Hayti to south of Holland. 21.7 miles/671.1 total
Monday, November 9, 2009
I start the day in Hayti, behind what used to be Boudreaux’s Café, Featuring Cajun Cuisine. I’m headed down south of Holland, to a Shell truck stop a mile and a half north of the Arkansas-Missouri border. It’s overcast and warm. No threat of rain, just lots of clouds. It’ll hit 70 again today, I expect. That strong wind from the south has died down to a gentle breeze.
Today will be my last full day in Missouri. Tomorrow’s walk will take me through Blytheville, Arkansas, which, I learned last evening from talking to a few old boys, is pronounced BLY-vull. It’s there that I have been staying for the last two nights, in the Walmart parking lot, and where I’ll stay tonight and probably tomorrow, too.
Besides learning how to pronounce Blytheville, I got a whiff of racial prejudice from these guys. This hatred is a nasty and unwelcome thing to witness. It’s always dished out to the white stranger in coded phrases, to see if the stranger understands. Then if there’s an opening, they go all out. If not, they fall back on their most tired line, which is that people from outside the south simply don’t understand how things are down here. The joke there is that it's obvious exactly how things are—white people hate black people. Black people sometimes respond in kind, but more often than not respond with a resignation and sullenness that’s perfectly understandable. And more than anyone has a right to expect, they insist on enjoying life and ignoring the white people as much as they can.
It makes me pessimistic that there will ever be a transformation of the soul of the south. I think the most effective solution would be to get rid of most of the white people. Ship ‘em off to an island somewhere, or back to Europe, where they came from.
I see another armadillo, my third, as I go past a work crew of about ten guys in grey jail clothes, who are weed wacking a stand of sumac on the side of the highway. It makes me grateful that I am free to walk past.
Yesterday I took a drive west, past Jonesboro, to Portia, Arkansas, where my grandmother was born. I figured I might as well since I was in the state. Portia is a little town of 400 or so, nothing much to see. It's past cotton country, getting close to the foothills of the Ozarks. You might remember that I checked out the town where my great grandfather was born, Cisne, Illinois, a while back. Well he moved down from Cisne to Grandin, Missouri, in the southern part of the state, where he met my great grandmother. Then they went on down to Portia and the neighboring town, Black Rock. But before too long they went south again, to Cleora, Louisiana, near Bastrop. That's where my grandfather met my grandmother, an auspicious occasion, since it led eventually to the birth of my mother. There was no need to go to any cemeteries, if I could have found them, because the whole family cleared out of Arkansas before the turn of the twentieth century.
On the way to Portia, I passed through a place called Black Oak, about twenty miles east of Jonesboro. All along the highway there were fields, with signs for Grisham Farms, Inc. I'll bet John Grisham or some of his relatives own that land. I remember a book he wrote called A Painted House, which took place in northeastern Arkansas, centering around cotton farming. And John Grisham was born in Jonesboro.
At just under nine miles into today's walk I enter the delightfully-named town of Braggadocio. I don’t know what god-awful way they pronounce it around here, and I’m not sure I even want to find out. The town itself isn’t much. It was founded in 1847, and according to one source, was named for Sir Braggadoccio, in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. Giving a place like this a name like that is a little like dressing a pig in a tutu.
There used to be a high school right here on Route J, where I’m walking. There’s nothing left except what looks like an arch from the school, with the name and the date of construction, 1923. Closed for lack of interest, probably.
At the intersection of Routes J and Z there’s the Braggadocio post office, and just down from the intersection is a place called Mary’s, purporting to be a store. I walk in to this old dilapidated white building and the smell of urine and accumulated filth is so overwhelming inside that I wouldn’t be able to eat or drink anything if I bought it. There’s no one at the counter, fortunately. Mary’s probably out back taking a dump or feeding the chickens. I back out and am quickly on my way past the rest of the dozen houses that comprise Braggadocio. Just thinking about the inside of that place makes me shudder.
At the corner of Route Z and Pemiscot County Route 442, I pause to sit in front of the ruins of an old gas station and store, overgrown and hardly recognizable as such. No roof or windows remain, and a few trees grow inside, together with giant weeds out front by where the pumps must have been. But the concrete skeleton is intact, and a couple of concrete benches are still in front, on either side of the hole that was once the front door. A great place to sit and listen to the thousands of birds that inhabit it now. It’s been a lot of years since old men sat on these benches, spitting tobacco juice and gossiping and gawking at customers. It’s a little like sitting in a cemetery. Today this place would be great for kids to play in, even though their parents probably would tell them not to. But this would make a great clubhouse, or a place to sneak cigarettes, or do such other forbidden things as young people are apt to do. Maybe set fires. Nothing can hurt this old concrete shell. It’s taken thirty years, at least, for it to get this way, and in another thirty it probably will be here. No one cares to tear it down and no one cares whether it stays up. This corner is nothing any more.
Next I enter the small city of Steele, population 2,263. This is where I rejoin Highway 61, which has been on the expressway for some miles. In Steele I see my first Piggly Wiggly store since I’ve been down here. Piggly Wiggly and Wynn Dixie are the two main southern grocery store chains. I’m pretty sure Walmart has put a serious dent in both of them. I wasn’t sure Piggly Wiggly was around anymore.
And here’s a historical tidbit about Steele that falls under the heading of “you just can't make this stuff up.” In 1934, four members of the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World (PMEW) were put on trial in Steele. The PMEW was a pro-Japanese movement of African Americans founded in Chicago in 1932 to promote the idea that Japan was the champion of all non-white people around the world. There had been some unrest between local whites and African Americans, who, particularly in Missouri, had become interested in the PMEW. The four defendants said they were innocent, and blamed the problems on members of a breakaway organization, the Original Independent Benevolent Afro-Pacific Movement of the World. Nevertheless the four were found guilty, one of the prosecutor’s arguments being that they had no business driving around in a high-powered Chrysler. After the trial the judge and the prosecutor stepped outside and allowed a mob of two hundred whites to go in the courtroom and beat the defendants. Then they were sentenced to one year in prison. At some point the conviction was overturned by the Missouri Supreme Court.
A few miles down U.S. 61 I reach Holland, population 247. I’m just at the outskirts of Holland and won’t go through it. But it’s not really necessary to walk right through a town of 247 to know what it’s all about. There are a couple of churches, a small school, and a few dozen houses, and a water tower. That’s it. But there is a cotton gin here, around the bend on Highway 61, with about a hundred cotton modules sitting out front. I stop to chat with a man who is digging in a ditch in front of a Pentecostal Church. I want to know more about cotton. I ask him how much the modules weigh. He says that a bale weighs 400 pounds, and that there are about fifteen bales in each module. So a module would weigh 6000 pounds. He confirms that this hasn’t been a good year because of the rain. The cotton is “knotty,” and not opened all the way, and clings to the plants, so the harvesters don’t get all of it. He said they still get about 80% of it. I had thought 60%, but he said there’s less cotton left on those plants than it looks like there is. He doesn’t know how much a module of cotton would be worth, but that's still a lot more than I knew before. I head on down the road.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Day 40: Armadillo Slim
Conran to Hayti. 19.4 miles/649.4 total
Saturday, November 7, 2009.
It’s 9 a.m. and I’m leaving from just outside Conran, at the intersection of Highway 61 and a couple of lettered state roads. This trip will take me down through Portageville, then through a long stretch of nothing as I walk next to the interstate, and finally to Hayti.
It’s warm today, probably in the 60s now, and promising to get into the 70s. The skies are cloudless. But again there’s a strong wind blowing from the south and southeast, right in my face, at 20 mph or more.
Today’s walk is going to be a little different, because when I get to my destination I won’t be at the motor home. It’s complicated, but I’ve got nothing but time, so I’ll explain. Last night I was driving today’s route while on my way down to the Walmart in Caruthersville, a few miles east of Hayti. When I drive a route, I write down odometer readings at strategic points every few miles, so when I walk I'll have an idea of where I am and how far I have to go to the next town, or to the end. It was a little after dark when I got to Portageville, where Highway 61 merges with I-55 for 20 or 30 miles before separating again and becoming its old two-lane self. So of course I had to find another road to walk on. My map of Missouri said there was a road that ran diagonally southwest from Portageville to a little place called Wardell, and I was looking for that road, but I couldn’t find it. After a little driving around downtown Portageville I decided to continue south instead on Outer Road, which runs right next to the expressway all the way to Hayti, but doesn’t go through any villages.
This morning I was still hoping to find that other road, the diagonal one. So I drove the motor home to where I would have come out if I’d found the diagonal road, and I decided to drive the route in the car on the way back up to Conran, and figure it all out. The problem was that when I got up to Wardell, I discovered, after talking to a couple of people, that there is no diagonal road to Portageville. The map is simply wrong about this. (I confirmed this on Google maps this evening.) The only way to get from Wardell to Portageville is to go straight north about five miles, and then straight east about the same distance. Or, you can go straight east about five miles and straight north on Outer Road or the expressway. The problem with that is that it made the trip longer than I wanted—about 24 miles, instead of maybe 21. I don’t want to walk 24 miles if I can help it.
The alternative is to walk this Outer Road route, which is a little over 19 miles, and hitchhike over to the motor home when I get down to Hayti. So that’s the plan. Worst case scenario is that I don’t get a ride and end up doing another four or five miles to the motor home, for a total of 24. I will have walked over 120 miles this week, due to the fact that I took just one day off. That’s more than enough walking for one week and I’m definitely taking tomorrow off.
A road kill first! An armadillo! Very very flat, but very definitely an armadillo. I didn’t realize they ranged this far north. (I looked up armadillos after the walk and discovered that they range into Nebraska, and have been found in Illinois, Indiana, and southern Ontario. Crikey!) I think I’ll call him Armadillo Slim, because he’s about as thick as a pancake right now. And he’s wearing his poker face, for sure. He gambled, and he lost. Time to fold ‘em, Slim. You’ve been dealt the aces and eights.
At 4.1 miles I enter Portageville, population 3,295. Portageville is home of the Missouri Grain and Warehouse, Inc., buyers of soy beans, milo, and wheat. Which makes me wonder, what the hell is milo, anyway?
Portageville is a dusty little town on this particular day, with the wind blowing from the fields up Highway 61. I provision myself early in the walk here in Portageville, because the remaining fifteen plus miles won’t have a single business where I can buy anything.
Just south of the downtown, I cross from New Madrid into Pemiscot County. Portageville straddles the county line. According to something I read last night, the name Pemiscot is from a local Indian word meaning “liquid mud.” That’s not a bad name for this area, because without the levees, there would be a great deal of liquid mud around here much of the time. Even as it is, it’s pretty wet from last week's rain.
Part of the reason I was having trouble finding the right road is that I don’t have a detailed enough map of Missouri. When I went through Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, I had DeLorme’s Atlases. They're map books in which the state is divided into dozens of squares, each with its own page. They have every single street and road on them, although not all of them are named. I couldn’t find one for Missouri, and I figured I wouldn’t be in the state long enough to need one. So I got a regular road map. But I could have used a DeLorme’s, for sure.
Some of you might be wondering, why not use your laptop? Well, you’re right, I could, in the motor home, at least. But I like the paper maps while I’m driving.
At about the halfway point in the walk, I come up on the overpass where Outer Road crosses Route A, which goes to Wardell. Of course I’m not going to Wardell. It’s not much to write home about anyway, nor are the other two dinky villages I went through on the way up to Wardell.
I come upon a veritable dune of soybeans. It looks like a semi truck full of soybeans tipped over here and dumped its whole load on the side of the road. I wade into them up to my knees. What a lot of soybeans. I wonder if they're salvageable?
I’m within two miles of my destination for the day, the intersection of Missouri Route 84 and Route J, in Hayti. The wind has continued to blow hard all day. I lean into it most of the time. It sure would be nice to have this at my back instead of in my face.
I passed a truck for the Richardson Gin of Marston earlier, carrying one of those huge cotton modules. It’s all been cotton again today, in the fields, being harvested, formed into modules, on trucks, and clinging to the weeds at the side of the road.
At about 19 miles I enter the city limits of Hayti, population 3,207. The only thing I know about it so far is that they mangle the pronunciation. I haven't heard anybody say it, but the internet says it's pronounced Hay-Tie. That's just bizarre. Who would even think of such a thing?
I get to my destination, and about ten minutes into my hitchhiking adventure, here on Missouri 84, a passing policeman informs me that it’s illegal to hitchhike in the State of Missouri, and that I have to walk. He doesn’t offer to give me a ride, either. So now I’m doing what I was trying to avoid—walking all the way until dark, maybe another 5 miles. I’m still going to walk along the right side of the road, look pathetic, and hope somebody will offer me a ride.
The part of Hayti I’m walking in is all used car lots and barbecue joints and little closed grocery stores and ratty housing developments. Finally I’m out of Hayti and Hayti Heights and back in farm country.
This extra bit of walking has afforded me an opportunity to see another new kind of road kill--a crayfish, or, as they say here, crawdad.
It's almost dark when I finally do get that ride, about a mile and a half before I get to the motor home. I won’t count these last few miles as part of today’s walk, since I’ll be starting out the next walk from back in Hayti where I thought I had ended this one. I'll chalk all this up to experience.
By the way, I don't think there's any law against hitchhiking in Missouri.
Saturday, November 7, 2009.
It’s 9 a.m. and I’m leaving from just outside Conran, at the intersection of Highway 61 and a couple of lettered state roads. This trip will take me down through Portageville, then through a long stretch of nothing as I walk next to the interstate, and finally to Hayti.
It’s warm today, probably in the 60s now, and promising to get into the 70s. The skies are cloudless. But again there’s a strong wind blowing from the south and southeast, right in my face, at 20 mph or more.
Today’s walk is going to be a little different, because when I get to my destination I won’t be at the motor home. It’s complicated, but I’ve got nothing but time, so I’ll explain. Last night I was driving today’s route while on my way down to the Walmart in Caruthersville, a few miles east of Hayti. When I drive a route, I write down odometer readings at strategic points every few miles, so when I walk I'll have an idea of where I am and how far I have to go to the next town, or to the end. It was a little after dark when I got to Portageville, where Highway 61 merges with I-55 for 20 or 30 miles before separating again and becoming its old two-lane self. So of course I had to find another road to walk on. My map of Missouri said there was a road that ran diagonally southwest from Portageville to a little place called Wardell, and I was looking for that road, but I couldn’t find it. After a little driving around downtown Portageville I decided to continue south instead on Outer Road, which runs right next to the expressway all the way to Hayti, but doesn’t go through any villages.
This morning I was still hoping to find that other road, the diagonal one. So I drove the motor home to where I would have come out if I’d found the diagonal road, and I decided to drive the route in the car on the way back up to Conran, and figure it all out. The problem was that when I got up to Wardell, I discovered, after talking to a couple of people, that there is no diagonal road to Portageville. The map is simply wrong about this. (I confirmed this on Google maps this evening.) The only way to get from Wardell to Portageville is to go straight north about five miles, and then straight east about the same distance. Or, you can go straight east about five miles and straight north on Outer Road or the expressway. The problem with that is that it made the trip longer than I wanted—about 24 miles, instead of maybe 21. I don’t want to walk 24 miles if I can help it.
The alternative is to walk this Outer Road route, which is a little over 19 miles, and hitchhike over to the motor home when I get down to Hayti. So that’s the plan. Worst case scenario is that I don’t get a ride and end up doing another four or five miles to the motor home, for a total of 24. I will have walked over 120 miles this week, due to the fact that I took just one day off. That’s more than enough walking for one week and I’m definitely taking tomorrow off.
A road kill first! An armadillo! Very very flat, but very definitely an armadillo. I didn’t realize they ranged this far north. (I looked up armadillos after the walk and discovered that they range into Nebraska, and have been found in Illinois, Indiana, and southern Ontario. Crikey!) I think I’ll call him Armadillo Slim, because he’s about as thick as a pancake right now. And he’s wearing his poker face, for sure. He gambled, and he lost. Time to fold ‘em, Slim. You’ve been dealt the aces and eights.
At 4.1 miles I enter Portageville, population 3,295. Portageville is home of the Missouri Grain and Warehouse, Inc., buyers of soy beans, milo, and wheat. Which makes me wonder, what the hell is milo, anyway?
Portageville is a dusty little town on this particular day, with the wind blowing from the fields up Highway 61. I provision myself early in the walk here in Portageville, because the remaining fifteen plus miles won’t have a single business where I can buy anything.
Just south of the downtown, I cross from New Madrid into Pemiscot County. Portageville straddles the county line. According to something I read last night, the name Pemiscot is from a local Indian word meaning “liquid mud.” That’s not a bad name for this area, because without the levees, there would be a great deal of liquid mud around here much of the time. Even as it is, it’s pretty wet from last week's rain.
Part of the reason I was having trouble finding the right road is that I don’t have a detailed enough map of Missouri. When I went through Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, I had DeLorme’s Atlases. They're map books in which the state is divided into dozens of squares, each with its own page. They have every single street and road on them, although not all of them are named. I couldn’t find one for Missouri, and I figured I wouldn’t be in the state long enough to need one. So I got a regular road map. But I could have used a DeLorme’s, for sure.
Some of you might be wondering, why not use your laptop? Well, you’re right, I could, in the motor home, at least. But I like the paper maps while I’m driving.
At about the halfway point in the walk, I come up on the overpass where Outer Road crosses Route A, which goes to Wardell. Of course I’m not going to Wardell. It’s not much to write home about anyway, nor are the other two dinky villages I went through on the way up to Wardell.
I come upon a veritable dune of soybeans. It looks like a semi truck full of soybeans tipped over here and dumped its whole load on the side of the road. I wade into them up to my knees. What a lot of soybeans. I wonder if they're salvageable?
I’m within two miles of my destination for the day, the intersection of Missouri Route 84 and Route J, in Hayti. The wind has continued to blow hard all day. I lean into it most of the time. It sure would be nice to have this at my back instead of in my face.
I passed a truck for the Richardson Gin of Marston earlier, carrying one of those huge cotton modules. It’s all been cotton again today, in the fields, being harvested, formed into modules, on trucks, and clinging to the weeds at the side of the road.
At about 19 miles I enter the city limits of Hayti, population 3,207. The only thing I know about it so far is that they mangle the pronunciation. I haven't heard anybody say it, but the internet says it's pronounced Hay-Tie. That's just bizarre. Who would even think of such a thing?
I get to my destination, and about ten minutes into my hitchhiking adventure, here on Missouri 84, a passing policeman informs me that it’s illegal to hitchhike in the State of Missouri, and that I have to walk. He doesn’t offer to give me a ride, either. So now I’m doing what I was trying to avoid—walking all the way until dark, maybe another 5 miles. I’m still going to walk along the right side of the road, look pathetic, and hope somebody will offer me a ride.
The part of Hayti I’m walking in is all used car lots and barbecue joints and little closed grocery stores and ratty housing developments. Finally I’m out of Hayti and Hayti Heights and back in farm country.
This extra bit of walking has afforded me an opportunity to see another new kind of road kill--a crayfish, or, as they say here, crawdad.
It's almost dark when I finally do get that ride, about a mile and a half before I get to the motor home. I won’t count these last few miles as part of today’s walk, since I’ll be starting out the next walk from back in Hayti where I thought I had ended this one. I'll chalk all this up to experience.
By the way, I don't think there's any law against hitchhiking in Missouri.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Day 39: The land of cotton
Highway 61 and Route HH to Conran. 21.3 miles/630 total
Friday, November 6, 2009
I'm at U.S. 61 and Route HH, headed south to just outside the village of Conran, Missouri, by an abandoned roadside stand, going through the city of New Madrid. Although some regard the whole southeast corner of Missouri, including Sikeston, as part of the bootheel, today I will officially reach the bootheel, which is, strictly speaking, the area below the rest of the border between Missouri and Arkansas, at the 36-30 parallel. Conran is just about at that parallel.
Cotton. You pick up a piece from the side of the road, where it looks like a bunch of cotton balls. But when you manipulate it you realize it contains seeds, about the size of small peas, deep inside the fibers. The fibers cling to the seeds, and it requires persistence and digital dexterity to remove them. The fibers are nature’s way of getting the seed to blow around to various places and propagate itself, I suppose, like the fluff of a dandelion.
It was the problem of how to efficiently remove these seeds that preoccupied a Connecticut inventor by the name of Eli Whitney. Whitney had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, and was hoping to become a lawyer, but he didn’t have enough money. So he accepted a position as a tutor down south, and while there, he became interested in the process of separating the seeds from cotton. His invention, the cotton gin, was patented in 1794. (Whitney also invented a musket with interchangeable parts, which he manufactured under contract with the U.S. government.)
Machines to separate cotton seeds from the fibers had been in use for centuries, but they were relatively difficult to use. The Chinese and the Indians had them. Therefore, it is not technically accurate to say that Whitney invented the cotton gin; he invented a cotton gin that was mechanically more elegant and effective than those in existence. In any event, since it obviated the manual separation of seeds from fiber and greatly increased the amount of cotton that could be processed, it revolutionized the agriculture of the south, with some attendant social consequences. Instead of decreasing the need for manual labor, the cotton gin greatly increased it. As far more land was given over to cotton cultivation, the need for people to plant, pick, and process cotton skyrocketed. Between the time of the invention of the cotton gin and the year 1808, over 80,000 new slaves were brought over from Africa. By the time if the Civil War, about one in three persons in the south was a slave.
Without a doubt it was cotton, and the cotton gin, that most seriously affected the agriculture and economy of the south, and caused the greatest increase in the number of slaves. After the Civil War the continuing need for manual labor in connection with cotton led to the development of share cropping, a quasi-feudal form of peonage that persists to the present day.
So how important is cotton today? Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m wearing blue jeans, which are made of denim, which is cotton. The shirt and t-shirt I’m wearing are 100% cotton. My underwear and socks are all cotton except for the elastic parts. In fact, everything I’m wearing except for my shoes is made of cotton.
Many of the dead of New Madrid lie interred in Evergreen Cemetery, just to the north of the city. I take a walk inside a have a look around. They’ve got folks named Robbins, O’Bannon, Hedgepeth, Ransburgh, and Hunter. Hubard Eugene Croach lived less than a year and a half, from 1933 to 1934. I sit down on his tombstone to rest, and think about what this boy—this baby—might have become. He would be 76 now if he’d lived. In all likelihood very few people have though about little Hubard in many decades. His mother and father, Nellie May and Hubard Lee, are long gone, lying here on either side of him. They’re all together now, and I’ve joined them for a moment of rest and solitude.
I arrive at the city limits of New Madrid, population 3,334. I’m taking a detour from Highway 61 on Old Kingshighway in the direction of downtown. Years ago U.S. 61 probably went right through the city center. I visit the New Madrid County Courthouse, built in 1915. It’s a handsome limestone building, but nothing special. It has a polished black and white tile floor inside leading to a rotunda that looks up at a second floor and a small dome and stained glass skylight above. The Higgerson School is a one-room schoolhouse that was floated over from Higgerson Landing, wherever that is, and restored and placed in the middle of town.
New Madrid is on the Mississippi River. But unlike up in Iowa or Minnesota, where there are bluffs overlooking the river, here the land is flat and low, and you can't see the river from downtown because of the levee. So I walk up onto the levee to take look. The mighty Mississippi stretches a mile or more over to Kentucky on the other side. And it's a good thing this levee is here, because from the looks of it the river is as high as the town is.
Up on the levee there’s a historical marker that tells some of the New Madrid story. It says New Madrid was the first American town in Missouri, founded in 1789 by George Morgan, a Princeton graduate and Indian trader, on the site of the trading post of the LeSieur brothers, Francois and Joseph, called L’Anse a la Graise. Morgan left, but after that American settlement began in earnest. The New Madrid earthquake, one of the world's largest, was centered here. It took place in 1811. (I read somewhere else that it was thought to have been about a 9.0 on the Richter scale. That’s big.) Aftershocks continued for over a year. It could be felt as far as 1100 miles away. But few lives were lost because the area was so sparsely settled. In 1862 Union forces took over New Madrid.
As I'm buying a drink at the gas station/convenience store/catfish restaurant, I pull out a beat up nickel and penny in partial payment, which the guy at the register has to look at closely to determine what they were. I say to him, “That’s found-on-the-road money,” and he replies, “Ah kin tay-ull.”
A sign in front of somebody’s house says, “I’ll keep my freedom, my Bible, my guns, and my money. You can keep ‘The Change.’” That sums up quite neatly the distinction between the conservatives and the progressives in this country. The conservatives don’t want things to change—they want to keep them the same as they were at some time in the past when they imagine that things were really good. It doesn’t matter how old these people are, or what precise year they’re thinking of. It’s always some time when they were about ten or twelve years old. They yearn for the past, hate the present, and fear the future. Progressives look forward to change, and to a future that improves on the present. Nowhere is this contrast as neatly showcased as in the attitudes of the Confederacy and the Union during the Civil War, reflected in their marching songs. For the south, it was “Dixie,” which is all about the past:
I wish I was in the land of cotton,
Old times there are not forgotten,
Look away, look away, look away, Dixie land.
In Dixie land where I was born,
Early on one frosty morn,
Look away, look away, look away, Dixie land.
Then there’s "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," which is about a future full of change, albeit a sort of apocalyptic one, in which justice marches in at last:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword,
His truth is marching on.
This stark contrast illuminates the reasons why people were fighting on both sides of that war. In the south it was to keep things the way they had always been. In the north it was to change things for the better.
I enter Howardville, population 342. Not a lot to distinguish it as I walk through. However, later I read that the town was founded by Travis Howard, father of Elston Howard, the great Yankee catcher, and the first African American to play for the team. How fitting, as I continue to celebrate the victory of the Yankees over the Phillies in the World Series. Howardville’s population, by the way, is over 92% African American.
The next village I enter, at about 17 miles, is Marston, population 610. Marston is a cotton town. Cotton fields surround it, and in the center of the town is the Richardson Gin. Huge semi-truck-sized rectangular blocks of just-harvested cotton, eight by eight by thirty feet, sit in a lot across from the gin, covered on the top and halfway down with green plastic. These blocks are called modules. As much cotton as litters the sides of the road out in the country, there’s much more in this town, along the road, in ditches, in parking lots, up against fences. They are awash in cotton here.
At last, about three miles down from Marston, the motor home comes into view, at the intersection of Highway 61 and Routes M and F, just outside the village of Conran.
Friday, November 6, 2009
I'm at U.S. 61 and Route HH, headed south to just outside the village of Conran, Missouri, by an abandoned roadside stand, going through the city of New Madrid. Although some regard the whole southeast corner of Missouri, including Sikeston, as part of the bootheel, today I will officially reach the bootheel, which is, strictly speaking, the area below the rest of the border between Missouri and Arkansas, at the 36-30 parallel. Conran is just about at that parallel.
Cotton. You pick up a piece from the side of the road, where it looks like a bunch of cotton balls. But when you manipulate it you realize it contains seeds, about the size of small peas, deep inside the fibers. The fibers cling to the seeds, and it requires persistence and digital dexterity to remove them. The fibers are nature’s way of getting the seed to blow around to various places and propagate itself, I suppose, like the fluff of a dandelion.
It was the problem of how to efficiently remove these seeds that preoccupied a Connecticut inventor by the name of Eli Whitney. Whitney had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, and was hoping to become a lawyer, but he didn’t have enough money. So he accepted a position as a tutor down south, and while there, he became interested in the process of separating the seeds from cotton. His invention, the cotton gin, was patented in 1794. (Whitney also invented a musket with interchangeable parts, which he manufactured under contract with the U.S. government.)
Machines to separate cotton seeds from the fibers had been in use for centuries, but they were relatively difficult to use. The Chinese and the Indians had them. Therefore, it is not technically accurate to say that Whitney invented the cotton gin; he invented a cotton gin that was mechanically more elegant and effective than those in existence. In any event, since it obviated the manual separation of seeds from fiber and greatly increased the amount of cotton that could be processed, it revolutionized the agriculture of the south, with some attendant social consequences. Instead of decreasing the need for manual labor, the cotton gin greatly increased it. As far more land was given over to cotton cultivation, the need for people to plant, pick, and process cotton skyrocketed. Between the time of the invention of the cotton gin and the year 1808, over 80,000 new slaves were brought over from Africa. By the time if the Civil War, about one in three persons in the south was a slave.
Without a doubt it was cotton, and the cotton gin, that most seriously affected the agriculture and economy of the south, and caused the greatest increase in the number of slaves. After the Civil War the continuing need for manual labor in connection with cotton led to the development of share cropping, a quasi-feudal form of peonage that persists to the present day.
So how important is cotton today? Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m wearing blue jeans, which are made of denim, which is cotton. The shirt and t-shirt I’m wearing are 100% cotton. My underwear and socks are all cotton except for the elastic parts. In fact, everything I’m wearing except for my shoes is made of cotton.
Many of the dead of New Madrid lie interred in Evergreen Cemetery, just to the north of the city. I take a walk inside a have a look around. They’ve got folks named Robbins, O’Bannon, Hedgepeth, Ransburgh, and Hunter. Hubard Eugene Croach lived less than a year and a half, from 1933 to 1934. I sit down on his tombstone to rest, and think about what this boy—this baby—might have become. He would be 76 now if he’d lived. In all likelihood very few people have though about little Hubard in many decades. His mother and father, Nellie May and Hubard Lee, are long gone, lying here on either side of him. They’re all together now, and I’ve joined them for a moment of rest and solitude.
I arrive at the city limits of New Madrid, population 3,334. I’m taking a detour from Highway 61 on Old Kingshighway in the direction of downtown. Years ago U.S. 61 probably went right through the city center. I visit the New Madrid County Courthouse, built in 1915. It’s a handsome limestone building, but nothing special. It has a polished black and white tile floor inside leading to a rotunda that looks up at a second floor and a small dome and stained glass skylight above. The Higgerson School is a one-room schoolhouse that was floated over from Higgerson Landing, wherever that is, and restored and placed in the middle of town.
New Madrid is on the Mississippi River. But unlike up in Iowa or Minnesota, where there are bluffs overlooking the river, here the land is flat and low, and you can't see the river from downtown because of the levee. So I walk up onto the levee to take look. The mighty Mississippi stretches a mile or more over to Kentucky on the other side. And it's a good thing this levee is here, because from the looks of it the river is as high as the town is.
Up on the levee there’s a historical marker that tells some of the New Madrid story. It says New Madrid was the first American town in Missouri, founded in 1789 by George Morgan, a Princeton graduate and Indian trader, on the site of the trading post of the LeSieur brothers, Francois and Joseph, called L’Anse a la Graise. Morgan left, but after that American settlement began in earnest. The New Madrid earthquake, one of the world's largest, was centered here. It took place in 1811. (I read somewhere else that it was thought to have been about a 9.0 on the Richter scale. That’s big.) Aftershocks continued for over a year. It could be felt as far as 1100 miles away. But few lives were lost because the area was so sparsely settled. In 1862 Union forces took over New Madrid.
As I'm buying a drink at the gas station/convenience store/catfish restaurant, I pull out a beat up nickel and penny in partial payment, which the guy at the register has to look at closely to determine what they were. I say to him, “That’s found-on-the-road money,” and he replies, “Ah kin tay-ull.”
A sign in front of somebody’s house says, “I’ll keep my freedom, my Bible, my guns, and my money. You can keep ‘The Change.’” That sums up quite neatly the distinction between the conservatives and the progressives in this country. The conservatives don’t want things to change—they want to keep them the same as they were at some time in the past when they imagine that things were really good. It doesn’t matter how old these people are, or what precise year they’re thinking of. It’s always some time when they were about ten or twelve years old. They yearn for the past, hate the present, and fear the future. Progressives look forward to change, and to a future that improves on the present. Nowhere is this contrast as neatly showcased as in the attitudes of the Confederacy and the Union during the Civil War, reflected in their marching songs. For the south, it was “Dixie,” which is all about the past:
I wish I was in the land of cotton,
Old times there are not forgotten,
Look away, look away, look away, Dixie land.
In Dixie land where I was born,
Early on one frosty morn,
Look away, look away, look away, Dixie land.
Then there’s "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," which is about a future full of change, albeit a sort of apocalyptic one, in which justice marches in at last:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword,
His truth is marching on.
This stark contrast illuminates the reasons why people were fighting on both sides of that war. In the south it was to keep things the way they had always been. In the north it was to change things for the better.
I enter Howardville, population 342. Not a lot to distinguish it as I walk through. However, later I read that the town was founded by Travis Howard, father of Elston Howard, the great Yankee catcher, and the first African American to play for the team. How fitting, as I continue to celebrate the victory of the Yankees over the Phillies in the World Series. Howardville’s population, by the way, is over 92% African American.
The next village I enter, at about 17 miles, is Marston, population 610. Marston is a cotton town. Cotton fields surround it, and in the center of the town is the Richardson Gin. Huge semi-truck-sized rectangular blocks of just-harvested cotton, eight by eight by thirty feet, sit in a lot across from the gin, covered on the top and halfway down with green plastic. These blocks are called modules. As much cotton as litters the sides of the road out in the country, there’s much more in this town, along the road, in ditches, in parking lots, up against fences. They are awash in cotton here.
At last, about three miles down from Marston, the motor home comes into view, at the intersection of Highway 61 and Routes M and F, just outside the village of Conran.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Day 38: Out on Highway 61
Bertrand to U.S. 61 and Route HH, New Madrid County. 19.4 miles/608.7 total
Thursday, November 5, 2009
I'm on a side street at the east end of Bertrand, Missouri, headed through Sikeston and south for about 10 miles to a spot somewhere in New Madrid County. Another bright sunny cloudless day with a high of only about 60. Very comfortable for walking.
The sign in front of the Bertrand First Baptist Church says, “Thank God For Your Freedom. Thank A Veteran.” It occurs to me that we do have a state church in this country, in spite of the constitutional provision against such a thing. It doesn't have a single name, but all the conservative Protestant denominations are in lock step with the government, especially in matters involving the use of military force, hatred of foreigners, and anything else where vengeance triumphs over compassion and tolerance.
The official state church can best be described as the Religious Right. Anything calling itself Baptist, Church of God, Church of Christ, Assembly of God, Disciples of Christ, whatever. It’s because these denominations are all wrapped up in that Old Testament stuff. They call themselves Christian, but their real champions are the kick-ass Israelites and their vengeful, jealous, punishing God. For the reforming message of the New Testament they have little or no use. They are really just a corn pone, Americanized version of Judaism (or Islam, for that matter), only they can eat pork. All the rest of the laws from the Pentateuch they love—the ten commandments, the eye for an eye thing, the condemnation of homosexuality, the dominance of men over women. All the things that make for an intolerant, patriarchal society.
In spite of this, I'm always struck by how much wiser and more restrained the African American churches are than the white churches when it comes to patriotism and toeing the government line. They’re usually branches of the same churches the whites go to, separated years ago by segregation, and they certainly believe is some of the same wacky things, like speaking in tongues, and all that. But they tend to emphasize the milder New Testament virtues of compassion, humility, forgiveness, and enduring life’s vicissitudes, over the Old Testament, us-versus-them nonsense.
For centuries white southern churches used their religion to justify the most brutish oppression of another race—slavery, segregation, abuses of all kinds. To do that they had to go to the Old Testament for all that crap about the Israelites being enslaved on a routine basis. And when the Jews did become slaves, the message was always, “Well, they got what was coming to them because they didn’t listen to God." And if they got their freedom, then backslid, it would happen to them again. When you spend all your time focusing on that, it’s easy to see slavery as just another instrumentality of God’s justice.
The sign in front of the Cornerstone Church, a few blocks down, says, “If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it.” Well, who’s to say God doesn’t have a refrigerator? People are so presumptuous. He probably has a damn nice one. Not just a GE or Maytag, but one of those really huge restaurant-style refrigerators like you see on HGTV, all stainless steel, with black and white granite countertops next to it. Filled with processed food, ice cream, soda, and lots of pork.
Two or three miles outside of Bertrand, which went by quickly and without anything much to distinguish it, I enter Scott County, which is one of the two counties in which Sikeston is situated. The other is New Madrid County. Scott County was named, in 1821, for John Scott, the first congressman from Missouri.
Just outside the town of Miner, I see a cotton field. I had read that this part of Missouri had a lot of cotton, but this is the first I’ve seen. There it sits, all white as hell, looking like it’s just about ready to be harvested.
Miner is a town of about 1000, located just east of Sikeston on U.S. 62. I read yesterday that it was named after a guy named Minner, and got misspelled. I don't know if the guy’s name was really Miner and he spelled it wrong, or if it was Minner, and other folks spelled it wrong. Either way, it’s par for the course.
Miner has a little old downtown, which I can see from the highway, but most of the action is up here, near the interstate. I pass Miner’s claim to fame, which is Lambert’s Restaurant, “The Home of Throwed Rolls.” It’s a big warehouse-sized place where they specialize in giving you lots of food—refills on most things, including entrees, and where they throw the dinner rolls at you. Quaint. From the size of the parking lot they do a good business. The only thing on the menu that I find enticing is the hog jowls, but I think I’ll pass.
At a little over six miles I enter Sikeston, population 16,992. I spent a little time here yesterday afternoon, in the old downtown, which has brick streets. The modern city center is the intersection of this road I’m on now, U.S. 62, and U.S. 61. This could be just about any place in the country. It could be 28th Street in Grand Rapids, or Telegraph Road in Oakland County. Five lanes of traffic, and all the same stuff. Auto Zone, Family Dollar, Enterprise Car Rental, Taco Bell, Dollar General, Armed Forces Recruiting, McDonald’s.
I turn south on U.S. 61, the old Camino Real, the King’s Highway. Highway 61 is one of the great old roads, running all the way from Minnesota down to New Orleans, a distance of 1400 miles. Down in Mississippi, it’s sometimes called the Blues Highway, because it runs through the Delta. The intersection of Highway 61 and Highway 49 is supposed to be the crossroads where Robert Johnson made his deal with the devil.
But it’s the northern reaches of Highway 61 I’m thinking of now--the Minnesota part, which inspired Bob Dylan. For all you Old Testament scholars, this is the highway where God ordered the sacrifice of Isaac. Here's how it went down, from the guy who is as close to God as anybody I know of:
God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son.”
Abe said, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on.”
God said, “No.” Abe said, “What?”
God said, “You can do what you want, Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you’d better run.”
Abe said, “Where you want this killin’ done?”
God said, “Out on Highway 61.”
It seems appropriate to play that tune on the iPod a couple of times, to observe my official entry onto this auspicious road.
One more Sikeston fact. Sikeston was the site of the last known lynching in Missouri, in 1942. There’s a book about it called The Lynching of Cleo Wright, by Dominic Capeci, Jr. Apparently the grand jury indulged in a what we now know as “jury nullification.”
Mack the Finger said to Louie the King,
“I got forty red white and blue shoestrings
And a thousand telephones that don’t ring.
Do you know where I can get rid of these things?”
And Louie the King said, “Let me think for a minute, son.”
Then he said, “Yes, I think it can be easily done.
Just take everything down to Highway 61.”
Along busy Highway 61 in Sikeston, tucked between a Domino’s Pizza and a bank, is a field of cotton.
I’m now in New Madrid (pronounced MAD-rid) County. The name goes back to when this area was under Spanish control, although the first settlers were French fur traders, in the 1780s. These guys, the Lesieur brothers, got rich from the Indians in that funny way the French had, without slaughtering them.
It’s nothing but cotton now, with a few soybean fields thrown in. Nine more miles of cotton. It's about to be harvested in most places. Cotton harvesters with big cages on them cut through the fields, and lumber up and down the highway. Bits of cotton line the roadside, as if someone had scattered millions of cotton balls everywhere. Cotton. Of course it evokes images of slaves bending down to pick it. Back when people harvested by hand, I imagine they planted the rows a bit farther apart. Also, I'll bet they got closer to 100 percent of the cotton off the branches. Now it looks like they get about 60 percent, and the rest stays on the plants. But they still must get far more cotton than they ever did, and even more cheaply than when the labor was free.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
I'm on a side street at the east end of Bertrand, Missouri, headed through Sikeston and south for about 10 miles to a spot somewhere in New Madrid County. Another bright sunny cloudless day with a high of only about 60. Very comfortable for walking.
The sign in front of the Bertrand First Baptist Church says, “Thank God For Your Freedom. Thank A Veteran.” It occurs to me that we do have a state church in this country, in spite of the constitutional provision against such a thing. It doesn't have a single name, but all the conservative Protestant denominations are in lock step with the government, especially in matters involving the use of military force, hatred of foreigners, and anything else where vengeance triumphs over compassion and tolerance.
The official state church can best be described as the Religious Right. Anything calling itself Baptist, Church of God, Church of Christ, Assembly of God, Disciples of Christ, whatever. It’s because these denominations are all wrapped up in that Old Testament stuff. They call themselves Christian, but their real champions are the kick-ass Israelites and their vengeful, jealous, punishing God. For the reforming message of the New Testament they have little or no use. They are really just a corn pone, Americanized version of Judaism (or Islam, for that matter), only they can eat pork. All the rest of the laws from the Pentateuch they love—the ten commandments, the eye for an eye thing, the condemnation of homosexuality, the dominance of men over women. All the things that make for an intolerant, patriarchal society.
In spite of this, I'm always struck by how much wiser and more restrained the African American churches are than the white churches when it comes to patriotism and toeing the government line. They’re usually branches of the same churches the whites go to, separated years ago by segregation, and they certainly believe is some of the same wacky things, like speaking in tongues, and all that. But they tend to emphasize the milder New Testament virtues of compassion, humility, forgiveness, and enduring life’s vicissitudes, over the Old Testament, us-versus-them nonsense.
For centuries white southern churches used their religion to justify the most brutish oppression of another race—slavery, segregation, abuses of all kinds. To do that they had to go to the Old Testament for all that crap about the Israelites being enslaved on a routine basis. And when the Jews did become slaves, the message was always, “Well, they got what was coming to them because they didn’t listen to God." And if they got their freedom, then backslid, it would happen to them again. When you spend all your time focusing on that, it’s easy to see slavery as just another instrumentality of God’s justice.
The sign in front of the Cornerstone Church, a few blocks down, says, “If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it.” Well, who’s to say God doesn’t have a refrigerator? People are so presumptuous. He probably has a damn nice one. Not just a GE or Maytag, but one of those really huge restaurant-style refrigerators like you see on HGTV, all stainless steel, with black and white granite countertops next to it. Filled with processed food, ice cream, soda, and lots of pork.
Two or three miles outside of Bertrand, which went by quickly and without anything much to distinguish it, I enter Scott County, which is one of the two counties in which Sikeston is situated. The other is New Madrid County. Scott County was named, in 1821, for John Scott, the first congressman from Missouri.
Just outside the town of Miner, I see a cotton field. I had read that this part of Missouri had a lot of cotton, but this is the first I’ve seen. There it sits, all white as hell, looking like it’s just about ready to be harvested.
Miner is a town of about 1000, located just east of Sikeston on U.S. 62. I read yesterday that it was named after a guy named Minner, and got misspelled. I don't know if the guy’s name was really Miner and he spelled it wrong, or if it was Minner, and other folks spelled it wrong. Either way, it’s par for the course.
Miner has a little old downtown, which I can see from the highway, but most of the action is up here, near the interstate. I pass Miner’s claim to fame, which is Lambert’s Restaurant, “The Home of Throwed Rolls.” It’s a big warehouse-sized place where they specialize in giving you lots of food—refills on most things, including entrees, and where they throw the dinner rolls at you. Quaint. From the size of the parking lot they do a good business. The only thing on the menu that I find enticing is the hog jowls, but I think I’ll pass.
At a little over six miles I enter Sikeston, population 16,992. I spent a little time here yesterday afternoon, in the old downtown, which has brick streets. The modern city center is the intersection of this road I’m on now, U.S. 62, and U.S. 61. This could be just about any place in the country. It could be 28th Street in Grand Rapids, or Telegraph Road in Oakland County. Five lanes of traffic, and all the same stuff. Auto Zone, Family Dollar, Enterprise Car Rental, Taco Bell, Dollar General, Armed Forces Recruiting, McDonald’s.
I turn south on U.S. 61, the old Camino Real, the King’s Highway. Highway 61 is one of the great old roads, running all the way from Minnesota down to New Orleans, a distance of 1400 miles. Down in Mississippi, it’s sometimes called the Blues Highway, because it runs through the Delta. The intersection of Highway 61 and Highway 49 is supposed to be the crossroads where Robert Johnson made his deal with the devil.
But it’s the northern reaches of Highway 61 I’m thinking of now--the Minnesota part, which inspired Bob Dylan. For all you Old Testament scholars, this is the highway where God ordered the sacrifice of Isaac. Here's how it went down, from the guy who is as close to God as anybody I know of:
God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son.”
Abe said, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on.”
God said, “No.” Abe said, “What?”
God said, “You can do what you want, Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you’d better run.”
Abe said, “Where you want this killin’ done?”
God said, “Out on Highway 61.”
It seems appropriate to play that tune on the iPod a couple of times, to observe my official entry onto this auspicious road.
One more Sikeston fact. Sikeston was the site of the last known lynching in Missouri, in 1942. There’s a book about it called The Lynching of Cleo Wright, by Dominic Capeci, Jr. Apparently the grand jury indulged in a what we now know as “jury nullification.”
Mack the Finger said to Louie the King,
“I got forty red white and blue shoestrings
And a thousand telephones that don’t ring.
Do you know where I can get rid of these things?”
And Louie the King said, “Let me think for a minute, son.”
Then he said, “Yes, I think it can be easily done.
Just take everything down to Highway 61.”
Along busy Highway 61 in Sikeston, tucked between a Domino’s Pizza and a bank, is a field of cotton.
I’m now in New Madrid (pronounced MAD-rid) County. The name goes back to when this area was under Spanish control, although the first settlers were French fur traders, in the 1780s. These guys, the Lesieur brothers, got rich from the Indians in that funny way the French had, without slaughtering them.
It’s nothing but cotton now, with a few soybean fields thrown in. Nine more miles of cotton. It's about to be harvested in most places. Cotton harvesters with big cages on them cut through the fields, and lumber up and down the highway. Bits of cotton line the roadside, as if someone had scattered millions of cotton balls everywhere. Cotton. Of course it evokes images of slaves bending down to pick it. Back when people harvested by hand, I imagine they planted the rows a bit farther apart. Also, I'll bet they got closer to 100 percent of the cotton off the branches. Now it looks like they get about 60 percent, and the rest stays on the plants. But they still must get far more cotton than they ever did, and even more cheaply than when the labor was free.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Progress report: Sikeston in the sun
Wednesday, November 4, 2009Another cloudless day, about 70 degrees. I would be happy if every day were like this, except that my face is beginning to take on the red leathery cast of an old wino, while my forehead, protected by the brim of my hat, stays white. Ah, vanity. As Al Pacino said in The Devil's Advocate, definitely my favorite sin.
Sikeston. Where do I start? The Wikipedia page on this city is unusually detailed. Obviously the Sikeston p. r. folks got to it and did their best. It's chock full of trivia.
I'm staying in the Wal-Mart parking lot, of course, taking the day off. But not just any Wal-Mart parking lot. Sikeston is where the first Wal-Mart outside of Arkansas was built, in the 1960s. Not the present building, to be sure, and maybe not at this precise location.
Two more items from the Sikeston page, and I'll save some for tomorrow, when I will be walking through the town. First, that Confederate general, Jeff Thompson, who robbed the bank in Charleston to pay his troops and buy supplies, is supposed to have buried some of the money here, under an oak tree at the corner of New Madrid Street and Kingshighway. Kingshighway was the name for what became U.S. 61, originally built by order of the King of Spain in 1789, when he owned this land. It was called El Camino Real--the royal highway. I'll be traveling on or near it for quite a while longer, because it goes to New Orleans.
The other item is true trivia, but too good to pass up. William Jefferson Blythe, Jr., the birth father of President Bill Clinton, died outside Sikeston on U.S. 60, in 1946, after an accident in which he was thrown from his car into a drainage ditch, where he drowned. That was three months before Clinton was born.
Now I'm off to the laundromat.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Day 37: Escape from Little Egypt
Cairo, Illinois to Bertrand, Missouri. 22 miles/589.3 total
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
I’m leaving from the parking lot of the SuperValu food store in Cairo, Illinois, heading across the Mississippi to the little town of Bertrand, Missouri.
It’s another cloudless day, promising to get up into the low 60s. Today will be my most ambitious walk yet, at 22 miles. This is also the first time since back in Michigan that I have walked four days in a row. Since I’m getting an early start this morning (8:20) and taking tomorrow off, it should be okay.
I pass by the old United States Post Office and Courthouse on Washington Avenue, apparently not in use any more. It’s far too big for the postal needs of a city of 3600, and I'm pretty sure the Cairo of today is too small to have a federal court. I imagine the court was to handle customs claims rather than regular federal business. Right next door to the federal building is the old Customs House. According to a plaque in front, it was begun in 1867, completed 1872. There was so much river traffic up from the south that Cairo was a port of entry for goods. The Customs House too is closed, although there’s a museum inside. But since it’s only 8:30, I’m too early. In the yard in front of the Customs House there’s a monument to someone named York the Slave. He was a slave who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their expedition, 1803-1806, sharing all their trials and tribulations, but getting none of the credit. He was the first African American to cross the continent, as far as anyone knows. The Indians thought he was cool.
A couple of blocks away from Washington Avenue, on both sides, I can see nothing but empty buildings—houses, warehouses, stores, motels—with gaping windows and missing doors. On Washington Avenue itself they’ve tried to keep things up, or at least get rid of the really bad buildings, but it’s a vain effort. It’s impossible to avoid comparisons to cities that have been devastated by war. This is the dilemma of the decaying urban center. When you have an abandoned building that’s beyond repair, do you tear it down and leave another vacant lot, or do you leave the building up so it looks like something’s there, even though the building is unsafe? Meanwhile, the folks who have to live in places like this try to go about the business of daily life like everyone else, knowing they live in an ugly, god-forsaken slum, but unable to escape from it.
There’s a two-block stretch of old storefronts and theaters that advertises itself as Historic Downtown Cairo. It looks as if it could be used as a movie set for a film about a post-apocalyptic world where people careen around lawlessly on motorcycles, or something. I wonder if Cairo could play up this angle? Come here and shoot your film about life in the ghetto, or the world after a nuclear disaster, or a war, or a riot. Use Cairo as a stand-in for Detroit or Dresden. We’ll give you the key to the city. You can even blow up buildings if you want to. Trouble is, you’ll all have to stay at the crummy little Days Inn over by the interstate, or the Belvedere Motel up on Sycamore, where the rats are the size of chihuahuas.
In the midst of this unpleasantness I came upon the largest and most magnificent ginkgo tree I’ve ever seen. It’s on Halliday Plaza, next to the Episcopal Church. This tree must be six feet in diameter, at least. Centuries old. And perfectly healthy, its yellow leaves just tinged with green. In another week there’ll be a beautiful blanket of yellow on the ancient sidewalk below it. Without question it is the prettiest thing I’ve seen since I came into Cairo.
I pass the virile art deco façade of the Illinois National Guard building, built in 1931. This place and the federal building and Customs House speak to the fact that Cairo wasn’t always what I see today. The city was once alive.
Because of the levees surrounding Cairo, I can’t see the Ohio or the Mississippi from the city. Last evening after my walk I drove up over the levee in Mound City and got a nice look at the Ohio, brown and wide.
Now I am outside the city, heading south toward the end of the peninsula on which Cairo sits, and toward the two bridges—one to Kentucky over the Ohio, and the other to Missouri over the Mississippi. It’s the latter I’ll be taking, off to the right. These two truss bridges are of the same vintage, from the 1920s or 30s. The problem for me is that they are narrow and have no pedestrian walkways. They were built when trucks, especially, were narrower than they are today.
Before I get to the Mississippi bridge I stop at a little park where there's a life-size statue of Ulysses S. Grant, looking down at toward the rivers converge. The guy looks like he was an inch or two shorter than me. I take my picture with him. Old Ulysses. My man. A great American. There’s another plaque that commemorates the Lewis and Clark expedition’s stopover here, on their way west. They camped on the peninsula for a couple of weeks. York the Slave probably did most of the heavy lifting.
I am now starting across the bridge. Fortunately, traffic is light. Still, I expect that this will be the most treacherous mile or two I walk on my entire trip. If I find myself at the point where two semis pass each other, one of them will simply have to stop. At least the speed limit is fairly low, about 45 mph. The Mississippi is about a mile wide at this point, muddy and fast flowing. A tugboat pushed a long barge up river to the north. At 2.6 miles I reach the center of the bridge and the middle of the river, and I am officially in Missouri. Now for the downward trip.
Well, about three-quarters of the way across, a Cairo police car came up next to me, going my way, and the cop asked me if I was okay. I said yes, that I was just trying to get across the bridge. His response was “get in,” and he said it in such a way that I took it as an order. So I hopped in the car, and he took me the last quarter of a mile or so to the end of the bridge and dropped me off in a turnaround for trucks. He told me he’d received a call that someone was trying to walk across the bridge. When he dropped me off, he asked me if I need a ride to anywhere, and I told him no thanks, that I was hiking. He was a very friendly guy, and told me to be careful. No lectures, just very professional. When I got out of the car, I saw on the door that he was none other than the chief of police. So I got an official escort of sorts. He was a little out of his jurisdiction by the time he picked me up, but it was a nice gesture on his part, and in all likelihood, he regarded me as a danger to myself and others.
That ride creates a bit of a problem for me. I have been scrupulous up to now about seeing to it that I walk every foot of the way. When I start from a spot where I left off the day before, I make sure I begin walking from as close to where I ended as I can. Someone asked me early on how I was going to walk across the Mississippi River. I expressed confidence then that whatever local bridges they had would be okay for walking. That has turned out not to be the case. And if any other bridges turn out to be as narrow and pedestrian unfriendly as this one was, I’ll just hitch a ride across at the beginning.
So now I am in Missouri, heading south into Arkansas. I could have gone down through Kentucky into Tennessee, but I decided instead to go this way, and cross the Mississippi back into Memphis. Then I’ll be going pretty much straight south through the State of Mississippi, crossing the river again, for good, in New Orleans. I am now in a former slave state for the first time on the trip.
Now that Illinois is history, time for some stats. I entered Illinois on October 19. I walked twelve full days there, for a total of 231.2 miles, an average of 19.2 miles per day. Illinois leads the way in friendliness and hospitality so far, with a total of 30 ride offers. I found $1.19 in change on the roadside. In road kill, snakes were tied with possums for the lead, with 28 each. You might recall that I only counted snakes that were at least as long as my shoe. In distant third place were raccoons—only 13 of them. Next were 9 skunks, 9 frogs, 8 turtles, 8 birds, 5 cats, 2 squirrels, and one each of newt, dog, and deer. (Sounds a little like a recipe for something.)
The road I’m on, U.S. 60 and 62, is on a levee here. It’s a two lane highway. After a long five miles on this levee, the highway curves away from it, and I come across something you don’t ordinarily see on the side of the road--a garter snake eating a frog. The snake is about two feet long. He’s got the frog’s head in his mouth, and he’s trying to get his jaws around its shoulders. Meanwhile, the frog’s legs are thrashing. Old brer frog is as good as dead, but he's not giving up yet. When the snake sees me taking pictures of him, he lifts his head up and hightails it down into the grassy ditch to finish his meal in peace.
The area just south of where I have entered Missouri is called the bootheel, because on the map it resembles one. These counties weren’t originally going to be part of Missouri, but part of Arkansas instead, and the southern border of Missouri was going to be straight across, following the rest of the Missouri-Arkansas border. But someone argued that the towns down here had more in common with the other Missouri towns along the Mississippi farther north, like St. Louis and Cape Girardeau, than they did with Arkansas towns. The county I’m in now is Mississippi County. It’s completely flat, with soybean fields stretching out for miles.
At 13.1 miles I enter the city limits of Charleston, population 5085. I still have a couple of miles to go before I get to the center. The first thing I pass inside the city is the Charleston Country Club, across the street from an affluent, upper middle class suburb, the first one of those I’ve seen in many a mile.
Next to the golf course is a historical marker telling some of the Mississippi County story. It was organized in 1845. Charleston is the county seat. It’s known as a cotton and shoe making center (or at least it was when they put up this marker, a few decades ago). Charleston was first called Mathews Prairie, settled on a Spanish grant in 1801. John Rodney laid out the town, named for Charles Moore, in 1837. The county was settled by people from Kentucky and Tennessee. The original settlement of the county was just about where the Cairo chief of police dropped me off. Grant fought a Civil War battle here, in Belmont, and won. Afterwards the Confederates strung a chain across the Mississippi to try to stop Union boats.
Next I come to the truck stop where I spent last night—a very nice place, where they have water and an RV dumping station. I stop there to get another drink and some refreshments before I begin the last long third of the walk.
As I walk through this part of Missouri I am aware that I am in Uncle John Crabb territory. He was my wife’s uncle, originally from Parma, Missouri, not far from here. I always liked Uncle John. He called them as he saw them. The straight unvarnished truth. If you asked him to, he’d give you his right arm. I’d like to think that a little bit of his spirit still lives around here, and I’m going to dedicate today’s walk to his memory.
Downtown Charleston was undistinguished, but here’s an interesting bit of info. In 1861 a confederate general named Jeff Thompson robbed the Union Bank of Charleston. He gave the teller an hour to get permission to open the vault. After receiving the money he gave the bank a receipt for $57,000, and discovered later that only $56,000 was in the bags.
South of town is an enormous cemetery, probably about 50 acres, as flat as the rest of the alluvial plains. One of the plots contains members of the Randol family. Thankful Randol was one of the early landowners of Charleston.
After this long day on the levees I have to end it by listening to Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” on the iPod. It seems appropriate.
Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good.
Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good.
When the levee breaks, mama you got to move.
At last I enter the village of Bertrand, population 740. Not much to say about Bertrand. I’ll be starting from here next time.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
I’m leaving from the parking lot of the SuperValu food store in Cairo, Illinois, heading across the Mississippi to the little town of Bertrand, Missouri.
It’s another cloudless day, promising to get up into the low 60s. Today will be my most ambitious walk yet, at 22 miles. This is also the first time since back in Michigan that I have walked four days in a row. Since I’m getting an early start this morning (8:20) and taking tomorrow off, it should be okay.
I pass by the old United States Post Office and Courthouse on Washington Avenue, apparently not in use any more. It’s far too big for the postal needs of a city of 3600, and I'm pretty sure the Cairo of today is too small to have a federal court. I imagine the court was to handle customs claims rather than regular federal business. Right next door to the federal building is the old Customs House. According to a plaque in front, it was begun in 1867, completed 1872. There was so much river traffic up from the south that Cairo was a port of entry for goods. The Customs House too is closed, although there’s a museum inside. But since it’s only 8:30, I’m too early. In the yard in front of the Customs House there’s a monument to someone named York the Slave. He was a slave who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their expedition, 1803-1806, sharing all their trials and tribulations, but getting none of the credit. He was the first African American to cross the continent, as far as anyone knows. The Indians thought he was cool.
A couple of blocks away from Washington Avenue, on both sides, I can see nothing but empty buildings—houses, warehouses, stores, motels—with gaping windows and missing doors. On Washington Avenue itself they’ve tried to keep things up, or at least get rid of the really bad buildings, but it’s a vain effort. It’s impossible to avoid comparisons to cities that have been devastated by war. This is the dilemma of the decaying urban center. When you have an abandoned building that’s beyond repair, do you tear it down and leave another vacant lot, or do you leave the building up so it looks like something’s there, even though the building is unsafe? Meanwhile, the folks who have to live in places like this try to go about the business of daily life like everyone else, knowing they live in an ugly, god-forsaken slum, but unable to escape from it.
There’s a two-block stretch of old storefronts and theaters that advertises itself as Historic Downtown Cairo. It looks as if it could be used as a movie set for a film about a post-apocalyptic world where people careen around lawlessly on motorcycles, or something. I wonder if Cairo could play up this angle? Come here and shoot your film about life in the ghetto, or the world after a nuclear disaster, or a war, or a riot. Use Cairo as a stand-in for Detroit or Dresden. We’ll give you the key to the city. You can even blow up buildings if you want to. Trouble is, you’ll all have to stay at the crummy little Days Inn over by the interstate, or the Belvedere Motel up on Sycamore, where the rats are the size of chihuahuas.
In the midst of this unpleasantness I came upon the largest and most magnificent ginkgo tree I’ve ever seen. It’s on Halliday Plaza, next to the Episcopal Church. This tree must be six feet in diameter, at least. Centuries old. And perfectly healthy, its yellow leaves just tinged with green. In another week there’ll be a beautiful blanket of yellow on the ancient sidewalk below it. Without question it is the prettiest thing I’ve seen since I came into Cairo.
I pass the virile art deco façade of the Illinois National Guard building, built in 1931. This place and the federal building and Customs House speak to the fact that Cairo wasn’t always what I see today. The city was once alive.
Because of the levees surrounding Cairo, I can’t see the Ohio or the Mississippi from the city. Last evening after my walk I drove up over the levee in Mound City and got a nice look at the Ohio, brown and wide.
Now I am outside the city, heading south toward the end of the peninsula on which Cairo sits, and toward the two bridges—one to Kentucky over the Ohio, and the other to Missouri over the Mississippi. It’s the latter I’ll be taking, off to the right. These two truss bridges are of the same vintage, from the 1920s or 30s. The problem for me is that they are narrow and have no pedestrian walkways. They were built when trucks, especially, were narrower than they are today.
Before I get to the Mississippi bridge I stop at a little park where there's a life-size statue of Ulysses S. Grant, looking down at toward the rivers converge. The guy looks like he was an inch or two shorter than me. I take my picture with him. Old Ulysses. My man. A great American. There’s another plaque that commemorates the Lewis and Clark expedition’s stopover here, on their way west. They camped on the peninsula for a couple of weeks. York the Slave probably did most of the heavy lifting.
I am now starting across the bridge. Fortunately, traffic is light. Still, I expect that this will be the most treacherous mile or two I walk on my entire trip. If I find myself at the point where two semis pass each other, one of them will simply have to stop. At least the speed limit is fairly low, about 45 mph. The Mississippi is about a mile wide at this point, muddy and fast flowing. A tugboat pushed a long barge up river to the north. At 2.6 miles I reach the center of the bridge and the middle of the river, and I am officially in Missouri. Now for the downward trip.
Well, about three-quarters of the way across, a Cairo police car came up next to me, going my way, and the cop asked me if I was okay. I said yes, that I was just trying to get across the bridge. His response was “get in,” and he said it in such a way that I took it as an order. So I hopped in the car, and he took me the last quarter of a mile or so to the end of the bridge and dropped me off in a turnaround for trucks. He told me he’d received a call that someone was trying to walk across the bridge. When he dropped me off, he asked me if I need a ride to anywhere, and I told him no thanks, that I was hiking. He was a very friendly guy, and told me to be careful. No lectures, just very professional. When I got out of the car, I saw on the door that he was none other than the chief of police. So I got an official escort of sorts. He was a little out of his jurisdiction by the time he picked me up, but it was a nice gesture on his part, and in all likelihood, he regarded me as a danger to myself and others.
That ride creates a bit of a problem for me. I have been scrupulous up to now about seeing to it that I walk every foot of the way. When I start from a spot where I left off the day before, I make sure I begin walking from as close to where I ended as I can. Someone asked me early on how I was going to walk across the Mississippi River. I expressed confidence then that whatever local bridges they had would be okay for walking. That has turned out not to be the case. And if any other bridges turn out to be as narrow and pedestrian unfriendly as this one was, I’ll just hitch a ride across at the beginning.
So now I am in Missouri, heading south into Arkansas. I could have gone down through Kentucky into Tennessee, but I decided instead to go this way, and cross the Mississippi back into Memphis. Then I’ll be going pretty much straight south through the State of Mississippi, crossing the river again, for good, in New Orleans. I am now in a former slave state for the first time on the trip.
Now that Illinois is history, time for some stats. I entered Illinois on October 19. I walked twelve full days there, for a total of 231.2 miles, an average of 19.2 miles per day. Illinois leads the way in friendliness and hospitality so far, with a total of 30 ride offers. I found $1.19 in change on the roadside. In road kill, snakes were tied with possums for the lead, with 28 each. You might recall that I only counted snakes that were at least as long as my shoe. In distant third place were raccoons—only 13 of them. Next were 9 skunks, 9 frogs, 8 turtles, 8 birds, 5 cats, 2 squirrels, and one each of newt, dog, and deer. (Sounds a little like a recipe for something.)
The road I’m on, U.S. 60 and 62, is on a levee here. It’s a two lane highway. After a long five miles on this levee, the highway curves away from it, and I come across something you don’t ordinarily see on the side of the road--a garter snake eating a frog. The snake is about two feet long. He’s got the frog’s head in his mouth, and he’s trying to get his jaws around its shoulders. Meanwhile, the frog’s legs are thrashing. Old brer frog is as good as dead, but he's not giving up yet. When the snake sees me taking pictures of him, he lifts his head up and hightails it down into the grassy ditch to finish his meal in peace.
The area just south of where I have entered Missouri is called the bootheel, because on the map it resembles one. These counties weren’t originally going to be part of Missouri, but part of Arkansas instead, and the southern border of Missouri was going to be straight across, following the rest of the Missouri-Arkansas border. But someone argued that the towns down here had more in common with the other Missouri towns along the Mississippi farther north, like St. Louis and Cape Girardeau, than they did with Arkansas towns. The county I’m in now is Mississippi County. It’s completely flat, with soybean fields stretching out for miles.
At 13.1 miles I enter the city limits of Charleston, population 5085. I still have a couple of miles to go before I get to the center. The first thing I pass inside the city is the Charleston Country Club, across the street from an affluent, upper middle class suburb, the first one of those I’ve seen in many a mile.
Next to the golf course is a historical marker telling some of the Mississippi County story. It was organized in 1845. Charleston is the county seat. It’s known as a cotton and shoe making center (or at least it was when they put up this marker, a few decades ago). Charleston was first called Mathews Prairie, settled on a Spanish grant in 1801. John Rodney laid out the town, named for Charles Moore, in 1837. The county was settled by people from Kentucky and Tennessee. The original settlement of the county was just about where the Cairo chief of police dropped me off. Grant fought a Civil War battle here, in Belmont, and won. Afterwards the Confederates strung a chain across the Mississippi to try to stop Union boats.
Next I come to the truck stop where I spent last night—a very nice place, where they have water and an RV dumping station. I stop there to get another drink and some refreshments before I begin the last long third of the walk.
As I walk through this part of Missouri I am aware that I am in Uncle John Crabb territory. He was my wife’s uncle, originally from Parma, Missouri, not far from here. I always liked Uncle John. He called them as he saw them. The straight unvarnished truth. If you asked him to, he’d give you his right arm. I’d like to think that a little bit of his spirit still lives around here, and I’m going to dedicate today’s walk to his memory.
Downtown Charleston was undistinguished, but here’s an interesting bit of info. In 1861 a confederate general named Jeff Thompson robbed the Union Bank of Charleston. He gave the teller an hour to get permission to open the vault. After receiving the money he gave the bank a receipt for $57,000, and discovered later that only $56,000 was in the bags.
South of town is an enormous cemetery, probably about 50 acres, as flat as the rest of the alluvial plains. One of the plots contains members of the Randol family. Thankful Randol was one of the early landowners of Charleston.
After this long day on the levees I have to end it by listening to Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” on the iPod. It seems appropriate.
Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good.
Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good.
When the levee breaks, mama you got to move.
At last I enter the village of Bertrand, population 740. Not much to say about Bertrand. I’ll be starting from here next time.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Day 36: Cairo by night and day
South of New Grand Chain to Cairo. 19.8 miles/567.3 total
Monday, November 2, 2009.
Leaving from the side of the road south of New Grand Chain, heading for Cairo. It’s a bright sunny day, promising to get up into the 60s. Today is my last full day in Illinois. Most of tomorrow will be in Missouri.
Cairo (pronounced like Karo Syrup), is built on a peninsula at the confluence of the Ohio River and the Mississippi River. It's at the bottom tip—the nadir—of Little Egypt. Such a boarded-up and desolate place is Cairo that it instantly brings to mind the east side of Detroit, except that it is much smaller, only 3600 population. As I drove around last night looking for a place to park the motor home for the night, I was struck at once by how many places there were—the city is full of empty parking lots—and how few of them looked the least bit safe or inviting. I ended up going out by the expressway exit, a few miles north of town, to see if there was a truck stop. But there was only a Days Inn motel, so I decided to spend the night there instead of in the motor home. I was out of water in the motor home anyway, and had taken only about half a shower in the morning, and I figured that a night in a real room with a TV with lots of channels would be a welcome change. The motel was pretty cheap, but clean and adequate. Tonight I’ll look for a truck stop in Missouri. No way am I spending another night in or near Cairo.
In the light of day Cairo doesn’t look quite as bad as it did in the dark, but it’s still a pretty depressed place. I found a spot for the motor home in a grocery store parking lot this morning. But more on Cairo later.
The topography has changed again, going from hilly to flat and low and alluvial, with lots of water on both sides of the road, from the recent rains and from the wetlands and flood plains inland from the Ohio River, which lies a mile or so to the east. Lots of soybean fields, many half under water.
Out in the middle of nowhere, I pass the modern-looking prefabricated Bethel Temple Church of God in Christ, sporting a slick newer bus—not a used school bus, but a city bus--as well as a smaller one that looks like the buses you see at senior citizen homes.
Whether in the midst of rural or urban poverty, churches proliferate. They’re parasitic, like rats, looking for places to establish themselves where things are less than ideal for people. In times of wealth, people tend to worship wealth, and are pretty happy with that. When they are destitute, they must turn to the worship of things that are unseen--the lick and promise of something later on. That’s the most obvious and simple explanation for why dinky churches are everywhere in blighted cities and the flea-bitten countryside. Another factor is that a church is one of the few business enterprises that can thrive just about anywhere, and particularly where nothing else can.
The church would say, of course, that it is supplying a necessity of life, like a grocery store is. Food for the soul, in a hungry land. Something to mitigate the awful sameness of the lives of poor folks. But from the standpoint of the practitioners of religion—the clergy—there’s no greater opportunity to make money, if you're reasonably glib and articulate, even if you don’t possess a formal education, than to go into business as a preacher. People will pay you money to tell them what they want to hear on Sunday mornings, provide you with a living out of their own meager funds, and raise the money for a decent church and home for you. Nice deal, if you’re just a bit swifter than the rest of the folks. And you never have to worry about a crash or a crisis in faith, like the stock market. In fact, the worse things get in the rest of the world, the more people seem to turn to religion. That’s why the airwaves are filled with preachers, on TV and radio. And their message is always the same, ultimately—send money.
I enter Olmsted, population 300. A good half mile after I pass the sign, past fields and nothing more, I finally arrive at what must be the commercial nexus of the village. The place was laid out by E.B. Olmstead in 1872, and later the name was misspelled, becoming Olmsted. This is absolutely appropriate. Olmsted was a much more thriving place even half a century ago, with passenger rail service, several factories (including one that made Kitty Litter), mussel fishing, as well as banks and stores. Today from the looks of it there’s not much left.
Tomorrow is election day here in Pulaski County, and they’re electing a sheriff, among other county officers. They seem to be nonpartisan here. Candidates for sheriff include Dean Hamilton, Anthony “Tony” Neeley, Gene Adams, Lloyd A. “Bo” Bosecker, and Randy Kern is running for re-election. The sheriff’s race looks like it’s wide open.
A couple of guys sitting in front of a closed watermelon stand call out to me, “Keep on walkin’.” I tell them what I’m doing and they say, “Well, then, you in good shape.”
The road is running on a levee now, and above the road is an older dirt road at the top. I climb up to that and walk along for a mile or two, free from traffic.
I enter Mound City, population 750, the county seat of Pulaski County. Mound City was established in 1854. But back in 1812 or 1813, something happened here called the Mound City Massacre. There were only a few dozen settlers in the whole area from New Grand Chain down to Cairo (then known as Bird’s Point), most or all of whom had come from Tennessee because of an earthquake in 1811. One day some Creek Indians, traveling through, visited the settlers in the area and killed most of seven families. The Indians got away into Kentucky and were never seen again. One or two people lived to tell the story.
During the Civil War, Mound City shipyards produced a number of ironclad vessels. Also during the Civil War the first Navy nurses, who were African American women, working along with Catholic nuns, cared for soldiers at a nearby military hospital.
The only businesses worth mentioning downtown are the Cut Mart gas station and convenience store and a drug store. But there is a very large and thriving grain elevator.
I pass an elaborate three-story Queen Anne style house, newly painted in white, grey, and pink. Down the street from that is St. Mary’s church, which has a window above the front door commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus, 1492-1892.
I have a conversation with a guy who saw me back in Olmsted as I was walking past his driveway. He offers me a ride, and I tell him what I'm doing. He says he was born and raised New Grand Chain. He introduces himself as Robert something.
There’s a National Cemetery outside Mound City, where almost 5000 Civil War dead are buried, and thousands of more recent veterans. As soon as I go into the cemetery I am beset by ladybugs, who swarm around me, land on me, and try to go into my pockets. One bites me on the back of the neck.
I leave Pulaski County and enter Alexander County. It was named for William Alexander, who became speaker of the Illinois house in 1822. Cairo is the county seat. To the southeast are the wide alluvial floodlands of the Ohio River. Illinois Route 37 is running out in less than two miles. It ends at U.S. 51 a couple of miles north of Cairo. For now it goes straight and flat, with telephone poles on one side and bald cypresses on the other, looking like dying evergreens.
A historical marker tells a little about the history of Cairo. Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix, a French Jesuit, reported in 1721 that the land at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers would be a good place for a settlement and fortification. In 1818 the Illinois Territorial legislature started Cairo, and a few years later there were plans for levees and canals. Things didn’t take off until 1854, when the railroad came through. Right after the start of the Civil War, in April of 1861, Union troops arrived at Cairo to secure the rivers for the north. The city thrived as a troop and supply center for Ulysses Grant’s army. And that was close to the high point for Cairo.
I go through the village of Urbandale. One of the jewels in the commercial crown of Urbandale is a large auto graveyard. At 17 miles I finally leave Route 37. I have walked just under 170 miles on Route 37, which is the longest I‘ve been on any one road so far.
A little north of Cairo I enter Future City. The people who named this place either had a sense of humor or they were hoping for something that never materialized. It has no future, and it’s not a city. It looks like only a grim sad past. There’s a long-abandoned honky-tonk, with only a Budweiser sign on the front and a second story, maybe a whorehouse. The awnings on the windows face the rising sun. Next to that is a trailer, and a church, and a few more trailers, some of which are fighting with brown weeds and small trees for ownership of the land they sit on. Nature is trying to take back Future City, to undo the mistake that someone made.
Immediately after this I enter Cairo. In the past it was a thriving steamboat port with its own customhouse. Cairo was the southernmost point in the north, the nearest place in a non-slave state for slaves who were running away. We’ve already seen how it prospered during the Civil War. The population reached a high of 20,000 in 1907, and it’s been downhill ever since. Cairo was declining dramatically by the 1960s. It was filled with bigoted, segregationist whites—descendants of the early southern settlers—and a high percentage of African Americans, dating back to its days as an important spot on the Underground Railroad. In 1969 a decade-long civil rights boycott of the white-owned businesses (virtually all of them) began, which took the city down even more.
Of course, people are wringing their hands and trying to do something about the poverty and blight. But what can they do? They need bulldozers and money. Well, lucky for me I find urban blight fascinating.
Just inside the city limits my buddy Robert is driving his pickup truck back up to Olmsted. He honks and waves. Nice to have a friend, if only for the afternoon.
As I walk down Sycamore, which is what the main drag is called, I pass mostly closed businesses and vacant lots. Empty store fronts, one with a poster of the Indigo Girls covering smashed out places in the glass front door. A VFW hall, closed. The offices of Robert Flummer, Attorney, closed. More vacant lots. Mack’s Barbecue Restaurant, closed. What used to be a supermarket, now the Mt. Moriah Missionary Baptist Church, open for business. The sign in the front window says, “Always Pray.”
At 28th and Sycamore I turn west and go under a wrought iron archway into Cairo’s Historic Park District, a reasonably well kept up residential enclave. At Washington and 28th is a huge mansion called Magnolia Manor, built in 1869. I go in and take the tour. It was owned by the Gallagher family. He was a hard tack and biscuit maker, and made a fortune selling his stuff to the Union army. So he built this place. He became a friend of Grant’s when he was here, and Grant came and visited him after he had been president. He also knew Grover Cleveland. Lots of nice Victorian furniture inside.
Now I'm out of the mansion district and back amid the decay. I look for the Super Valu market, next to the Alexander County Courthouse, a one-story modern building that looks like an office. That’s where the motor home is parked, in the back.
Monday, November 2, 2009.
Leaving from the side of the road south of New Grand Chain, heading for Cairo. It’s a bright sunny day, promising to get up into the 60s. Today is my last full day in Illinois. Most of tomorrow will be in Missouri.
Cairo (pronounced like Karo Syrup), is built on a peninsula at the confluence of the Ohio River and the Mississippi River. It's at the bottom tip—the nadir—of Little Egypt. Such a boarded-up and desolate place is Cairo that it instantly brings to mind the east side of Detroit, except that it is much smaller, only 3600 population. As I drove around last night looking for a place to park the motor home for the night, I was struck at once by how many places there were—the city is full of empty parking lots—and how few of them looked the least bit safe or inviting. I ended up going out by the expressway exit, a few miles north of town, to see if there was a truck stop. But there was only a Days Inn motel, so I decided to spend the night there instead of in the motor home. I was out of water in the motor home anyway, and had taken only about half a shower in the morning, and I figured that a night in a real room with a TV with lots of channels would be a welcome change. The motel was pretty cheap, but clean and adequate. Tonight I’ll look for a truck stop in Missouri. No way am I spending another night in or near Cairo.
In the light of day Cairo doesn’t look quite as bad as it did in the dark, but it’s still a pretty depressed place. I found a spot for the motor home in a grocery store parking lot this morning. But more on Cairo later.
The topography has changed again, going from hilly to flat and low and alluvial, with lots of water on both sides of the road, from the recent rains and from the wetlands and flood plains inland from the Ohio River, which lies a mile or so to the east. Lots of soybean fields, many half under water.
Out in the middle of nowhere, I pass the modern-looking prefabricated Bethel Temple Church of God in Christ, sporting a slick newer bus—not a used school bus, but a city bus--as well as a smaller one that looks like the buses you see at senior citizen homes.
Whether in the midst of rural or urban poverty, churches proliferate. They’re parasitic, like rats, looking for places to establish themselves where things are less than ideal for people. In times of wealth, people tend to worship wealth, and are pretty happy with that. When they are destitute, they must turn to the worship of things that are unseen--the lick and promise of something later on. That’s the most obvious and simple explanation for why dinky churches are everywhere in blighted cities and the flea-bitten countryside. Another factor is that a church is one of the few business enterprises that can thrive just about anywhere, and particularly where nothing else can.
The church would say, of course, that it is supplying a necessity of life, like a grocery store is. Food for the soul, in a hungry land. Something to mitigate the awful sameness of the lives of poor folks. But from the standpoint of the practitioners of religion—the clergy—there’s no greater opportunity to make money, if you're reasonably glib and articulate, even if you don’t possess a formal education, than to go into business as a preacher. People will pay you money to tell them what they want to hear on Sunday mornings, provide you with a living out of their own meager funds, and raise the money for a decent church and home for you. Nice deal, if you’re just a bit swifter than the rest of the folks. And you never have to worry about a crash or a crisis in faith, like the stock market. In fact, the worse things get in the rest of the world, the more people seem to turn to religion. That’s why the airwaves are filled with preachers, on TV and radio. And their message is always the same, ultimately—send money.
I enter Olmsted, population 300. A good half mile after I pass the sign, past fields and nothing more, I finally arrive at what must be the commercial nexus of the village. The place was laid out by E.B. Olmstead in 1872, and later the name was misspelled, becoming Olmsted. This is absolutely appropriate. Olmsted was a much more thriving place even half a century ago, with passenger rail service, several factories (including one that made Kitty Litter), mussel fishing, as well as banks and stores. Today from the looks of it there’s not much left.
Tomorrow is election day here in Pulaski County, and they’re electing a sheriff, among other county officers. They seem to be nonpartisan here. Candidates for sheriff include Dean Hamilton, Anthony “Tony” Neeley, Gene Adams, Lloyd A. “Bo” Bosecker, and Randy Kern is running for re-election. The sheriff’s race looks like it’s wide open.
A couple of guys sitting in front of a closed watermelon stand call out to me, “Keep on walkin’.” I tell them what I’m doing and they say, “Well, then, you in good shape.”
The road is running on a levee now, and above the road is an older dirt road at the top. I climb up to that and walk along for a mile or two, free from traffic.
I enter Mound City, population 750, the county seat of Pulaski County. Mound City was established in 1854. But back in 1812 or 1813, something happened here called the Mound City Massacre. There were only a few dozen settlers in the whole area from New Grand Chain down to Cairo (then known as Bird’s Point), most or all of whom had come from Tennessee because of an earthquake in 1811. One day some Creek Indians, traveling through, visited the settlers in the area and killed most of seven families. The Indians got away into Kentucky and were never seen again. One or two people lived to tell the story.
During the Civil War, Mound City shipyards produced a number of ironclad vessels. Also during the Civil War the first Navy nurses, who were African American women, working along with Catholic nuns, cared for soldiers at a nearby military hospital.
The only businesses worth mentioning downtown are the Cut Mart gas station and convenience store and a drug store. But there is a very large and thriving grain elevator.
I pass an elaborate three-story Queen Anne style house, newly painted in white, grey, and pink. Down the street from that is St. Mary’s church, which has a window above the front door commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus, 1492-1892.
I have a conversation with a guy who saw me back in Olmsted as I was walking past his driveway. He offers me a ride, and I tell him what I'm doing. He says he was born and raised New Grand Chain. He introduces himself as Robert something.
There’s a National Cemetery outside Mound City, where almost 5000 Civil War dead are buried, and thousands of more recent veterans. As soon as I go into the cemetery I am beset by ladybugs, who swarm around me, land on me, and try to go into my pockets. One bites me on the back of the neck.
I leave Pulaski County and enter Alexander County. It was named for William Alexander, who became speaker of the Illinois house in 1822. Cairo is the county seat. To the southeast are the wide alluvial floodlands of the Ohio River. Illinois Route 37 is running out in less than two miles. It ends at U.S. 51 a couple of miles north of Cairo. For now it goes straight and flat, with telephone poles on one side and bald cypresses on the other, looking like dying evergreens.
A historical marker tells a little about the history of Cairo. Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix, a French Jesuit, reported in 1721 that the land at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers would be a good place for a settlement and fortification. In 1818 the Illinois Territorial legislature started Cairo, and a few years later there were plans for levees and canals. Things didn’t take off until 1854, when the railroad came through. Right after the start of the Civil War, in April of 1861, Union troops arrived at Cairo to secure the rivers for the north. The city thrived as a troop and supply center for Ulysses Grant’s army. And that was close to the high point for Cairo.
I go through the village of Urbandale. One of the jewels in the commercial crown of Urbandale is a large auto graveyard. At 17 miles I finally leave Route 37. I have walked just under 170 miles on Route 37, which is the longest I‘ve been on any one road so far.
A little north of Cairo I enter Future City. The people who named this place either had a sense of humor or they were hoping for something that never materialized. It has no future, and it’s not a city. It looks like only a grim sad past. There’s a long-abandoned honky-tonk, with only a Budweiser sign on the front and a second story, maybe a whorehouse. The awnings on the windows face the rising sun. Next to that is a trailer, and a church, and a few more trailers, some of which are fighting with brown weeds and small trees for ownership of the land they sit on. Nature is trying to take back Future City, to undo the mistake that someone made.
Immediately after this I enter Cairo. In the past it was a thriving steamboat port with its own customhouse. Cairo was the southernmost point in the north, the nearest place in a non-slave state for slaves who were running away. We’ve already seen how it prospered during the Civil War. The population reached a high of 20,000 in 1907, and it’s been downhill ever since. Cairo was declining dramatically by the 1960s. It was filled with bigoted, segregationist whites—descendants of the early southern settlers—and a high percentage of African Americans, dating back to its days as an important spot on the Underground Railroad. In 1969 a decade-long civil rights boycott of the white-owned businesses (virtually all of them) began, which took the city down even more.
Of course, people are wringing their hands and trying to do something about the poverty and blight. But what can they do? They need bulldozers and money. Well, lucky for me I find urban blight fascinating.
Just inside the city limits my buddy Robert is driving his pickup truck back up to Olmsted. He honks and waves. Nice to have a friend, if only for the afternoon.
As I walk down Sycamore, which is what the main drag is called, I pass mostly closed businesses and vacant lots. Empty store fronts, one with a poster of the Indigo Girls covering smashed out places in the glass front door. A VFW hall, closed. The offices of Robert Flummer, Attorney, closed. More vacant lots. Mack’s Barbecue Restaurant, closed. What used to be a supermarket, now the Mt. Moriah Missionary Baptist Church, open for business. The sign in the front window says, “Always Pray.”
At 28th and Sycamore I turn west and go under a wrought iron archway into Cairo’s Historic Park District, a reasonably well kept up residential enclave. At Washington and 28th is a huge mansion called Magnolia Manor, built in 1869. I go in and take the tour. It was owned by the Gallagher family. He was a hard tack and biscuit maker, and made a fortune selling his stuff to the Union army. So he built this place. He became a friend of Grant’s when he was here, and Grant came and visited him after he had been president. He also knew Grover Cleveland. Lots of nice Victorian furniture inside.
Now I'm out of the mansion district and back amid the decay. I look for the Super Valu market, next to the Alexander County Courthouse, a one-story modern building that looks like an office. That’s where the motor home is parked, in the back.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Day 35: Bunk
North of Buncombe to south of New Grand Chain. 20.5 miles/547.5
Sunday, November 1, 2009
I’m leaving from near the gravel pit just north of Buncombe, and traveling to a spot on the road south of New Grand Chain. Today’s walk is pretty much nothing. Country walking through a few small villages.
We went off daylight saving time last night. So this morning I’m starting an hour earlier, because it’s going to get dark just a little after 5:00 today. I need to get done with the walk by 4:00 or a little after. Then I’ll retrieve the car and go on down to Cairo and look for a place to park the motor home. No Wal-Marts for a few days now, until I get to Sikeston, Missouri.
The quarry of the Southern Illinois Stone Company is a magnificent sight to behold--an enormous tiered hole about half a mile wide and several hundred feet down from where I stand. So much stone and gravel has been removed. It's funny, but when people do this to get coal, they call it strip mining, and everybody thinks it's terrible. But do the same thing--level and dig out a hill or mountain--to get sand, gravel, and stone, and it seems to be okay, for the most part. Go figure.
Up another hill from the quarry sits a fat little water tower. Just down from there I enter Buncombe, population 200. The town is mostly to the west of Route 37. A handful of streets and a handful of houses. Buncombe was named for Buncombe County, North Carolina, where the early settlers came from. But that doesn't tell us much. The county in North Carolina was named for Edward Buncombe, a local guy who was a colonel during the Revolutionary War. He was wounded and captured by the British during the Battle of Germantown, near Philadelphia. They paroled him to Philadelphia, where (get this) he fell down some stairs while sleepwalking, reopening his wounds and causing him to bleed to death. Also, at the deep trivia level, his name was the origin of the word "bunkum," later shortened to "bunk." That came about because a congressman from the county was giving a poorly-received speech in which he invoked the name of the county, causing people to jeer at him.
Since nothing much is going on today, I might as well do the statistics for the month of October. I started October in San Pierre, Indiana, that town with the strange name, and ended it back up the hill from where I am this morning. I walked 20 days in the month, ten of them in Indiana and ten in Illinois. I walked a total of 344.1 miles, averaging 17.2 miles per day. My average for the Indiana days was 15.4 miles, but my average in Illinois was just under 19 miles a day. So I’ve stepped it up a bit. The week that ended yesterday was the first week in which I walked a hundred miles.
So what have I learned during the month of October about walking, and about this whole trip? When I started the month I was taking it easy, only walking about fifteen miles a day. I should have begun increasing my daily mileage by a mile or so a day back at the beginning. I’ve learned that I can walk 20 miles a day without much more trouble than walking ten or fifteen. The amount of walking is limited only by the amount of daylight available. I have to get started earlier, especially with the days getting shorter.
I’m hitting the wall later in the walk, too. Hitting the wall is what I call the time, during each day, when I reach the point where I say, “This is a bunch of crap. I can’t do this every day, it’s just too painful. I don’t know why I decided to undertake this in the first place.” As I say, I reach that point just about every day, then walk through it to the other side. I used to reach it at about 13 miles, and now it happens at about 15 miles. So that’s progress.
Before I started walking I had envisioned walking five days and taking two off. Now I see that that’s not really the best idea. So I’ve been walking three days and taking the fourth off, which comes out to about five and a half days of walking a week.
I’ve learned that the people of Indiana and Illinois are friendly and helpful, without being asked, but when someone does ask them for help, they respond generously.
I’ve also learned that every little place I walk through has a story. Sometimes I find out what that story is, and sometimes I don't. In the last analysis, the story of each place is the same—people are trying to get from one end of the day to the other, to care for their families, to make a buck, to keep up with the latest technology, watch the latest TV shows, eat the latest junk food. They want to know what Brad and Angelina are up to, or how the Titans or the Colts are doing. They want to be up-to-date, even if their towns are dinky and outdated.
Next little village I come to is Cypress, population 250, at about halfway through the walk. Again, it starts from atop a hill, and the road winds down and around and through it. These look more like coal mining towns than like farming towns. I assume Cypress was named for the many bald cypress trees that grow in this region. Somewhere not far from here, off Route 37, stands the state’s largest bald cypress. And that’s about it. As long as it took me to tell about it is as long as it took to walk through the place.
About five miles later I leave Johnson County and enter Pulaski County. Kazimierz Pulaski was a Revolutionary War hero for whom several counties around the country are named. He came to North America from Poland as a soldier of fortune, already having distinguished himself in battles against the Russians. He saved the life of George Washington in the Battle of Brandywine, for which he was promoted to Brigadier General by Washington. He was killed in the Siege of Savannah in 1779.
For the past several miles I’ve been going through wetlands and swamps. There are a number of state nature preserve areas around here. Near the end of the walk I enter New Grand Chain, population 250. New Grand Chain is a crummy little place, not quite as bad as LaClede, but close. As I pass through, a middle aged man with no teeth is sitting and smoking on the steps of what looks like an abandoned house. Its door is ajar. We exchange pleasantries about the weather, and he tells me to have a nice walk.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
I’m leaving from near the gravel pit just north of Buncombe, and traveling to a spot on the road south of New Grand Chain. Today’s walk is pretty much nothing. Country walking through a few small villages.
We went off daylight saving time last night. So this morning I’m starting an hour earlier, because it’s going to get dark just a little after 5:00 today. I need to get done with the walk by 4:00 or a little after. Then I’ll retrieve the car and go on down to Cairo and look for a place to park the motor home. No Wal-Marts for a few days now, until I get to Sikeston, Missouri.
The quarry of the Southern Illinois Stone Company is a magnificent sight to behold--an enormous tiered hole about half a mile wide and several hundred feet down from where I stand. So much stone and gravel has been removed. It's funny, but when people do this to get coal, they call it strip mining, and everybody thinks it's terrible. But do the same thing--level and dig out a hill or mountain--to get sand, gravel, and stone, and it seems to be okay, for the most part. Go figure.
Up another hill from the quarry sits a fat little water tower. Just down from there I enter Buncombe, population 200. The town is mostly to the west of Route 37. A handful of streets and a handful of houses. Buncombe was named for Buncombe County, North Carolina, where the early settlers came from. But that doesn't tell us much. The county in North Carolina was named for Edward Buncombe, a local guy who was a colonel during the Revolutionary War. He was wounded and captured by the British during the Battle of Germantown, near Philadelphia. They paroled him to Philadelphia, where (get this) he fell down some stairs while sleepwalking, reopening his wounds and causing him to bleed to death. Also, at the deep trivia level, his name was the origin of the word "bunkum," later shortened to "bunk." That came about because a congressman from the county was giving a poorly-received speech in which he invoked the name of the county, causing people to jeer at him.
Since nothing much is going on today, I might as well do the statistics for the month of October. I started October in San Pierre, Indiana, that town with the strange name, and ended it back up the hill from where I am this morning. I walked 20 days in the month, ten of them in Indiana and ten in Illinois. I walked a total of 344.1 miles, averaging 17.2 miles per day. My average for the Indiana days was 15.4 miles, but my average in Illinois was just under 19 miles a day. So I’ve stepped it up a bit. The week that ended yesterday was the first week in which I walked a hundred miles.
So what have I learned during the month of October about walking, and about this whole trip? When I started the month I was taking it easy, only walking about fifteen miles a day. I should have begun increasing my daily mileage by a mile or so a day back at the beginning. I’ve learned that I can walk 20 miles a day without much more trouble than walking ten or fifteen. The amount of walking is limited only by the amount of daylight available. I have to get started earlier, especially with the days getting shorter.
I’m hitting the wall later in the walk, too. Hitting the wall is what I call the time, during each day, when I reach the point where I say, “This is a bunch of crap. I can’t do this every day, it’s just too painful. I don’t know why I decided to undertake this in the first place.” As I say, I reach that point just about every day, then walk through it to the other side. I used to reach it at about 13 miles, and now it happens at about 15 miles. So that’s progress.
Before I started walking I had envisioned walking five days and taking two off. Now I see that that’s not really the best idea. So I’ve been walking three days and taking the fourth off, which comes out to about five and a half days of walking a week.
I’ve learned that the people of Indiana and Illinois are friendly and helpful, without being asked, but when someone does ask them for help, they respond generously.
I’ve also learned that every little place I walk through has a story. Sometimes I find out what that story is, and sometimes I don't. In the last analysis, the story of each place is the same—people are trying to get from one end of the day to the other, to care for their families, to make a buck, to keep up with the latest technology, watch the latest TV shows, eat the latest junk food. They want to know what Brad and Angelina are up to, or how the Titans or the Colts are doing. They want to be up-to-date, even if their towns are dinky and outdated.
Next little village I come to is Cypress, population 250, at about halfway through the walk. Again, it starts from atop a hill, and the road winds down and around and through it. These look more like coal mining towns than like farming towns. I assume Cypress was named for the many bald cypress trees that grow in this region. Somewhere not far from here, off Route 37, stands the state’s largest bald cypress. And that’s about it. As long as it took me to tell about it is as long as it took to walk through the place.
About five miles later I leave Johnson County and enter Pulaski County. Kazimierz Pulaski was a Revolutionary War hero for whom several counties around the country are named. He came to North America from Poland as a soldier of fortune, already having distinguished himself in battles against the Russians. He saved the life of George Washington in the Battle of Brandywine, for which he was promoted to Brigadier General by Washington. He was killed in the Siege of Savannah in 1779.
For the past several miles I’ve been going through wetlands and swamps. There are a number of state nature preserve areas around here. Near the end of the walk I enter New Grand Chain, population 250. New Grand Chain is a crummy little place, not quite as bad as LaClede, but close. As I pass through, a middle aged man with no teeth is sitting and smoking on the steps of what looks like an abandoned house. Its door is ajar. We exchange pleasantries about the weather, and he tells me to have a nice walk.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Day 34: Bloody Williamson
Cedar Grove to near Bunscombe, Illinois. 20.7 miles/527 total
Saturday, October 31, 2009
It's cool and breezy this morning and quite sunny, as I leave from the construction company parking lot in Cedar Grove, heading down through Marion and down to just north of the little town of Buncombe.
Very shortly after I begin the walk I enter Marion, population 16,000. Marion was founded in 1839 and named after the old Swamp Fox, Francis Marion, after whom Marion County also was named. Just a word about Francis Marion. He was considered a hero by the Americans in the first few decades of the 19th century, as having fought tenaciously and well against the British in his native South Carolina, where he was known to employ tactics that resembled modern guerrilla warfare. He was the model, loosely, for the Mel Gibson character in the movie The Patriot. Back in the 50s Walt Disney resurrected the Swamp Fox’s legend and created a television series that ran for eight episodes from 1959 to 1961. It starred Leslie Nielsen as the Swamp Fox, which seems a little bizarre, considering how much Nielsen is associated today with the farcical comedies of the Zucker Brothers, like Airplane.
Marion is a thriving city, although the old downtown is a bit empty. But hell, who really cares any more about these old downtowns? The only reason they ever thrived was because they were where the roads converged. Yet people keep wringing their hands and wondering how they can revive city centers, long after their relevance has disappeared. Most of Marion's commercial activity takes place out by the intersection of Illinois Route 13 and I-57, including a mall, many large stores and tons of restaurants and fast food places. It’s not too pedestrian friendly out there, but who really walks these days anyway?
North of the city proper, I come to an embarrassment of cemetery riches. Large cemeteries on both sides of the street. One is the Oddfellows Cemetery. Here lie the odd fellows. That was always a strange name for a group, I thought. It puts me in mind of a poem by Greg Farnum, which goes like this:
Our lodge is much renowned for its good works.
We call ourselves Asshole Bastards of the World
So as not to seem immodest.
Right next to the Oddfellows Cemetery is Rose Hill Cemetery, and on the other side of the street, another large cemetery. In the latter is the Goddard Memorial Chapel, erected in 1918 and dedicated the next year. Donated by Leroy A. Goddard. Handsome little building. Next to the chapel lie J.W. Pillow and his wife Myrtie. I take a shortcut through this thriving necropolis over to Route 13, and east a few blocks to Market Street, so I can walk through the old town center, as irrelevant as it may be.
I’m traveling south on Market Street. Ahead of me looms a tall tower in the town square of Marion, where, it seems to me, the courthouse ought to be. Maybe they moved it. In the middle of the town square stands the Tornado Memorial, a tower some 60 or 80 feet high, that commemorates a tornado that struck the town on May 29, 1982. On a stone in front are listed the names of the ten people who died in that tornado. Seems like it's tempting fate a little to build a tall tower to commemorate a tornado. On the southeast corner of the town square is Marion's spiffy new civic center, which has won an architectural award.
South of the town square Market Street is still made of brick, and it's lined with the large houses of the early prominent citizens of Marion. Here’s an Italianate house from about the 1840s. Most of the rest of the houses date from the first two decades of the twentieth century. And, just so you don’t think you’re in some hoity toity place that puts on airs, cheek by jowl with these stately homes and neat bungalows is a single wide trailer with an huge pile of unsplit wood in the front yard, along with a wrecked school bus and a couple of trucks and a few mangy dogs barking out back. So much for zoning.
Pulling out of Marion, back on Route 37, I’m looking at ten miles of hills until I come to the next community of any size. About nine miles south of the city center, three miles west of Route 37, lies the United States Penitentiary at Marion, which today houses about 900 inmates. It was built in 1963, to replace Alcatraz. For some time it housed a unit where inmates were kept in solitary confinement for most of the time. John Gotti spend the last years of his life there, and other gangsters did time there, too, including Nicodemo Scarfo from Philadelphia, James Coonan of the Westies of Hell’s Kitchen, and Nicky Barnes, the Harlem drug boss. And Pete Rose spent a few months here, back in 1990-91. Today there are a number of Arabs being held in Marion.
Several miles south of Marion I come to a graveyard with a really perfect name—Freedom Cemetery. If there’s one thing that can be said of the people who lie here, it’s that they are completely free. Free from pain and suffering, free from disease and addiction, free from debt and worry. I know the cemetery probably was named for the nearby Freedom Baptist Church, or maybe this little area was once called Freedom, but that doesn’t matter. The name is appropriate. Here are the tombstones of the Courtneys, the Wrights, the Kelleys—including Rev. Otis Kelley—and one of the Fisher parents, whose little boy Johnnie Lamar Fisher was born and died on the same day, August 6, 1961. I sit atop the Fisher stone, whose rough cut marble top is still a little damp from two days of rain, and look around me at the peace, the quiet, and the freedom.
This is Williamson County, which was named for a county in Tennessee. It was once known as Bloody Williamson, due to several outbreaks of violence—the Bloody Vendetta of Southern Illinois in 1876 (the subject of a 2006 book by Milo Erwin and John Musgrave); the Carterville Massacre in 1899 (involving the killing of blacks by whites); a coal strike in 1906; and the Herrin Massacre in 1922 (involving the gruesome killing of a number of scabs by local striking coal miners), to name just a few. Lots of action here in Williamson County over the years.
Down by the sign for a recreation area called the Lake of Egypt, I go into a place called King Tut’s Restaurant and Lounge, which includes a gas station and convenience store. Soon afterwards I enter a spot on the road called Pulley’s Mill, which might have had a little activity once, but now consists only of a couple of closed businesses and the Pulley’s Mill United Pentecostal Church, with Pastor Jerry D. Huckleberry.
I leave Williamson County and enter Johnson County. Small world: according to the internet, this county was named in 1812 for Richard Mentor Johnson, then a U.S. Congressman from Kentucky. The next year Johnson served under Gen. William Henry Harrison in the Battle of the Thames, in Ontario, where he claimed to have killed the Indian chief Tecumseh in hand-to-had combat. Richard Mentor Johnson went on to be vice president under Martin Van Buren.
The sign says Welcome to Goreville, home of the Blackcats. It’s a village of about 1000. The streets of Goreville have little cat’s paws on the signs. I stop in at an antique mall and buy a straight razor. A couple in the store had seen me on the road up by Marion, and I tell them what I'm doing. They advise me to go to Metropolis, Illinois, where there's a gigantic statue of Superman, and a gambling boat on the Ohio River.
At just under 19 miles I come to a historical marker. It says that Lt. Col. George Rogers Clark and his troop of 170 volunteers passed near this spot, called Buffalo Gap, in July of 1778, on their way to capture the British post in Kaskaskia. This attack, and a later one in Vincennes, Indiana, prevented the British from invading Kentucky, and secured the Illinois territory for the Americans during the Revolutionary War. This was quite some time before Clark's brother William joined Lewis for their expedition out west. Next to the sign is an older stone marker placed in 1913 by the Daughters of the American Revolution. I sit on this one to eat a snack. Turning my rear end to the D.A.R. is a way of honoring my mother, who always said that she could have joined, but decided not to in order to follow the example of Eleanor Roosevelt, who in 1936 resigned from the D.A.R. in protest when they wouldn’t let the black singer Marian Anderson perform at Constitution Hall. My mom (who, by the way, was Eleanor Roosevelt’s seventh cousin) figured that was as good a reason as any not to bother joining the D.A.R.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Progress report: Benton in the rain
Friday, October 30, 2009
Raining again, since the middle of last night. Time for an off day anyway. Some time next week I should be out of Illinois and into Missouri and then Arkansas. The next big mark to reach after that will be Memphis, Tennessee.
Today is for filling up the propane tank in the motor home and moving down to the next Wal-Mart, in Marion, Illinois. I'm watching the rain fall and maybe the gasoline prices, too. Around here gas shot up to $2.74 a gallon, but today I see that it's twenty cents less. Good trend. As long as I'm sucking up gas the way I am it might as well be cheap. This trip is going to leave a carbon footprint so big that Al Gore will be able to see it from cyberspace.Thursday, October 29, 2009
Day 33: Pennies from heaven
Outside Whittington to Cedar Grove. 20.7 miles/506.3 total
Thursday, October 29, 2009
I'm leaving from that state-owned land near old Dewey Ray Wilkins's place, heading into the cities of Benton, West Frankfort, and Johnston City, to the village of Cedar Grove.
It’s cloudy and windy this morning, and I won’t be surprised if it starts to rain before I’m finished. This is my most ambitious walk to date, at 20.7 miles. As overcast as it is, I’ll be getting down to the destination just before dark, and that’s cutting it a little close. I have to start getting up earlier, and spending less time puttering around before I start walking. After that time change, I'll have to get up even earlier.
Since Mt. Vernon the terrain has been noticeably more hilly, and very little land along the road is under cultivation. Back where I came in to Illinois, near Terre Haute, there was nothing but corn and soybeans. I think this is coal mining country down here.
They’re having elections here in Little Egypt next week, local ones, and I think maybe a special election for governor after Rod Blagojevich got bounced out earlier in the year. What surprises me is that there are quite a few Democrats running for sheriff in these counties. The reason that’s surprising is that most of the white southern Democrats switched over to the Republican Party starting in ’64, leaving the Democratic Party to African Americans and a tiny minority of white liberals. By 1980 white southern Democrats were as scarce as hen’s teeth. I’m going to speculate that here in Copperhead country they vote Democratic at the local level, out of habit and tradition, but they vote Republican in the bigger races--governor, senator, and the presidential elections. Anyway, these guys who are running for sheriff down here all have these southern-sounding names, like J.T. Moore and D.L. Richardson.
The modern Democratic Party still likes to trace its roots back to Jefferson and Jackson, and the populist, anti-Federalist, anti-banking, anti-big business issues. The party of the little guy. But until well after World War Two they were pretty much just for the little white guy. Today the Democrats have more in common with the progressive wing of the old Republican Party, embodied by Theodore Roosevelt, than with their own populist tradition. As for the Democratic Party before and after the Civil War, they made a lot of noise about decentralization and state’s rights, but that was code for racism and the right of southern states to continue to have slavery. Northern Democrats of the same era had a little more claim to being pro-labor and opposed to business conglomerates, but they always had to accommodate the southern faction of the party, which was their little deal with the devil they couldn’t get out of until about a century after the Civil War.
A couple of miles into the walk I enter Benton, population 7200. Just a little inside the city limits I pass the office of the United Mine Workers of America, District 12. So I know there's still some mining going on. This is probably where all that coal I saw in the freight trains a few days ago was coming from. Benton was organized in 1841, and named after Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. The internet says that George Harrison visited his sister here in 1963, and also visited the nearby town of Eldorado. His sister’s house is now the Hard Day’s Nite Bed and Breakfast. But the coolest thing I’ve been able to find out about Benton is that it's the home town of the actor John Malkovich. Remember him as the Russian guy Teddy KGB in that movie Rounders, breaking apart those Oreo cookies while he was playing poker? His accent was a little over the top, but the part was good.
In the middle of Benton I arrive at the Franklin County Courthouse, which is surrounded by a large town square in the downtown business district. The building was completed in 1875, but has had some rather ugly expansion to the ground floor since then. Because cell phones aren’t allowed in the building, I decide not to go in. In some places you can take them in, or leave them with the sheriff at the metal detector. I can’t think where I’d leave my phone, and from a peek in the front door it doesn’t look like I’m missing much. All around the square there are antique malls, about four or five of them. After spending time in two of them, I have to walk on out of town before I spend too much time and money. But I do get some good bargains, and come away with four pocket knives and a straight razor. Among the knives is a genuine Walt Disney Davy Crockett knife, with a picture of Fess Parker as Davy Crockett on the handle.
Benton has a warm feel to it. It’s old, and making no serious attempt to look new. So the trees are large and mature, and the church buildings are from a century or more ago. There’s still a train depot standing, now used as a food pantry. Down past one of the few new buildings, the public library, I stop to wait for a Union Pacific freight train that is crossing Route 37. On the other side of the tracks I pass under a graceful old gingko tree, its fan-shaped leaves a bright yellow trimmed with green.
The sign in front of the New Life Apostolic Pentecostal Church says, “Look up, your redemption draweth nigh.” Involuntarily I raise my eyes to the sky. I wonder what form my redemption will take today?
Next up is the City of West Frankfort, population 8500. I assume it got its name because folks from Kentucky came here and named it after the capital of their state. (Later I find out it was named after a fort built by a guy named Francis Jordan, which became known as Frank’s Fort. The fort was for protection against the Indians in the early 1800s. The original settlement was to the east, and later there was another settlement west of that, which became this city.)
Between Benton and West Frankfort it started to rain, and it looks like the rain has settled in for the day. My pants are wet up to my thighs and my feet are soaked. But the good news is that it’s fairly warm—somewhere in the low 60s—and I can’t get any wetter, so all I have to do is get used to it. I’m going to breeze on through West Frankfort without getting too familiar with it. It’s raining like crazy and I want to keep moving.
I spend the next five miles, from West Frankfort to Johnston City, slogging through the rain, entertaining myself by singing “Desolation Row” and other Bob Dylan songs.
Suddenly money seems to start falling from the sky along with the raindrops. First I find a quarter on the roadside, then three pennies in quick succession. Then over the next few miles another penny, and another. It makes me think of what Shakespeare said, in The Merchant of Venice:
The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
The coins I'm finding are like that. My blessing goes out to those who dropped them. Pennies from heaven. What a beautiful thing.
I enter Johnston City, population 3600. Route 37 takes me down the west side of the city, and whatever earthly delights the city center holds for a weary wanderer, I will not partake of them today. Gotta keep moving. Johnston City’s main claim to fame is that for many years it hosted an annual pool tournament, attracting hustlers from all over the country, including frequent visits by Minnesota Fats, who lived in nearby Dowell, Illinois.
At just under 19 miles, I enter the village of Whiteash. (It's not on the sign, but the internet tells me the population in the last census was 268.) Quite a bit of commercial activity for such a small place. There’s a junk store called The Yard Sale Shoppe, and Whisker Willy’s Bar and Grille, and a package store and an army surplus store. Not to mention a couple of big churches—the All Nations Church of Whiteash and the Whiteash Freewill Baptist Church.
This has truly been a fat day for change found by the roadside. Altogether since it started raining I have found two quarters, ten pennies, and two nickels, for a total of 70 cents. That’s the biggest single haul since that day in Indiana when I picked up over a dollar, including a Kennedy half dollar. It could be because the rain has washed the dirt off these coins, making it easier for me to see them, or that I'm just looking more carefully. But I don’t think so. I’ve always got my eye on the road for coins and other things, and I’ve walked in the rain a number of times. I think there might be something bigger going on here. Suddenly I get a thought. At those antique malls in Benton they were playing oldies from the big band era. Is it possible that one of the songs I heard might have been Bing Crosby singing “Pennies from Heaven”? Nah, who would believe that?
Less than half a mile after I leave Whiteash I come to another little village called Cedar Grove. This one isn’t even on my map, which is so detailed that it has just about every road in the State of Illinois. Yet here it is, with its own green and white sign.
Cedar Grove is where I parked the motor home, in the large parking lot of a construction company, just across the street from the world headquarters of the TCT Television Network. Probably one of those religious outfits. (It is indeed. Turns out TCT stands for Tri-State Christian Television. Part of the vast right-wing conspiracy to turn our brains to mush with a continuous barrage of mumbo jumbo.)
Thursday, October 29, 2009
I'm leaving from that state-owned land near old Dewey Ray Wilkins's place, heading into the cities of Benton, West Frankfort, and Johnston City, to the village of Cedar Grove.
It’s cloudy and windy this morning, and I won’t be surprised if it starts to rain before I’m finished. This is my most ambitious walk to date, at 20.7 miles. As overcast as it is, I’ll be getting down to the destination just before dark, and that’s cutting it a little close. I have to start getting up earlier, and spending less time puttering around before I start walking. After that time change, I'll have to get up even earlier.
Since Mt. Vernon the terrain has been noticeably more hilly, and very little land along the road is under cultivation. Back where I came in to Illinois, near Terre Haute, there was nothing but corn and soybeans. I think this is coal mining country down here.
They’re having elections here in Little Egypt next week, local ones, and I think maybe a special election for governor after Rod Blagojevich got bounced out earlier in the year. What surprises me is that there are quite a few Democrats running for sheriff in these counties. The reason that’s surprising is that most of the white southern Democrats switched over to the Republican Party starting in ’64, leaving the Democratic Party to African Americans and a tiny minority of white liberals. By 1980 white southern Democrats were as scarce as hen’s teeth. I’m going to speculate that here in Copperhead country they vote Democratic at the local level, out of habit and tradition, but they vote Republican in the bigger races--governor, senator, and the presidential elections. Anyway, these guys who are running for sheriff down here all have these southern-sounding names, like J.T. Moore and D.L. Richardson.
The modern Democratic Party still likes to trace its roots back to Jefferson and Jackson, and the populist, anti-Federalist, anti-banking, anti-big business issues. The party of the little guy. But until well after World War Two they were pretty much just for the little white guy. Today the Democrats have more in common with the progressive wing of the old Republican Party, embodied by Theodore Roosevelt, than with their own populist tradition. As for the Democratic Party before and after the Civil War, they made a lot of noise about decentralization and state’s rights, but that was code for racism and the right of southern states to continue to have slavery. Northern Democrats of the same era had a little more claim to being pro-labor and opposed to business conglomerates, but they always had to accommodate the southern faction of the party, which was their little deal with the devil they couldn’t get out of until about a century after the Civil War.
A couple of miles into the walk I enter Benton, population 7200. Just a little inside the city limits I pass the office of the United Mine Workers of America, District 12. So I know there's still some mining going on. This is probably where all that coal I saw in the freight trains a few days ago was coming from. Benton was organized in 1841, and named after Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. The internet says that George Harrison visited his sister here in 1963, and also visited the nearby town of Eldorado. His sister’s house is now the Hard Day’s Nite Bed and Breakfast. But the coolest thing I’ve been able to find out about Benton is that it's the home town of the actor John Malkovich. Remember him as the Russian guy Teddy KGB in that movie Rounders, breaking apart those Oreo cookies while he was playing poker? His accent was a little over the top, but the part was good.
In the middle of Benton I arrive at the Franklin County Courthouse, which is surrounded by a large town square in the downtown business district. The building was completed in 1875, but has had some rather ugly expansion to the ground floor since then. Because cell phones aren’t allowed in the building, I decide not to go in. In some places you can take them in, or leave them with the sheriff at the metal detector. I can’t think where I’d leave my phone, and from a peek in the front door it doesn’t look like I’m missing much. All around the square there are antique malls, about four or five of them. After spending time in two of them, I have to walk on out of town before I spend too much time and money. But I do get some good bargains, and come away with four pocket knives and a straight razor. Among the knives is a genuine Walt Disney Davy Crockett knife, with a picture of Fess Parker as Davy Crockett on the handle.
Benton has a warm feel to it. It’s old, and making no serious attempt to look new. So the trees are large and mature, and the church buildings are from a century or more ago. There’s still a train depot standing, now used as a food pantry. Down past one of the few new buildings, the public library, I stop to wait for a Union Pacific freight train that is crossing Route 37. On the other side of the tracks I pass under a graceful old gingko tree, its fan-shaped leaves a bright yellow trimmed with green.
The sign in front of the New Life Apostolic Pentecostal Church says, “Look up, your redemption draweth nigh.” Involuntarily I raise my eyes to the sky. I wonder what form my redemption will take today?
Next up is the City of West Frankfort, population 8500. I assume it got its name because folks from Kentucky came here and named it after the capital of their state. (Later I find out it was named after a fort built by a guy named Francis Jordan, which became known as Frank’s Fort. The fort was for protection against the Indians in the early 1800s. The original settlement was to the east, and later there was another settlement west of that, which became this city.)
Between Benton and West Frankfort it started to rain, and it looks like the rain has settled in for the day. My pants are wet up to my thighs and my feet are soaked. But the good news is that it’s fairly warm—somewhere in the low 60s—and I can’t get any wetter, so all I have to do is get used to it. I’m going to breeze on through West Frankfort without getting too familiar with it. It’s raining like crazy and I want to keep moving.
I spend the next five miles, from West Frankfort to Johnston City, slogging through the rain, entertaining myself by singing “Desolation Row” and other Bob Dylan songs.
Suddenly money seems to start falling from the sky along with the raindrops. First I find a quarter on the roadside, then three pennies in quick succession. Then over the next few miles another penny, and another. It makes me think of what Shakespeare said, in The Merchant of Venice:
The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
The coins I'm finding are like that. My blessing goes out to those who dropped them. Pennies from heaven. What a beautiful thing.
I enter Johnston City, population 3600. Route 37 takes me down the west side of the city, and whatever earthly delights the city center holds for a weary wanderer, I will not partake of them today. Gotta keep moving. Johnston City’s main claim to fame is that for many years it hosted an annual pool tournament, attracting hustlers from all over the country, including frequent visits by Minnesota Fats, who lived in nearby Dowell, Illinois.
At just under 19 miles, I enter the village of Whiteash. (It's not on the sign, but the internet tells me the population in the last census was 268.) Quite a bit of commercial activity for such a small place. There’s a junk store called The Yard Sale Shoppe, and Whisker Willy’s Bar and Grille, and a package store and an army surplus store. Not to mention a couple of big churches—the All Nations Church of Whiteash and the Whiteash Freewill Baptist Church.
This has truly been a fat day for change found by the roadside. Altogether since it started raining I have found two quarters, ten pennies, and two nickels, for a total of 70 cents. That’s the biggest single haul since that day in Indiana when I picked up over a dollar, including a Kennedy half dollar. It could be because the rain has washed the dirt off these coins, making it easier for me to see them, or that I'm just looking more carefully. But I don’t think so. I’ve always got my eye on the road for coins and other things, and I’ve walked in the rain a number of times. I think there might be something bigger going on here. Suddenly I get a thought. At those antique malls in Benton they were playing oldies from the big band era. Is it possible that one of the songs I heard might have been Bing Crosby singing “Pennies from Heaven”? Nah, who would believe that?
Less than half a mile after I leave Whiteash I come to another little village called Cedar Grove. This one isn’t even on my map, which is so detailed that it has just about every road in the State of Illinois. Yet here it is, with its own green and white sign.
Cedar Grove is where I parked the motor home, in the large parking lot of a construction company, just across the street from the world headquarters of the TCT Television Network. Probably one of those religious outfits. (It is indeed. Turns out TCT stands for Tri-State Christian Television. Part of the vast right-wing conspiracy to turn our brains to mush with a continuous barrage of mumbo jumbo.)
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