of a historic site than a National Park. Most of the famous sites are architectural: the old colonial architecture of Bathhouse Row and The Arlington. But hey, it’s an absolutely lovely place to stop by for a day or so.

I stopped by a coffee shop in the morning. A small sign in the corner boasted the shop’s weekly open mic poetry reading, which it claimed was the longest-running poetry reading in the country – a claim I cannot help but find dubious, but part of me really wants to believe that record is actually nested in a tiny shop off a side street in Hot Springs. I wanted to stay and read for a while, but I could see the clouds darkening overhead and figured I’d hit the trails before I got thoroughly rained out.

The hiking trails are a nice stroll just above the main street, with some nice overlooks and a lookout tower in the middle. The walk was brief, but with the clouds overhead, the smell of rain, and the breeze rustling the long grass up on the mountain, it was enough to get me to those precious moments of calm and solitude out in a quiet corner of the trail.

I always like looking over the many names variously carved around the park, on trail markers and signs and rock walls. Families memorializing their trips, the classic lovers’-initials-and-heart carved into a tree trunk, the occasional prayer.

But the rain cut my outdoors time short. I did make it into one of the famous bathhouses before I left, which was both pleasant – a nice warm bath is a perfect respite after getting caught out in the rain – and made me a bit sad that the US doesn’t really have a bathing culture in the way that some other countries do. This is perhaps case of suffering from success, since historically bathhouses often developed during periods when homes couldn’t easily have access to hot water, and much of the construction in the US likely happened at times when most people could have hot water heaters directly in their homes¹.

In other parts of the world, like Turkish hammam, Japanese onsen and sento, or Korean jjimjilbang, bathhouses are just as much a social experience as they are for health and cleanliness. People may stay around for hours if the bathhouse is large enough. While their numbers seem to be dwindling pretty much across the board, they’re still regarded as a staple of their respective communities, and many cities have rallied around their local bath to keep it alive. It’s not explicit or acknowledged, but I think there’s something important about people of all ages and groups stripping (literally) their various accoutrements and experiencing a moment of connection and community.

But what most stood out to me was in comparison to bathhouses elsewhere, these seemed surprisingly regimented and, for lack of a better word, prudish. While you can go nude, you are quickly wrapped by an attendant in a gigantic towel wrapped tightly around you. Your bath is private, and going between baths and saunas and so on is pretty “on rails.” It’s more like getting a personal spa treatment where others just so happen to be present instead of experiencing the whole thing with others. This isn’t exactly a surprise, since Americans aren’t exactly known for being comfortable with publicly discussing nudity or anything even vaguely sexual, but it is noticeably at odds with how bathhouses work, well, basically everywhere else: fully nude and highly communal.

But by this point, the thunder and lightning had pretty firmly uprooted any other outdoors plans in Hot Springs. The forecast was that it would be pouring for at least another two days in Hot Springs and in the nearby Ozark National Forest, so the next morning I packed up and made my way over to Oklahoma.

OKC, it turns out, is pretty rad. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Birmingham in terms of size, but it’s like an alternate history where Birmingham was steadily growing instead of shrinking². The population of OKC proper has been growing steadily for years, and much more of the metro area’s population is inside the city itself: almost 700k of the metro area’s 1.4M residents live in the city itself, compared to about 200k of Birmingham’s 1.1M metro area.

The downtown feels incredibly well-maintained: Scissortail Park is brimming with local pollinators; the nearby Myriad Botanical Garden is gorgeous, with lots of small nooks to sit and rest in the shade; and there’s several pockets of the city where the restaurant scene is punching well above its weight. The city isn’t immune to the problems of any big metro, like homelessness and the occasional overflowing trash can, but the place seems to have struck a great balance between modern amenities and classic charm.

I’m only here for a day or so, but I’ve seen OKC lauded as a surprisingly-great/affordable city enough times to pique my curiousity, and I’m glad I got to stop by and eat all of its delicious tacos and famous onion burgers.

Next off, I’m heading to Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas. I’ll have two days of driving (why force yourself through 10-hours in one day if you don’t have to?) with some camping interspersed in there. After that, I’ll be in the middle of a whole cluster of parks in the southwest, like White Sands, Guadalupe Mountains, Carlsbad Caverns, Death Valley, and all the rest, so hopefully that means less big driving days ahead.

Catch you next time.