Mount Magazine
Arkansas
June 2012
Fortunately, you don’t need to join a club to visit the highest point in Arkansas. However, if you stay at the Lodge at Mount Magazine, as we do after our summit hike, and choose to imbibe an adult beverage here in this dry county, you must first apply to become a member of the Skycrest Private Club. Conveniently, suspiciously, you can do this at the hostess station of the dining room by filling out an application with information that could easily be found in your wallet: name, address and some verification that you have lived more than 20 years on this Earth. The hostess writes out your membership card with an ink pen right there while you wait and watch. And then, presto! On the spot she hands you your brand new membership card. Easiest club I’ve ever joined. This membership entitles you to walk right in to the dining room with its enormous stone fireplace and ceiling-high windows with the panoramic view, and get yourself a grown-up drink.
First time for me with my new status as a member of an official drinking club. It has been a grueling entry process, as you have seen, and I have worked up quite a thirst. L’chaim!
This is quite a night of firsts for us. At tonight’s dinner, Lisa samples, for her first time, a frog leg. She orders it as part of her dinner, no membership required. I ask, “How does it taste?” To her credit, Lisa does not say, “It tastes like chicken,” which in my opinion, it does. What she does say, while sliding a scrap of lettuce on top of the uneaten leg on her plate, is, “Not very good.” In a quick, little fantasy, we watch, amused and aghast, as the indignant leg hops away on its own while the three-legged frog, from whose body this leg was separated, makes its way on crutches to the hotel pool.
Lisa proudly tells people about her high point adventure, “My high points are that I ate hush puppies and a frog leg!” I choose not to alert the ASPCA.