Luxora to Bassett. 21.9 miles/712.7 total
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
It's cloudless and cool as I leave from behind Charlie’s grocery store in Luxora, headed through Osceola and a few small towns to my destination, Bassett. I should get there by just before dark today. There's a breeze blowing at my back, like a gentle hand pushing me along. I’m back to wearing my sweatshirt, at least for the morning. It’s supposed to get up to about 66.
Lately I’ve been seeing, here and in Missouri, green and white signs on front lawns, bearing the word “JESUS.” The signs are about the size of the campaign signs people put on their lawns at election time. It’s got me wondering if maybe Jesus is running for office down here. It can’t be sheriff or even governor, since I’ve seen the signs in two different states. (Unless he’s trying to be in more than one place at the same time, a possibility, I suppose.) The other possibilities are that it’s not the Jesus—Jesus H. Christ—but maybe some Hispanic guy who’s so well known that people just call him by his first name. Or it could be someone like Jesus Shuttlesworth from Spike Lee’s movie, He Got Game.
Such speculation is frivolous, I know. More likely people are declaring their allegiance to Jesus over all the other candidates running for all offices—dropping out of mainstream secular politics in favor of religious rule for the country, like in Iran. They're saying, in effect, “A pox on both your houses. We’re going to back the guy who died on the cross. He’ll put an end to those pro-choice commies and their homosexual fellow travelers. And he'll make sure all the criminals get the needle, all the lazy mud people get off welfare, and when he's done with that, he'll kick some serious Arab ass!”
I’m sure that if Jesus ran for office around here he’d be overwhelmingly elected. The problem with that is that it brings up the whole question of WWJD—What Would Jesus Do? That gets dicey, because what if he doesn’t do what people expect? What if these southern Baptists are all wrong about old Jesus. (Do ya think?) What if--he does absolutely nothing. Puts me in mind of the last lines of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem, “A Coney Island of the Mind No.5”:
Him just hang there
on his Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world news
from the usual unreliable sources
real dead
One thing I’ve noticed in the south, and in rural places generally, is that you don’t get a whole lot of choices when it comes to coffee. Lots of places out in the country don’t have decaf, and even the regular stuff is all gone by about noon. I guess after that if you want a pick-me-up, you get yourself an RC Cola and a moon pie. Hell with all that fancy-Dan cappuccino and latte.
I’ve had a few comments from friends about the sinister capabilities of southerners. No doubt the south has a history and tradition of committing atrocities in connection with race, from slavery to Klan activities to the assassinations of civil rights people. That can’t be denied. But having said all that, I remember from growing up in Oakland County, Michigan, that the town I lived in had racial hatred every bit as deep as anything in the south, just not directed at any one in particular, because we were all white. There were kids who used the “N” word as a common insult, in place of “asshole” or “jerk.” And on the very rare occasions when someone would try to integrate the township, they were shown the door. So let’s not kid ourselves. Outside of a few urban and academic enclaves, Michigan is as redneck a state as any in the nation.
After an hour and a half I enter Osceola, population 8,875. Osceola shares the name of the county in Michigan where my other grandmother was born, in Reed City. Osceola was a leader of the Seminoles. But I think this Osceola was named for a nearby river. Here it’s pronounced OH-ceola.
In the center of town is the Mississippi County Courthouse. Because today is Veteran’s Day, this and all other government offices are closed. Actually, this is one of two county courthouses, since Blytheville also has one. Osceola is the seat of the southern part of the county. It’s a brick building of an unusual brown color, topped with a copper dome. A little monochromatic, but interesting. There’s a plaque honoring William J. Driver, who donated the land for this courthouse. Also in front of the courthouse is something I expect to see more of now, a monument to the Confederate veterans of Mississippi County, put up by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
A couple of historical markers tell the story. This has been the county seat since 1836. Since about 1900 the county has maintained the other courthouse in Blytheville. This neo-classical courthouse was built in 1912. The big deal around here was the establishment of a drainage system, in which old William J. Driver was instrumental, enabling the area to become the largest cotton producing county in the world. I’ll have to check out the building tomorrow when it’s open, and also visit the museum across the street, housed in an old store.
In front of the Eastside Baptist Church, south of town, is another one of those Jesus signs. He obviously has the votes of the Baptists of Osceola. Wonder when the election will be?
I sit down on the wall at the memorial garden in front of the Roller-Swift Funeral Home and watch the cotton being harvested across Highway 61. There are no tombstones to sit on, just those bronze flower holders with the artificial flowers, looking all bleached out and especially phony.
Unlike the machines that harvest corn and soybeans, that cut down everything, blow the chaff out the back, and keep the grain, these cotton pickers either pick or suck up the cotton and leave the plants untouched. Later on, the plants will be cut down and ground up, maybe for fodder, I don’t know. When the hopper in the picker is full, they dump it into a truck with a large cage in the back. Then the cage trucks take the loose cotton over to machines that operate like giant trash compactors, using hydraulics to compress the cotton into the large rectangular bricks, called modules, you see everywhere. It’s a thing of beauty to see the sophisticated mechanization of the whole process. Only a fool would look back nostalgically at the days when the raising of cotton took huge numbers of low-paid or unpaid workers. Millions of jobs for peons is not what this country needs.
About halfway through the walk I come to a sign for a place called Rotan. A road goes up over the railroad tracks and I can see about six houses and a few pole barns. Down the road a piece, there’s another little community called Driver, named no doubt for William Driver of Osceola. I sit down in front of the post office and watch a BNSF railroad engine go by pulling 96 empty flat cars.
At 16 miles I enter the town of Wilson, population 939. For a half mile or more coming into Wilson I pass a succession of large mansions set back 500 feet or so from the road, with ancient sweet gums, oaks, and bald cypresses growing in the front yards and along the driveways. Each place has a large horse pasture. In the far distance are the cotton fields. There’s definitely some money around here, and has been for many years.
This town was named after Robert E. Lee Wilson, who was the big bossman around here. Wilson is an unusually shady town. Old trees, old houses, old money. Shady. The small downtown business district has been done over with faux Tudor facades, a not unpleasant touch. Somebody put some money into this little facelift. Up close, however, the Tudor stuff is a little dingy, and not all the buildings are occupied. There’s the Gunn Supermarket and the Wilson Drug Store, and a bank. That’s about it. But an interesting idea. There must be a story here somewhere.
Well, sure enough, there is a story or two in Wilson. One thing is that they found a mastodon skeleton not far from here. Also the remains of a pre-Columbian village. But that’s just everyday stuff. Check this out. According to an undocumented story on the Wikipedia page, in the early part of the 20th century, the Frisco Railroad would throw hoboes off the train in Wilson, where, regardless of race, they would become slaves on Lee Wilson's cotton plantation. If they were caught trying to run away, they would be shot and killed. This practice allegedly persisted into the 1960s, when it was ended after a senate investigation.
True or not, it’s a good story, obviously inspired by hostility toward old Robert E. Lee Wilson. Another source says that in 1925 the Wilson plantation was investigated after complaints by the Mexican Embassy that Wilson had recruited 5,000 Mexicans to work for him but was not paying them the wage he had promised. Lee Wilson was charged with tracking a guy down in Memphis and having him arrested and put in the Mississippi County jail (in Osceola, probably) until he agreed to go back and work at his place.
The moral of those stories is to keep moving when you’re in Wilson. Which I do. Hundred year old trees line both sides of the highway. A few of them are so massive that they may have stood here when Confederate soldiers marched down this road, perhaps after having been released from the Union prisoner-of-war camp in Rock Island, Illinois--sick, skinny, weak, and dispirited. The thought makes me feel robust by comparison.
All afternoon, dozens of soybean trucks have been driving by, along with the cotton trucks (some from Lee Wilson & Co.) taking modules to the huge Willow Gin, near Bassett. Next to the gin is a plant of the Gilster-Mary Lee Corporation, from which a tantalizing sweet smell emanates, like maybe from some sort of fruity drink mix.
At last, nearing the end of my day’s journey, I enter Bassett, population 168. The sun is low in the sky, directly in front of me, just a few degrees above the trees. I’m always happy when my home away from home comes into view. Today it is parked right alongside Highway 61.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Day 42: Dixie Pig
South of Holland, Missouri to Luxora, Arkansas. 19.7 miles/690.8 total
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
It's bright and early as I leave from the Car-Mac truck stop and Shell gas station at Exit 1, a couple of miles south of Holland, Missouri, headed for the town of Luxora, Arkansas, traveling through the city of Blytheville. It’s warm already, and partly cloudy, promising to get up into the 70s. I might work up a sweat today for a change.
I’m savoring my last minutes in the Missouri Bootheel, as I draw toward the Arkansas border. I’ve learned quite a bit about cotton, and I'm learning about armadillos. I know I’ll continue to see lots of both as I proceed south.
Last night as I tossed and turned my dreams were filled with the story of Viola Liuzzo. You might remember that she was a woman from the Detroit area who went down to Alabama in 1965 to help civil rights workers in connection with the Selma to Montgomery marches, and was shot to death in her car by the Ku Klux Klan. In the dream I could see LBJ on television talking about arrests of KKK members in connection with the murder and I heard people speaking a mixed-up version of her name. I kept thinking, in the dream, it’s Viola Liuzzo, Viola Liuzzo.
I’m not sure how that popped into my head. Who knows how dreams work, anyway? But I'm sure it had something to do with the guys I was talking to and the stuff about the four men in Steele, Missouri, and the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World.
I realize how much guts it must have taken to be Viola Liuzzo or Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman or Medgar Evers. Or these four men in Missouri who had the audacity, in 1934, to be part of a movement that not only stood up to the white man, but aligned itself with a less-than-friendly foreign government. What incredible bravery, bordering on insanity and born of a desperation I can only imagine.
How pathetic, by comparison, that from the safety of my blog I take potshots at this doddering ancienne regime--this “old bitch gone in the teeth,” this "botched civilization" (to borrow a couple of phrases from Ezra Pound)--that is the white south of the 21st century.
At 1.8 miles I cross over into Arkansas, The Natural State, as it advertises itself on its signs. The welcome point is a concrete arch, about fifteen feet high, looking like a more squat, miniature version of the St. Louis Gateway Arch. It’s much older, though. It looks like a nice public works project that might have been undertaken in the 20s or 30s. Sure enough, the plaque on the arch says it was erected in 1924. Put up by the folks of Mississippi County, Arkansas, which I’m entering now.
It’s time for a summary of Missouri stats. I walked in Missouri for almost five full days and part of a sixth. Adding the two partial days together I get what amounts to five full days, and a total of 103 miles walked in the state—20.6 miles per day, on average.
For road kill I saw 10 possums, 7 raccoons, 6 frogs, 5 birds, 4 squirrels, 4 skunks, 4 cats, 3 turtles, 3 armadillos, 3 snakes, 2 dogs, 1 mouse, and 1 crawdad.
I got nine ride offers, close to two per day. Very respectable, illustrating the kindness and friendliness of the folks of Missouri.
Last but not least, I found $1.21 in change on the roadside.
With that I bid farewell to Missouri, and enter the fifth state of my journey.
As I step into Arkansas, I am entering my first Confederate State. (As a slave state Missouri was far from neutral in its sentiments, but was neutralized and occupied early on by the Union.)
Near Yarbro, which I pass by but do not go through, I go into a junk store that calls itself an auction house, to have a look around. I realize that I must be instantly recognizable as a stranger, because both my eyes aim in the same direction, I don’t mumble or drool, my gut doesn’t hang down over my belt, and I do not dip snuff. Also, I’m wearing reasonably clean clothes. Ah, the salt of the earth.
I enter Blytheville, population 18, 272. This isn’t quite a new area to me. I’ve stayed here three nights already, and probably will stay again tonight. I already had a nice chat with some white guys and explored the region of my grandmother's early childhood. But today I’m getting the ground level view.
The Highway 61 northern shopping district is mostly grocery stores and drug stores. Super D is a big drug store chain. Also Sonic drive-ins. Lots of Sonics. The real action, of course, is over by I-55, where the Walmart and other big stores are located.
Blytheville is the home town of the actor George Hamilton. He spent the first twelve years of his life here. Old George isn't exactly Laurence Olivier, but he’s very likable. At least, I like him. He doesn’t take himself too seriously. You might say he laughs all the way to the bank, like Liberace. Today, in honor of Blytheville's native son, I’m working on my George Hamilton tan. I really need to take my hat off to get some color on my forehead, but it makes me have to squint too much. Those crow's feet.
I remember that George Hamilton played Hank Williams in a biographical movie, fairly early in his career. I used to think it was funny casting, but given the fact that he’s from here in Blytheville, it seems okay. Hank was from Alabama, and George Hamilton actually does look a little like him.
And of course George Hamilton played the lawyer in The Godfather, Part 3, the part that was supposed to be played by Robert Duvall. Too bad they couldn’t sign Duvall. George did a game job and all, but what the hell. As I understand it, Duvall would have settled for half of what they were paying Al Pacino and Diane Keaton to be in the movie, and he would have been well worth whatever that was. It might have saved the movie. (Well, that and someone else to play the daughter and someone to play Vincent who didn't have a Cuban accent.) I don’t know if that was Paramount’s fault, or Coppola’s, or both, but it was a big blunder.
Blytheville is one of two county seats of Mississippi County. The city was founded in 1879 by a Methodist minister named Henry T. Blythe.
I pass a place called Dixie Pig. That pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?
As I turn right on Highway 61, I see the gigantic First Baptist Church, looking as impressive as a church can look. It takes up a large square block. Across the street behind First Baptist is the First United Methodist Church, which I suppose is really the mother church of this city. It’s another large edifice, of neo-gothic design. Two churches fighting for the souls of the white people of Blytheville.
Walking down the shady, affluent residential streets near these two churches, I get to experience fall all over again. Brown sycamore leaves the size of elephant's ears sail to the ground. Delicate ginkgo fans lay a yellow path, and the accumulated leaves of oaks, elms, and a few maples all crunch beneath my shoes.
As U.S. 61 takes me south out of town, I pass an abandoned building with the word “Halal” on its front. This might have been a Muslim food preparation center, the equivalent of a kosher place, maybe for the preparation of poultry or beef. Wonder how the Muslims of eastern Arkansas are faring these days? They're probably mostly doctors.
Just down the street is a cemetery where some of the Blytheville dead await me. I walk across the five-lane highway to take a look. I sit on the tombstone of someone named Rex Baker and look across the street at warehouses and the ubiquitous tufts of cotton lining the roadside . A cemetery has the power to take me so quickly out of the world where I've been walking and to a place of rest, that it’s a great antidote to the fatigue and pain. Nobody’s here right now, on a Tuesday at about noon. Just me and the folks who aren’t going anywhere. The Shaws and the Duncans. Charles and Louise Purtle. Bud Ratliffe and his wife Edna. Byrdie Mae Lawhorn.
One section of the cemetery is called the Garden of Memories, where the stones are all flush with the ground. In the middle of it is a stone about the size of a pulpit, topped with a marble effigy of an open bible, about three feet wide. Chiseled on the two open pages are the familiar words from the 11th chapter of John, from the story of the raising of Lazarus: “I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” Someone has laid a necklace down in the center of the two stone pages, with a pendant that consists of three little metal pages about a half inch square, on a ring binder so they can be turned. And the message in tiny lettering on the three pages is this: “Never frown, even when you are sad, because someone might be falling in love with your smile.” (Hey, I don't make it up, I just write it down.)
This has been an absolutely great day for money on the roadside. Just since entering Arkansas I have found 79 cents—a quarter, four dimes, and fourteen pennies. If this keeps up I’ll be rich by the time I get to Memphis.
Down past the southern I-55 exit for Blytheville nothing remains on this walk but an eight-mile stretch down to Luxora, my destination. Luxora is another of those Egyptian towns along the American Nile--the Mississippi. In Illinois there are Cairo and Karnak, and of course there's Memphis. Probably an Alexandria around here somewhere, too.
With less than a mile to go I at last enter Luxora, population 1,317. I peel off of Highway 61 onto Arkansas 158 and head diagonally over toward the center of the town. A couple of horses greet me as I go by, looking for a handout, no doubt. I pet their noses; it's the best I can do. In the background a donkey brays. An old man shuffles past, looking distracted or demented or both. A little boy and girl laugh and chase each other. For the hundredth time today a pickup truck passes and someone waves at me.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
It's bright and early as I leave from the Car-Mac truck stop and Shell gas station at Exit 1, a couple of miles south of Holland, Missouri, headed for the town of Luxora, Arkansas, traveling through the city of Blytheville. It’s warm already, and partly cloudy, promising to get up into the 70s. I might work up a sweat today for a change.
I’m savoring my last minutes in the Missouri Bootheel, as I draw toward the Arkansas border. I’ve learned quite a bit about cotton, and I'm learning about armadillos. I know I’ll continue to see lots of both as I proceed south.
Last night as I tossed and turned my dreams were filled with the story of Viola Liuzzo. You might remember that she was a woman from the Detroit area who went down to Alabama in 1965 to help civil rights workers in connection with the Selma to Montgomery marches, and was shot to death in her car by the Ku Klux Klan. In the dream I could see LBJ on television talking about arrests of KKK members in connection with the murder and I heard people speaking a mixed-up version of her name. I kept thinking, in the dream, it’s Viola Liuzzo, Viola Liuzzo.
I’m not sure how that popped into my head. Who knows how dreams work, anyway? But I'm sure it had something to do with the guys I was talking to and the stuff about the four men in Steele, Missouri, and the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World.
I realize how much guts it must have taken to be Viola Liuzzo or Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman or Medgar Evers. Or these four men in Missouri who had the audacity, in 1934, to be part of a movement that not only stood up to the white man, but aligned itself with a less-than-friendly foreign government. What incredible bravery, bordering on insanity and born of a desperation I can only imagine.
How pathetic, by comparison, that from the safety of my blog I take potshots at this doddering ancienne regime--this “old bitch gone in the teeth,” this "botched civilization" (to borrow a couple of phrases from Ezra Pound)--that is the white south of the 21st century.
At 1.8 miles I cross over into Arkansas, The Natural State, as it advertises itself on its signs. The welcome point is a concrete arch, about fifteen feet high, looking like a more squat, miniature version of the St. Louis Gateway Arch. It’s much older, though. It looks like a nice public works project that might have been undertaken in the 20s or 30s. Sure enough, the plaque on the arch says it was erected in 1924. Put up by the folks of Mississippi County, Arkansas, which I’m entering now.
It’s time for a summary of Missouri stats. I walked in Missouri for almost five full days and part of a sixth. Adding the two partial days together I get what amounts to five full days, and a total of 103 miles walked in the state—20.6 miles per day, on average.
For road kill I saw 10 possums, 7 raccoons, 6 frogs, 5 birds, 4 squirrels, 4 skunks, 4 cats, 3 turtles, 3 armadillos, 3 snakes, 2 dogs, 1 mouse, and 1 crawdad.
I got nine ride offers, close to two per day. Very respectable, illustrating the kindness and friendliness of the folks of Missouri.
Last but not least, I found $1.21 in change on the roadside.
With that I bid farewell to Missouri, and enter the fifth state of my journey.
As I step into Arkansas, I am entering my first Confederate State. (As a slave state Missouri was far from neutral in its sentiments, but was neutralized and occupied early on by the Union.)
Near Yarbro, which I pass by but do not go through, I go into a junk store that calls itself an auction house, to have a look around. I realize that I must be instantly recognizable as a stranger, because both my eyes aim in the same direction, I don’t mumble or drool, my gut doesn’t hang down over my belt, and I do not dip snuff. Also, I’m wearing reasonably clean clothes. Ah, the salt of the earth.
I enter Blytheville, population 18, 272. This isn’t quite a new area to me. I’ve stayed here three nights already, and probably will stay again tonight. I already had a nice chat with some white guys and explored the region of my grandmother's early childhood. But today I’m getting the ground level view.
The Highway 61 northern shopping district is mostly grocery stores and drug stores. Super D is a big drug store chain. Also Sonic drive-ins. Lots of Sonics. The real action, of course, is over by I-55, where the Walmart and other big stores are located.
Blytheville is the home town of the actor George Hamilton. He spent the first twelve years of his life here. Old George isn't exactly Laurence Olivier, but he’s very likable. At least, I like him. He doesn’t take himself too seriously. You might say he laughs all the way to the bank, like Liberace. Today, in honor of Blytheville's native son, I’m working on my George Hamilton tan. I really need to take my hat off to get some color on my forehead, but it makes me have to squint too much. Those crow's feet.
I remember that George Hamilton played Hank Williams in a biographical movie, fairly early in his career. I used to think it was funny casting, but given the fact that he’s from here in Blytheville, it seems okay. Hank was from Alabama, and George Hamilton actually does look a little like him.
And of course George Hamilton played the lawyer in The Godfather, Part 3, the part that was supposed to be played by Robert Duvall. Too bad they couldn’t sign Duvall. George did a game job and all, but what the hell. As I understand it, Duvall would have settled for half of what they were paying Al Pacino and Diane Keaton to be in the movie, and he would have been well worth whatever that was. It might have saved the movie. (Well, that and someone else to play the daughter and someone to play Vincent who didn't have a Cuban accent.) I don’t know if that was Paramount’s fault, or Coppola’s, or both, but it was a big blunder.
Blytheville is one of two county seats of Mississippi County. The city was founded in 1879 by a Methodist minister named Henry T. Blythe.
I pass a place called Dixie Pig. That pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?
As I turn right on Highway 61, I see the gigantic First Baptist Church, looking as impressive as a church can look. It takes up a large square block. Across the street behind First Baptist is the First United Methodist Church, which I suppose is really the mother church of this city. It’s another large edifice, of neo-gothic design. Two churches fighting for the souls of the white people of Blytheville.
Walking down the shady, affluent residential streets near these two churches, I get to experience fall all over again. Brown sycamore leaves the size of elephant's ears sail to the ground. Delicate ginkgo fans lay a yellow path, and the accumulated leaves of oaks, elms, and a few maples all crunch beneath my shoes.
As U.S. 61 takes me south out of town, I pass an abandoned building with the word “Halal” on its front. This might have been a Muslim food preparation center, the equivalent of a kosher place, maybe for the preparation of poultry or beef. Wonder how the Muslims of eastern Arkansas are faring these days? They're probably mostly doctors.
Just down the street is a cemetery where some of the Blytheville dead await me. I walk across the five-lane highway to take a look. I sit on the tombstone of someone named Rex Baker and look across the street at warehouses and the ubiquitous tufts of cotton lining the roadside . A cemetery has the power to take me so quickly out of the world where I've been walking and to a place of rest, that it’s a great antidote to the fatigue and pain. Nobody’s here right now, on a Tuesday at about noon. Just me and the folks who aren’t going anywhere. The Shaws and the Duncans. Charles and Louise Purtle. Bud Ratliffe and his wife Edna. Byrdie Mae Lawhorn.
One section of the cemetery is called the Garden of Memories, where the stones are all flush with the ground. In the middle of it is a stone about the size of a pulpit, topped with a marble effigy of an open bible, about three feet wide. Chiseled on the two open pages are the familiar words from the 11th chapter of John, from the story of the raising of Lazarus: “I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” Someone has laid a necklace down in the center of the two stone pages, with a pendant that consists of three little metal pages about a half inch square, on a ring binder so they can be turned. And the message in tiny lettering on the three pages is this: “Never frown, even when you are sad, because someone might be falling in love with your smile.” (Hey, I don't make it up, I just write it down.)
This has been an absolutely great day for money on the roadside. Just since entering Arkansas I have found 79 cents—a quarter, four dimes, and fourteen pennies. If this keeps up I’ll be rich by the time I get to Memphis.
Down past the southern I-55 exit for Blytheville nothing remains on this walk but an eight-mile stretch down to Luxora, my destination. Luxora is another of those Egyptian towns along the American Nile--the Mississippi. In Illinois there are Cairo and Karnak, and of course there's Memphis. Probably an Alexandria around here somewhere, too.
With less than a mile to go I at last enter Luxora, population 1,317. I peel off of Highway 61 onto Arkansas 158 and head diagonally over toward the center of the town. A couple of horses greet me as I go by, looking for a handout, no doubt. I pet their noses; it's the best I can do. In the background a donkey brays. An old man shuffles past, looking distracted or demented or both. A little boy and girl laugh and chase each other. For the hundredth time today a pickup truck passes and someone waves at me.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Day 41: A pig in a tutu
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
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.
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.
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