Get Your Fill in Fayetteville: Grabbing a Bite at Hammontree’s Grilled Cheese

It’s true for many states—regions within their borders feel disparate—so it’s no surprise that I felt a combination of culture shock and longing for home in Fayetteville in its surrounding area. Topographically, you couldn’t be more different than central Illinois: mountainous hills abound the landscape. But something felt homelike. Perhaps it’s Fayetteville’s inherent college town-ness that evoked the feeling of Champaign-Urbana, yet bigger.

We spent barely an afternoon there, but I felt comfortable there. It’s a definitely a flagship university town with modern looking buildings. There was a street that seemed like you could stumble out of one bar and end up crawling into another without difficulty. There was even a used bookstore that we could’ve spent all day there, though that was due in part to my futile attempt to decode its organizational system. There was something about the city that just seemed right.

We stopped at a restaurant that Sam had been recommended called Hammontree’s Grilled Cheese. As you can guess, they have a very specific menu. As you may well know, I have reservations about gourmet burgers, so I was reluctant to sample what Hammontree’s had to offer. Then I saw how the place ran rife with Star Wars memorabilia and artwork, particularly the Admiral Ackbar painting hanging above the bar. And then I saw the restaurant’s companion food truck is called the GrilleniumFalcon. They tickled my nerd sensibilities, but would they satisfy my appetite?

“Grilled cheese” here feels somewhat like a misnomer. In my book, a grilled cheese sandwich is one without meat, one that sticks to a simple pairing of melted cheese between toasted bread. Several of Hammontree’s sandwiches have ham or pork or some other meat on them, which isn’t to discredit the place—they know how to make a damn fine sandwich. It reminded me of a place we had in my college town called Planet Wiener that, though it touted itself as serving hot dogs in its title, half of its menu were hamburgers. Oddly enough, Hammontree’s serves hot dogs as well. Thankfully, Hammontree’s made a better sandwich than the now-defunct Planet Wiener made hot dogs or burgers.

I ordered the “Cheebacca”—again, Star Wars—which has “Sharp White Cheddar, House Cheese, bacon, pulled pork, grilled onions and garlic cilantro sauce on sourdough.” I wasn’t huge on the garlic cilantro sauce, but everything else on it came together beautifully. It wasn’t a heavy sandwich, either, so it was ideal for a lunch meal. It was disappointing that they served generic potato chips with the sandwich, though again, anything more would’ve made the meal heavier.

Sam got their Chicago Dog, so she looked to see if it held up to her homeland’s traditions. Hammontree’s Chicago Dog is comprised of “Quarter pound all beef frank soaked in Old Style beer, grilled and topped with mustard, tomatoes, relish, onions and a pickle spear on a poppy seed roll.” What impressed me was its Old Style infusion, as even in Illinois you were lucky to find Old Style if you weren’t within an hour of Cook County.

Though I don’t know if we’ll make it to Fayetteville again anytime soon, I’d return to Hammontree’s. It’s an ideal lunch location, and though our wait for food was a little long, it’s an amusing dining experience. If nothing else, we could scout out for the Grillenium Falcon. 

Arkansas Adventures: A Day-trip Travelogue

Since moving to Arkansas, I've only been to one other town, which isn't all that surprising when where I live is the metropolitan center and capital of the state. To put it simply, there aren't a lot of reasons to leave when everything you need is close. But staying put is a bad way to soak in culture, and, though the trip to Hot Springs was satisfying, it was a limited sampling of what the Natural State has to offer.

Sam asked if I wanted to tag along when she went to facilitate an outreach for underprivileged kids in Monticello, AR. I asked where it was. She responded, "Close to Mississippi," as if it were a sales point. And then she noted that we'd have to get up early. While I'm not prone to sleeping in much these days, the idea of having to be up early put me in a funk. But I wasn't going to be doing anything beyond playing Mass Effect 3 if I stayed home so what the hell. 

The plan was to take a rental care because somehow it would be cheaper than taking her own car and getting the gas comped by the museum. We had to go pick it up at 8 AM, which was the same time I'd ordinarily be waking up. That meant I'd have to be up earlier than 8 that day. Before 8, I'm a pitiful creature, a more lowly-evolved being. Language is an effort. Thoughts manifest in single emotions: rage, confusion, disappointment.

Sam told me that Enterprise had a Corolla and a Focus available, which were also what she and I drove, respectively. But the rentals were undoubtedly newer than my thirteen-year-old red rambler and Sam's ambiguously aged vehicle (I think an '07?). The youth of the rentals had promise: most cars anymore have that most hallowed feature of an auxiliary port for a headphone jack. No more of this FM transmitter disappointment. A clean signal with no intrusion by gospel or public radio! Hell, if it was a new Focus, it might even have a USB port to plug in the iPhone. I was more excited about this than arriving at the destination, especially when I knew next to nothing about the town and Wikipedia didn't yield more information on it. 

Sam usually wakes up earlier than I do for her job (my previous job didn't require me to be there until the afternoon, both blessing and curse), and this morning kept that routine consistent. Only this time when she got up, the sun had yet to do so itself. Since I'm conditioned to take darkness as an indication to sleep or panic, I shut my eyes and pulled the covers in such a way to hide me from her. If she couldn't find me, she couldn't wake me up, right? Then I heard the question: "Still coming with?" My response was not English or any written language, but translation was simple: "Too tired but okay." The long singular syllable that escape my sleep-salivating gob was what I could mostly muster at 8 AM. Understood or ignored, I got up and let the shower start my day. 

We made excellent time, likely do to Sam's impeccable planning. We got in he car but not before I grabbed my FM transmitter and iPhone USB cable. But then I remembered the prospect of the headphone jack in the car, so I went back inside to grab that too. I also recalled an iPhone car charger that I was compelled to find right then. We had time. I spent five minutes looking in boxes and drawers before I realized no ounce of will on my part was going to make the damn thing materialize after the third time I looked in the end table drawer. I scooped up a cable and got back in the car, only to realize that it was some random USB cable and not the headphone jack I came in to grab in the first place. I ran the stretch of sidewalk between our apartment building and Sam's Corolla like a sprinter conditioning in a pea coat. The return was uphill. I was winded and a little sweaty.

There was no Focus or Corolla waiting for us at the rental place. Instead, we got a Chrysler that was the biggest car I've ridden in recent memory. The legroom was incredible--so spacious that I forgot what proper posture was. My body slipped down the curvature of the seat and my toes never once reached the edge of the legroom. For a long-legged individual, there are a few greater indulgences, especially when most of those that said individual holds close and dear seem to exclusively drive compact cars. Optimally comfortable, we hit the road.

We depended on the rarely-dependable Apple Maps app on Sam's phone, possibly reduced to less dependability since she still hasn't updated to iOS 7. I'm not the update's biggest fan after it temporarily bricked my phone, but if it gave us some sensible directions I'd consider patching up our rocky relationship. We had to forego the robot lady's directions when we saw signs clearly marked for an exit to Monticello, but the robot lady seemed confident that our turn was a couple miles further. She also seemed to disagree with the physical presence of the road that said sign had marked as our little arrow avatar on the app's display showed us on a lonely curve, no opportunities for turning off in sight. 

This was the furthest south I'd been. The lay of the land seemed to shift. Here, the hills stayed uniform to those we have in Little Rock, but trees were more plentiful. These were the trees that stood tall and had most of their branches towards the top like they were playing a game of keep-away from the leaf-eaters on the ground. The lady at the car rental place warned that the hour-and-forty-five-minute drive was boring. A couple times driving that stretch could get samey, but with virgin eyes I stayed attentive. Breaks between the patches of trees presented a bleak picture of rotting fallen logs and grassless turf that intimated death and left little hope that green would return come spring. Buildings along the highway gave off the same vibrations: empty, lifeless windows like black eyes sockets in a skull. A tipped over laundry basket briefly shone like a flickering beacon of life but no clothes suggested either an aborted mission for clean clothes or that the basket served an entirely different and unknown purpose. 

The sky remained a dismal gray with ever ambiguous intentions: maybe us clouds will spit rain on you; we're still mulling it over. This nearly echoed the trip to Hot Springs. That day too was cold and overcast, but then there was an excitement for visiting that town. Hot Springs has a fascinating history with a mostly preserved historical area and famous features (I think you can guess what they are). Early research suggested that Monticello was an inflated version of my hometown. 

In reality, it was about that. There may have been an insular sense of community here, but it was the sort that no outsider was going to feel. I dressed differently from most of them. Lots of camo, lots of Carhart, all a stark contrast to my tattered New Balances and messy wool coat that was missing a button and was about to lose another. Cowboy hats and hunting caps to my unwashed, naked hair. I met eyes with none but I wondered if they looked at me the same way I looked at strangers back home: don't make eye contact but watch them closely until they do something interesting or dangerous.

On the way home after eating lunch at a local hotspot called Ray's, the thought hit me like a stray bullet: I'd never felt more like city folk. I wouldn't consider myself a country boy by any means, but I've never wanted to be around more people as I did then. Not so much to be among them as to be near them, to know there is hope for heterogeneity, some variety, something different. It's hard to just call it "culture." That just feels condescending. 

Coping With Ya'll

"Ya'll" was always a cowboy thing to me. We had our good-ol'-boys in Central Illinois, those who embraced the redneck stereotype while waving their rebel flags and drove trucks that would break all sound-related city ordinances if my hometown had any. Their accents always danced the line of southern without jumping the Mason-Dixon line. Never full Texas, but distinctly rural. And nobody said "ya'll."

My first exposure to "ya'll," that is to say, the first time I heard the contraction without a television speaker as a mediator, was when a girl starting going to my middle school after she moved with her family from Texas. She didn't have the accent--in fact, she sounded more like us than some of us did. But she said, "ya'll." Everything else had that Midwestern lack of twang, and then she'd hit that address to a group of people. "How ya'll doing?" You'll notice that the g remains at the end of doing, not contracted by any means. It seemed to emphasize the anomalous presence of the word, like speaking Spanish but dropping a German word in. I wasn't around her much (a year younger than me) so I never got used to the word's use.

My mom bought me a t-shirt when she took a trip to visit her friend who now lived in Texas after spending most of her life in Northwest Indiana. On it was the Texas flag with its lone star and the phrase, "It's a Texas thing, ya'll wouldn't understand it." I wore it but never thought much of it until the new girl saw my shirt and told me that she was from Texas. She didn't sound like it until she read the shirt out loud and hit that hard ya'll.

In my college town, there was a restaurant that was never open since I started as a freshman. From what I understand, the owner refused to relinquish ownership but had no immediate plans to reopen the restaurant. I heard they served food you'd see at a Popeye's or Long John Silver's. The outside was colorful, sharing the same color scheme as a Long John Silver's with blue siding and yellow trim. The parking lot was overgrown, populated by weeds infiltrating the cracks in the pavement and bereft of cars carrying hungry people. Above the front of the restaurant in straight-lined stylized lettering was the phrase, "How Ya'll Doin?" No apostrophe at the end of Doin, but a question mark as if to suggest they owners were genuinely interested how passersby were. Or maybe everybody. "Ya'll" is inclusive.

A trip to North Carolina immersed me further into "ya'll" culture. It was a similar sensation as when the girl from Texas greeted me or anyone else, except everyone around me was doing it. It wasn't until then that I came to that epiphany that nearly everyone we talked to lacked anything resembling an accent and sounded like the Nebraskans they tell newscasters to mimic, except for "ya'll." I never thought the word would induce a feeling of cognitive dissonance in me.

And then I moved down here. Everybody says "ya'll," regardless of accent. Everybody. I'm not used to it. Neither is Sam. I hear it in restaurants, grocery stores, antique stores. It's weird. I'm not offended, of course, but I'm still not used to it. Maybe I won't be. But I probably should get used to it.

Castle Doctrine

This morning I went to examine our balcony door to see about fixing it. The door is crooked and there's a space that looks like a possible entryway for little critters, and I wondered if it was as easy a solution as tightening the upper hinges. Opening the door, I discovered that we had squatters. Buzzing, stinging squatters.

We've found a couple of them around the apartment before. The first one I thought was a dead roach, but it turned out to just be a soon-to-be dead wasp. The second Sam thought was a spider in the corner of our bathroom. Upon close inspection, it turned out to be a dead wasp. I long wondered where they came from. Did they have their own doorway? Did they have an embassy we didn't know about? Whatever the case, I wanted to keep them--and any other unwanted guests--out.

The nest sat in the doorway just under the threshold in front of the door. Nothing flew out but I saw a couple of them crawling around. I slammed the door. My breathing went shallow. My heart rate tripled. I don't think I have a phobia--that's an irrational fear, right? I got stung by a yellow jacket when I was ten years old at my sister's wedding reception, and cried like a rivet went through my wrist. I went inside--the reception was in our backyard--and watched TV while I kept ice on the sting. My cousin Adam came in and made fun of me.

So I didn't want to get stung. It hurt like hell the first time, and I didn't want to see the sequel. I needed a solution quickly. YouTube served me well in the past in terms of instructing me on how to dice onions and make egg salad, so I figured I could find a recipe for serving up a main course of wasp annihilation.  One video showed using this incredible death foam on a large nest above a garage. The uploader suggested doing it at night so the wasps would be asleep and you could cut their throats in bed, but I didn't have that kind of time. It was going to hang over me forever, or at least until winter when I could pull the nest down by hand and punt the bastards into the snow. He also suggested wearing protective covering, but I don't have any jeans.

Then I considered a professional. Let them get stung to hell. They get paid for that. Orkin. Or a local guy. Then I saw something about a special for $50 off on a visit and figured they were well out of my budget.

My breathing was still heavy, and my heart hadn't slowed. I didn't even want to stay in the apartment. I left. I saw our neighbor Mark as I came down the stairs, likely on lunch. I just met him last night on our balcony. He asked me how it was going. I didn't know how to explain to him that we had home invaders and I was going to buy a big gun--maybe a .357, maybe, a 12-gauge shotgun--to cleanse my dominion of winged stinging filth. But I just told him, "Good."

I was seething with rage, in response to my own fear of things no bigger than my little toe and to the idea that there could be just a couple of the little shits or a well-connected network of miniature pain-bringers and I had no clue. Immediate threats first.

The Ace Hardware isn't far, so I ran by there. I wondered if I needed that industrial strength foam that may have been weaponized Barbasol. I then wondered if, should there be more, do I buy some sort of beekeeper outfit? Would they even have that at Ace?

Entering Ace, I was greeted by an employee. He walked with a slight limp and spoke with the southern drawl I'm still getting used to. He asked me what I was looking for, and I told him: "Wasp spray." I was headed in the right direction anyway but he escorted me there, suggested the Ace-brand stuff because that's what they used on "the farm" and it seemed to work good. Then he saw the price for Raid-brand was practically identical. I went with Raid out of some twisted brand loyalty.

I return home. No sign that they had breached. I debated waiting until later. It was a short debate. I grabbed a broom, the very broom I used to smack the roach-turned-wasp only weeks before. I readied it by the doorway. I grasped the can of Raid Wasp & Hornet that I had already removed the safety plastic piece outside. Opened the door. Two of them crawled about. Let off a burst, squeezing the trigger as I had learned to for the rifle shooting merit badge. Dead wasps fell lifeless. I slammed the door shut.

I spray a heavy dose on the cracks around the door like I'm laying down a barrier. None shall pass. I sat in a chair near the door and waited. Seconds passed as I expected some to break through like buzzing berzerkers. But none did pass. I opened the door again, doorknob slick with Raid Wasp & Hornet formula. I sprayed another volley, seeing no dead wasps fall. Was it empty?

Taking the broom, I gently prodded the small nest. Then I speared it like a Spartan. It came down easy enough, falling square in the center of the balcony. I shut the door, unsure if there would be retaliation. I thought back to things I'd heard about wasps returning to help fallen comrades because of some pheromone released in death. Thought back to me dropping their home so effortlessly and ungracefully. I needed to get rid of the nest. I batted it off the balcony into the woods using the broom. The wasps on the balcony remained still, no signs of life. Or further conflict.

Dansonwatch, Day 1

Recently I've moved from Central Illinois to Arkansas, which was a hell of a move. While Little Rock isn't quite the change that moving from the prairie to, say, Chicago would be, it's still a change. And I'm getting used to it. If you had asked me a year ago that I'd be moving to Little Rock, I'd have probably asked you, "Where is that again?"

I didn't know much about Little Rock, but I've slowly been learning more about it. Nice little city. Got to see one of my favorite bands last night, so that I was nice surprised. Almost felt like fate. We live next to a large park that we've yet to explore (and yes, it requires the verb "explore"), and we're not far from Pinnacle Mountain State Park, which I've heard good things about. Bugs are a bit of a problem, but a problem everyone shares and deals with. So far, so good.

Yesterday I learned something that makes me proud about my move: Ted Danson. He's not from here, originally, but he and wife Mary Steenburgen I guess have a place in the city. I'm in the same city as Sam Malone. I might run into Dr. John Becker.

So that's why I've started "Dansonwatch," an initiative to catch a glimpse of the silver-maned devil in the wild. A bit harder to pull off when most of my time has been spent inside job seeking, but that might change in the coming months. For right now, my eyes are peeled.

If I call out "Norm!" downtown, will it catch his attention?