Charleston

Finally made it to Charleston and it was worth visiting. Coming from the northern coast, it was really easy to get into the historic part of town. Although I had trouble spotting the signs until I was on foot parking is plentiful and reasonable. The ramps and lots I saw are small and frequent and the ramps also contain public toilets. There are very few buildings from before the revolutionary war, most of the impressive stuff is mid-1800s or new and built to look like older.

The older part of town once had a defensive wall around it and the southernmost tip of the peninsula was tidal swamp like much of the coastline. Since the original settlers were french, it isn't surprising that many of the older parts of town had a foreign look to it. I found it surprising to see a look more closely resembling Quebec than New Orleans.

Originally the settlers built on Parris Island and then moved up the river and built again. When the governor decided that place would be too hard to defend, they moved to the current location. It was an orderly move. Charleston was carefully plotted and laid out. Green squares were made an intricate part of the plan and most of them still exist. Not only are there little green parks scattered around, there are many benches and walls on the streets waiting to be used. There are even free trolleys that loop around town on three different lines.

The older part of town is directed mostly to tourists. There are some shops, lots of restaurants, historical churches and buildings and then lawyer offices scattered around. Mostly I'd say it's residential with big, old, well-maintained houses and discrete apartment buildings, especially in what I think were wharf buildings. I'm guessing there are many more rentals than I saw because there are huge numbers of 20-something people using the green spaces. Everything I saw was clean; there's no trash blowing around, no graffiti, no loiterers and no obvious police or maintenance workers.

Move a little further up the peninsula and banks and hotels start appearing. They are built in keeping with the 1800s and with a french flair, but they have a new, sharp-edged look to them that the older buildings lack. Some of the older buildings have had face-lifts and most at least a good scrubbing. . Apparently it was customary for a plantation owner to have a town house for summer. Sea breezes keep Charleston cooler and healthier than a plantation in summer where the mosquitoes and gnats are supposed to be fierce. Course their slaves were still there.

Even though there weren't as many tourists as I prepared for, there were enough that I saw some kind of tour nearly every block. There are small tour buses, bicycle cabs that give tours, walking tours, harbor tours and horse-drawn wagon tours that were the most popular.

The first couple of wagons I saw were pulled by a single Clydesdale that made a funny sound as it walked by. Then I saw a pair of mules and they too sounded strange. When I took time to get a good look, I saw they were all wearing wooden shoes. Are they to protect the paving when the roads get really hot or to protect the horses feet?

One of the older buildings is the city market dating from 1841. Its made of brick and most of it is still open air. Lots of the vendors are blacks selling sweetgrass baskets. Originally the slave women made baskets as they had in Africa. Whether the original style was wide and flat I don't know, however what they made here was and the baskets were used for winnowing the rice after harvest. A plantation with 4-500 acres in rice would use lots of baskets so those women and their children would have perfected their skill. After the Civil War, some of the free slaves settled on the barrier islands, developed their own culture and continued to make baskets. I don't think many blacks can afford to live on those islands today though they do continue to make and sell baskets. Some are very elaborate and some are plain. All smell really good because of the sweetgrass that is the primary ingredient. The grass is worked into strands and coiled. The coils are sewn into each other with palmetto leaf cut into thin strips and pine needles are used to add color. They keep an even coil besides adding other colored material into it and then hide the ending so the buyer won't be able to see it. Besides the many sellers at the market, there are stands lining the highway where other women sell their baskets. All the baskets I saw were wonders of creation.

I could have bought a ton of stuff at the market. There was whimsical critters made out of spark plugs, nuts and bolts; nice collections of well-made jewelery; tacky t-shirts; hairbrushes with back and handle cast as cat, fish or bird; some appealing pottery patterned after items used in the 18^th and 19^thcentury; the usual local spices and mixes; and a collection of non-typical mementos – posters advertising slave auctions or offering rewards for runaways.

Charleston and surrounding area played a huge part in the slave trade. There was a port used principally in slave shipment and one of the few remaining original buildings is the slave market. This town is the only one I've seen that labels slavery as inhumane. Other southern cities have mentioned slaves or slavery however none have stood up and declared it as I saw here. The blacks here act like the ones at home and Charleston's acknowledgment may play a part in that. Most blacks I've seen in the south do not make eye contact unless they are challenging nor will they speak more than necessary if addressed. Not here, here the black people I've met expect me to acknowledge they are equal.

This visit I mostly looked at the outside of buildings as I walked down to the Battery Park at the southernmost end of town. There are lots of churches in town, some with the mandatory attached cemetery. One, painted a bright white, has a lighthouse instead of a belfry that was used into the 20^thcentury. The houses have street-side gates set in high walls that hide small gardens or driveways. Porches are everywhere. On the newer houses they are open to the air while the older houses sport shutters that block the sun and also block the view when if they are still used as sleeping porches.

All of the visitors I talked to were southerners themselves. One woman was from Atlanta and was going crazy over all the photo opportunities. Another was from Columbia SC, that's a bit like someone from Duluth visiting the Twin Cities. And, surprise, there were more french speaking tour groups than asian ones.

Total aside – a tow is going by –its dark and I can't see more than a small tug at each end. I wish they would go by in the daylight instead of the pleasure boats.

Later I compared notes with Joan, one of the camp hosts. Its been a pleasure to share views with another outsider. Once in awhile even I like to verify I'm walking on the same side of the street as other folks, at least in some things.

South Carolina

My plan was to bite the bullet and spend a few days visiting Charleston. I thought if I broke the visits up with 'wild' days, I could manage a few town days. Plans mean keeping track of time, as in days, and the longer I wander the harder it is for me to track the days so I wasn't too surprised to discover it was Thursday, when I thought it might be as late as Tuesday, and I still haven't visited my avowed destination.

One of the people I talked to at Thanksgiving told me it was worth visiting McClellanville, named after its founder McClellan. Its only a few miles up the road so I did drive to visit it. The roads in the southeast deserve a word – narrow. State highways are however wide a road be, 8-9ft probably, and they have a stripe down the center. There are no shoulders though often sides are wide and level; maybe shoulder paving is a northern thing for snowplowing. Secondary roads usually have leaves & pine needles along the edges so its really hard to see if the road is wider than the one lane that is typically visible.

The road into McClellanville had a stripe and yards that came right up to its edge. In many ways it was reminiscent of rural roads in Scotland where it was easy to see how a track through a cluster of houses turned into the road through a village. Places in Scotland had hedges defining the roadway, here there are large trees draped with spanish moss that created a winding tunnel leading through the older part of town.

Its not the kind of town a tourist would typically give a glance. I saw a very busy restaurant, an art gallery and a gazebo where the road took a turn to the left and headed back to the main highway. On right there is a pair of brick posts, they are huge on driveway gateposts in these parts, and a newish road leading toward water showing behind a mowed field. Turns out the field is someone's yard and the road is a small loop driving past McMansions.

Back at the gazebo I spotted and then took another road heading to a boat dock. There I found an informational sign about rebuilding the oyster beds. Once baby oysters are spewed out it seems the little buggers prefer to anchor on a fellow oyster over anything else so the area has a recycling program for oyster shells.

While I was reading the sign I heard a car stop behind me and a voice called out a greeting. An older gentleman, he didn't tell me his name however he did tell me he is 85, and his equally old dog, Zoe, had spotted me and came to talk. In the process I learned that one of the McMansions belongs to an Australian, and the one for sale belongs to a man who has taken up with a woman who lives out of town. None of the older residents, particularly his lady friend, like houses are on the point so he is selling his. I also found out there are damnyankees, he was a teen before he learned that was really two words, who buy in and then want to change things, yankees, who are smart enough to leave, and westerners like myself who don't count. Further, if I really was interested in learning about his community I needed to visit the museum and a cemetery.

The museum was close at hand and is smaller on the inside than it looks on the outside. However the gentleman running the museum was interesting enough to be a museum on his own. There were five initial families and nearly all the locals are related to more than one of them. Talking to him about his community and its roots that are clearly alive today started giving me a sense of the south that I have seen but don't understand. He is  directly related to one of the oldest plantations in the area and his quiet pride in his ancestors is part of his character.

We talked quite a bit about blacks and plantation culture. He wanted me to understand that there was deep respect for Negro culture and knowledge in spite of them being slaves. In the best sense, at least on his family plantation, the relationship was symbiotic. If it remained patronizing in the intervening years, it really wasn't much different than the peasant–landowner relationship of Europe. And while whites don't generally invite blacks to their table, blacks don't generally invite whites either and that isn't much different than other parts of the country.

He told me nearly all the houses in town were built by a family of blacks who are known to be the best builders around and it is a matter of pride to own one of their houses. He asked if I'd noticed that blacks tended to live in clusters off a ways. That goes back to after the Civil War when they were free and now had less than nothing. Most of them had been field hands and lived in plantation housing, ate plantation provided food and wore plantation provided clothing. Plantation owners couldn't farm without the blacks and they in turn couldn't survive without the farm so in many cases the plantation owner gave land to the blacks for houses. That gave both the blacks some place to live and gave the farmer a ready supply of labor. Listening put a personal view to history that the teaching of it generally lacks.

I decided to visit the cemetery. As with most towns there is more than one however my gent had given me directions to the Presbyterian one so that is where I headed. No sooner was I parked and out of my car than another vehicle pulled in an another older gent asked if he could help me. When I explained why I was there, he nodded in satisfaction, told me I should see it in the spring with the azaleas in bloom, and drove further in.

Most cemeteries I've seen consist of long rows of stones, some with flowers and some with fancy carving, trees here and there and paved roads. This one is a bit different. I drove in on a sandy roadway with a bit of crushed rock spread over it, through brick gateposts and parked in a wide spot under a moss draped tree. There are lots of trees and bushes with groupings of stones clustered under or around them. Each cluster is like a little mini-cemetery and the stones share family names.  Some stones are two hundred years old and are hard to read. Some places have a bench.

While I wandered around looking at generations of family all buried together 'family plot' took on a different meaning. Family going back two hundred years and being buried together is hard for me to grasp. Granted my mother has stayed in one place for a long time, however her parents' families had spread out and my father's family had also spread. My uncles and aunts spread out as did my siblings and many of our children.

The more south and east I explore, the more European it feels. I find myself relating experiences and bits of information to European history rather than my own and the more that happens, the closer I think I'm moving to an understanding that keeps eluding me.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving

I've been staying at a campground at a lake on the Georgia-South Carolina border for several days. Georgia has been in a drought since July so the lake was very low. Naturally, that meant it rained while I was there. On the other hand, while it rained I used my very quirky internet connection.  After shear persistence and dumb luck I scored my current camping spot.

Friends, I am spending the next few days on the coast of South Carolina about an hour east of Charleston. Not actually the open sea coast, rather then inter-coastal waterway. The tide rises and falls, birds bob around and very large cruisers or sailboats glide past within touching distance.

While I was driving here, I found a good public radio station issuing from someplace in the state. Buried in the chatter was some Thanksgiving food talk. Seems like sea food would have been a much more suitable Thanksgiving food than turkey. Good old Ben Franklin started pushing turkey eating while he lobbied for it as our national bird.

I did drive by a couple of roadside sellers of crab and shrimp however I chose to stick with turkey and so purchased a frozen breast. There was no cranberry in the store I shopped, instead I found mountains of fresh green beans or gallon cans of them next to quart containers of french fried onions. Sweet potatoes and collards disappeared as fast as they were refilled. Snatches of conversation circled around the meat displays; most were discussions over ham, turkey or chicken and how many they could feed with their holiday budget.

One of my grandmas could make a pot roast that tasted like it was oven baked so I thought I'd give it a try with my turkey part. It thawed nicely, nearly unfrozen and still cold enough to be safe. I dug out the cast iron fry pan and found a bit of aluminum foil for a lid. Soon sizzling sounds came from the pan as the bird began to brown. I had just settled myself outside to read while it cooked when a 'neighbor' came over.

Seems like an extended group of family and friends, about 20, gather yearly at the park to celebrate Thanksgiving. I was invited to join the group, the campground hosts who were unknown to the family were also there so I too must join them; I did.

There was several turkeys, deep fried, baked and grilled, a beef roast, stew, collards, green bean casserole, two or three different types of dressing, biscuits, a couple different gravies, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, spoon bread, unknown casseroles and another table loaded with dessert. There was no cranberry anyplace nor were there any jello salads, for a stray second I missed Minnesota.

After everyone was done eating and seconds and take-home plates offered several times, some of the older guys dug out their guitars and a family sing-along started. I heard that two of the older guys used to be in bands and that the one younger guy currently plays in one. There were the usual Jesus songs and another bunch right out of the 60s. One of the guys sang “House of the Rising Sun”, a song my kids' father used to sing. Even after all these years I could hear him singing and he did it better than what I heard today.

Now the sun is turning everything to bronze, the no-see-ums have returned for supper and the party broke up as some folks left for family obligations. My turkey is cooking since I can better keep it cooked than raw.

Its been a good day – I hope you too had a good one.

South Carolina

I've continued to follow the Mississippi south, on the Missouri side, as far as St. Louis. Mostly the roads are away from the river. Where it runs close by, there are huge ugly plants surrounding small hamlet-like towns. Those towns seem even older than the river towns I've met further north. In general they are quite similar. The highway, running on higher ground, twists through town toward the river on what appears to be the 'best' road in town. Semis use it too so corners turn into a dance of who goes first. The big trucks seem to have it figured out, us strangers are notable for our caution and the young natives simply blast through intersections..

The ugly plants have enormous piles of coal or sand piled around them, usually on the up hill side with big tunnels of metal stretched over the road and ending in tubes hanging over the river. The riverbank is fortified with edging that looks bigger than railroad ties and sometimes a barge is tied under a tube.

So picture one of these towns. There is a railroad track nearby that is heavily used – train rumbling & whistles. There is a main road snaking through your streets – constant engine growling and the sound of air brakes. Some kind of plant nearly spills into your streets – gears grinding and sometimes squealing along with dust I could taste. Tugboats and barges pass on the river close enough to talk with the crew – chugging, lots of chugging along with slapping water if the wind is right. ALL the people I saw in this one town were acting like it was normal. I know, for them it is but I keep thinking about the assault on their senses and wonder if they are uncomfortable someplace quiet.

Around St. Louis the roads became a little confusing so I turned on my GPS, still a new toy, and asked it to send me to a park in Illinois. If roads came together at a diagonal, it would send me down a side street to cut off a block or two, and then if I wanted to take a lesser road, it would keep trying to divert me back to a major one. I'm guessing most of the problems I had are user errors. And it couldn't know the ferry it told me to take was closed for the season. What I really want is google maps in a hand-held with GPS connect. Eventually it did a very good job of routing me to where I wanted to go and keeping me out of St. Louis traffic.

Once in Illinois, I had the pleasure of driving on one of the prettiest and nicest roads I've found. The stretch I was on runs along the Mississippi from Alton to Grafton and then turns north to follow the Illinois River. Its four lanes wide with the Mississippi flanking one side and the white cliffs of Illinois flanking the other. It was late afternoon on a sunny, 72 degree day. The lower cliff-side was covered with brilliant reds and browns. Not only were the trees brilliant, the steep embankment under them was blanketed with the same sizzling colors. Sunlight sparkled on the river littering it with diamond points of light and overhead the sky had that intense blue some afternoons wear.

A few miles north of Grafton I found the state park I was seeking. The guy in charge is friendly, the sites are fairly level and the showers have really hot water.

There is a bunch of great sounding stuff to do in St. Louis and I thought I might stay a few days and visit some of them. First though, I wanted to drive south to Cahokia (Caw-hoe'-key-aaa), the remains of a city of Mississippian Mound Builders. Around 1100AD, when their city was at its peak, it had a larger population than London and was about the same size as Paris. 25,000 is a lot of people living in wooden huts and building huge mounds out of dirt. Their largest mound has a more volume than the Great Pyramid and was it constructed over a period of 300 years. Basket by basket people carried dirt to build that and many other mounds; I wanted to see for myself.

Armed with directions from the guy-in-charge, I headed back toward Alton and missed my turn. The road I was on also headed south and the greater St. Louis map I have showed the road I was on would take me where I wanted to go. So I continued and found a Lewis and Clark Historic Site instead. Well, I've been enamored with their Expedition for years so I stopped. Two hours later - - -. Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1803-1804 in the area. Since the Louisiana Purchase had not been finalized when they arrived at St. Louis, the Spanish governor would not allow them access to the Missouri River forcing them to winter and wait. Clark, a former military man, whipped the expedition men into a team and Lewis, the naturalist, spent his time gathering more information and buying supplies. They took a keel-boat and couple of tree-hollowed canoes to transport tons of goods. (And the only extra they had was some dried ink.) They “proceeded on under a jentle brease up the Missourie.” in May, 1804.

Keel-boats have always fascinated me and the reproduced one, made from following Lewis' sketchy plans, was of particular interest. Even seeing it I found it hard to visualize 20 men sleeping on board, actually on top of all those supplies. Staff is mostly volunteers who must spend their evenings browsing copies of Lewis' 13 journals. They are extremely well informed and wiling to share their knowledge with anyone. The info-guy there send me on my way with an annotated copy of the journal and new instructions for reaching Cahokia.

Fifteen minutes later I gazed at the Grand Plaza before parking at the Visitor Center. Granted I was still tired from the first stop, however I was disappointed with the informational video I saw regardless of the awards it won. The narrative is what bothered me. I think there are way too many “may have been used for” comments. Once again I spent hours in a museum this time looking for information to back up the video. I found very little that supported their assumptions.

Before leaving Minneapolis I read a book that questioned many assumptions made about other historic sites. Perhaps that book, added to my own skeptical nature, influenced my view. For one thing, they kept referring to de Soto exploring the area – as a free man he was hundreds of miles to the SW in Arkansas, and when he was here he was an Indian’s slave working as a trader and this site no longer existed. I wanted more than a throw-away comment about this site being in direct line with the earthworks outside Mexico City. I wanted more information about climatic conditions at the time this site was abandoned. And I wanted my old foot back so I could visit the wooden poled equinox calender. After another 2-3 hours looking at a very interesting museum, I was unable to do any outside walking.

When I return to check out St. Louis, Cahokia will come first.

Itchy Feet

October is half over and I have just now returned to wandering. Maybe there's a wandering gene since being condemned to wander for forty years doesn't sound bad to me. I do wander more in one day than a nomadic tribe would travel however not far by current standards.

The Corp of Engineers have many campgrounds across the country. Since they are federal, my old-person pass lets me stay for half-price. And since the Mississippi is very managed, the Corp has several camping sites along it. My first stop was at one called Blackhawk Camp in Wisconsin. Its right on the Mississippi River and is nearly deserted; both are appealing.
The park is north of Prairie du Chien and south of La Crosse. This part of the Mississippi is like the area around Red Wing, MN with lots of sloughs, meandering channels and backwaters. I can see where the water has dropped in the last month or so and grasses have started growing at the edges of the islands. Knowing how geese chow down on grasses inside Minneapolis, I see this grass and think prime feeding grounds for migrating birds. In fact, this area is a wildlife refuge. Thousands of acres that are pretty useless for much else are protected.

Even without the signs I can see hunting and fishing are prime recreation. Every 5 miles or so there is a boat launch site; each I've seen had several vehicles in it and the road traffic seems to be either semis or truck and boat. Not all the boats are for fishing, some are decorated for hunting and even plain boats are used for it. The pair of duck hunters who enthusiastically showed me their haul used a normal looking boat. I must have made the correct sounds because I left with a couple of teal for supper. They are very small birds once they are dressed out (it was harder to see just how small while they were feathered) and the hunter told me true, they are very tasty.

Now I've wandered a bit further south to the end of Iowa. I've often traveled through the state however I've rarely taken the time to explore it. Parts along the Mississippi are quite pretty and I really like the bluff area. There is a section of NE Iowa, western Wisconsin, northeast Illinois and Minnesota's bluff area that were untouched by glaciers. No glaciers but heavy glacial run-off left the area fairly rugged and quite hilly, resembling the lower western hill areas leading away from the Appalachians.

River towns are similar to each other no matter where I've seen them. Each has some really old buildings, they are generally two or three streets deep, and they can stretch for miles. The Mississippi has railroad tracks running on either side of it using the same space as the towns. One little Iowa town has tracks running down the center of Main St. Every other intersection is shut off but there are still lots of unguarded crossings. Naturally the trains blow their whistles when approaching though the trains are hard to ignore since the buildings and street vibrate when they pass through.

The towns I've been through seem poorer than those in Minnesota or Wisconsin. However they all are trying to reinvent themselves and some seem to be succeeding. In an effort to keep people handy, lots of towns and counties have campgrounds that are consistently cheaper than Iowa state parks which are several dollars cheaper than Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois or Missouri's state parks.  Reasonable camping fees and pretty scenery will get be back to visit!


Currently I am in a 'historic county' in southern Iowa. I guess that means its old. While old buildings and houses don't particularly interest me, one blurb says it's house was part of the underground railroad. Now I'm going to have to look at Iowa history since I thought this was a free area even when it was a territory. I may even decide to visit that old house.

Southern Music

Lafayette Louisiana has a Music Festival every year.  This year since I was in the south, I agreed to meet some extended family and attend with them.  In preparation I tried to find regional music on the radio.  And I did find it.  I found black southern christian rap and christian zydeco;  I also heard old-time country western and oldie local rock and roll that has a different flavor that Midwest oldie rock and roll.  None of that prepared me for the music festival.

It is billed as an international festival.  In the past, I was told, it was more Cajun, Arcadian and Creole.   We went four of the five festival days and during that time I heard Burmese drummers, Haitian rara, french rock & roll, a little zydeco and various flavors of cajun music.  Most of it was way too loud though some of it was intriguing, like the plastic pipe the rara band used as trumpets or the way flutes change cajun.  And I enjoyed seeing youngsters playing with their families.

Today, the state park in Arkansas where I am staying had a different kind of musical celebration.  Every spring they hold a one-day music festival that has traditionally been a blue-grass event.  This year they invited a variety of groups, they said, in an effort to widen their appeal.  I hadn’t planned on staying for it since they were booked however a cancellation occurred, they offered me the spot and I decided to stay on to hear what they had.  - - -
 s of the Loretta Lynn sound, a really, really terrible Dylan impersonation and lots of gospel.  Some of it was excellent music, most of it was ok and one group wasn’t very musical any more.  All of them clearly loved what they were doing.

The last group, made up mostly of retired ministers and their wives with one guy on death’s door, were interesting because of who they are.  Lots of country singers learned how to perform at church and to hear and see their musical bones laid out in front of me was intriguing.

As I sit here writing this waiting for supper to cook, I asked myself if I would do either of these events again.  No, I won’t; what I will do is make an effort to visit other events as I travel.  Music seems to be a good way to get a feel for the place I’m visiting.

Coastal Mississippi

Remember hearing about Katrina and all the news reports about New Orleans, its people and the dikes?  Do you remember hearing anything about Mississippi?  If I heard anything, it wasn’t enough to remember.  Coastal Mississippi was hammered! Nearly all the way to the Alabama border I saw signs of hurricane damage.

The area where I am staying is roughly 50 mile east of New Orleans and only about a quarter of the coastal houses have been rebuilt.  Houses off the coast, inland a half-mile or so are pretty much back on their lots.  Those houses are also much smaller and very few are set up off the ground.  Nearly all the rebuilt coastal houses are on posts, pillars or beams one and two stories above ground level.

I don’t think being two stories off the ground will help them if there is another Katrina.  First, the only houses that seemed to survive are cement or brick built and I saw few replacements that are built that solidly.  Second, water in Biloxi was 35ft high and the water was as damaging as the wind.  What difference does it make if the wind is strong enough to tear off the roof when the water pushed along by it is going to crash through your windows and flood your house?

It looks like 80% of the coastal property in my area is for sale.  Some of it has houses on it, some foundations or pillars and some are simply bare.  I talked to a woman who told me many of the residents in my area were retired and they simply couldn’t afford to rebuild.  She has a friend that lives inland.  The friend had no flood insurance since her area never expected to be flooded; in the past insurance agents didn’t even mention the idea.  That woman was flooded up to the middle of her second floor.

Since community infrastructures were also shredded some of them used storm repair as a means of rethinking and upgrading infrastructure.  Supply companies also made some changes.  It looks like power and phone lines are underground.  I see lots of streets dug up and bundles of pipe lying along side the diggings.  Roads are still being replaced along the shore in my area and it seems to be the last of shore repair.

The state park I’m staying in just reopened late last summer.  Only about ½ of its spaces are ready to be used and its swimming pool and water park is still closed.  The attendant I spoke with said they barely had 30 snowbirds over winter.

Most of the towns appear recovered.  Casinos have rebuilt, Wal-marts abound and the area is home to more Waffle Houses than McDs.  Small shops that depend on tourists are closed. Some smaller strip malls are boarded up and I saw an occasional abandoned school.

It is mile upon mile of empty house lots that have most impressed me.  Off shore lots are normal sized and normal priced I think (150x150 for $50,000) while the coastal lots are generally over an acre and sport Lake Superior prices.  Near Biloxi townhouse complexes have sprung up.  Those range from uninspired (think prefab) through garish (Italian baroque) with one or two tastefully done.

The beaches themselves are shiny white sand that is supposed to originate in the Appalachians.  Wherever it comes from the beaches are pretty.  There are scores of men keeping them picked up and groomed while others work at keeping drifting sand of the roadway.  There are strips of snow fence nailed to posts set into the sand.  The sand collects on both sides of the fencing and then more men plant sea grass to anchor the sand.  If the dunes are successful, eventually the beach will no longer be visible from the road.

Also generally not visible and still around are mosquitoes, midges and wood ticks.

bank vault

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Poverty Point

My thwarted archeological self rose to the foreground last week when I visited a place called, you guessed it, Poverty Point.  The name comes from a former plantation however an ex-plantation was not the draw.  Poverty Point is the site of ancient civilization.  By ancient I mean around 10,000 BC.  And still, a couple of stray Clovis points were not the draw.

So, why am I taken with the place, some of you may ask with a sigh of resignation?  Around 1500 BC there was a largely idle well-fed population of about 2000 people living at the Point.  I know there was much potential idleness or maybe lots of slaves even then because somebody carried 100,000s of baskets of dirt to build a series of half-circle mounds and also an enormous bird.  They leveled about 40 acres and then ‘painted’ it by hauling in differently colored dirt.
I’m not exaggerating; the archeologists who have studied the place figured it took at least 1 ½ million 40-pound baskets of dirt to build the earthworks.  That’s enough dirt to build the Great Pyramid of Egypt.  And after all the studying they still don’t know why they were built.

This is all delta land and before that was shallow sea so there aren’t what upper midwesterners would call rocks, a few pebbles maybe however no rocks.  Keep in mind the point has been farmed for 100 years.  Those farmers just plowed right over the smaller mounds and the central plaza (about as long as 3 football fields).  Even after all the farming, over 40 tons of stone have been found.  That stone is not native, its been carted in from as far north as the Great Lakes, east from the Appalachians and from northern Florida.  Most of it has been worked into useful stuff like bowls, net and throwing-stick weights or jewelry.  And after all the studying they still have no idea what the people who lived here used for trade goods.

I could bore you even more with other intriguing detail however I choose not to share.

Update

I’m nearing the end of the Trace and I’m feeling a bit sad about it.  I’ve enjoyed drifting south with the weather.  The trees are pretty nearly all leafed out, azaleas are in full bloom, wisteria is beautiful and regarded as a near weed and crops are starting to be planted.

The earth really is red, at least in places, some people really do say “ lil ol “ this or that and Beaureard, Piccit ( I think that’s spelled wrong) and Burnside are well-respected names.  Some days I’ve seen more horses than people.

And I’ve finally found some black people.  There are surprisingly few on streets or in shops and jobs that would be held by blacks or latinos in MN are held by white people.  I have seen a few black people holding public works type jobs but they must work and live someplace and I’ve been looking.

Well, there was to be a rhythm and blues festival in a near town so I decided to go.  The town is about 1500 people and I think all of them and their friends and family were there.  Parking no longer existed and the streets were barely one car wide.  I may have tried harder to find a spot if I’d seen even one other white person.  I didn’t feel unsafe, just very strange.

I’ve been at gay gatherings and we fit together differently when we know its us.  When somebody that is clearly an outsider appears, they aren’t treated badly, it’s more of a knowing kind of tolerance that they don’t really belong, that this time, they are the outsider.  That’s what that gathering felt like to me.  The kind of look that I would have given an outsider is the kind of looks I saw directed toward me.  I thought I understood, so I left and simply drove around.

In driving, I went through several small towns that were not on my road map.  Actually most of the roads aren’t on the map either.  Nearly all the people I saw in those little towns were black.  In many cases the roads were in poor shape.  Some I think have only been patched since they were first paved maybe 40 years ago.  Many of the houses looked poor though there was a sprinkling of efficient looking small ranches; there are no attached garages here. Regardless of how poor a place looked, in Mississippi it was usually neat and tidy, unlike some other states where poor and heaps of trash seem to be tied together.

There are parts I have not explored and I am not ready to count this state as done.  Maybe in a couple more weeks when I finally leave it I will however not just yet.  There’s still the coast, a plantation or two and I may even risk visiting a city!

The Natchez Trace

For the past few days I have been meandering down the Natchez Trace from TN into MS to, eventually, Natchez.  Down here trace refers to an old road.  They seem to have started as game trails, were used by Indians and then followed by white men first on foot, then on horseback and finally by wagon.  The white men who used the Trace started at the southern end and moved north to eventually end near Nashville, Tennessee.

I have been intrigued by the Trace for years.  The name sounded strange and the idea of it going from here to there puzzled me.  Long ago I did find out why the road was used however it continued its hold on me.  Now that I’m actually following it, I wanted to try to find its original feel.
History has always appealed to me and American History from Revolution to Civil War is my particularly favorite time period.

Men from the Tennessee Valley, farmers probably though there must have been merchants too, made flatboats out of hewn and sawed timber.  They loaded those boats with wares and floated their boats down the Tennessee River, into the Mississippi and down to New Orleans where they sold both goods and lumber from their boats. Hand-sawing lumber is a two-man job and at times controlling the boat would take more than one man too so I’m guessing they traveled in  groups of 2 or 3 men.

It must have been easy to travel from New Orleans to Natchez since the Trace starts there.  From there its roughly 450 miles back to Nashville.  At first the trace was a simple footpath wide enough for a man or horse.  Later it was widened enough to allow carts or wagons.  Eventually inns, called stands, were built every 20-30 miles along the route.  Some streams are too wide to ford or the bottom isn’t suitable for fording so there were ferries too along the way.  Often there was a stand at the ferry on the north side of the stream.

I have driven on some pieces of the Trace where it is allowed.  The road is hilly and twisty as it tends to follow the tops of ridges.  Since I have stood beside streams and seen flood debris stuck over my head, I can understand staying on high ground.  And I’ve walked on bits of the old road too, where the opportunity exists.  Still those chances missed something.  Though the current roads may have followed the old ones, they are well maintained and drained.  I’ve walked enough trails to know the road must have been rutted and rocky.

There is a piece of the old trace in my campground.  Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was murdered here outside the local stand so of course there would have to be some remnant of the road.  There is also a trail from the campground that more or less encircles the park.  It crosses the Trace in a couple of places so it seemed like an interesting afternoon walk.  It would all be uphill because all the trails are, uphill, repeatedly uphill and twice as much uphill for any down hill.

Down hill I went, down to the Little Swan River and a ford where the old Trace crossed the river on its shale bottom and crawled up the hill on the other side through a wash that was so eroded it was difficult to guess a road had once used the same route.  OK! The footpath continued.  It was not your ordinary park-service groomed trail, this one was truly a footpath, at times as slanted as the hillside.  This path, I could imagine, may have been a game trail at first.  A deer print or two added to the illusion.  There were several small streams to ford and I could see where other hikers and moved up or down the stream, depending on its flow to find the driest and easiest place to cross.  A real Trace would have that, I think.

Further on, I came to the actual Trace, not a mowed, ‘look, here’s the Trace’ site but the real rutted, eroded track leading me uphill from the stream.  In places it was gullied where water had cut into it running downhill.  In places sections of fallen trees were cut out just as it would have been when it was used to return home.  As I neared the top of the hill, I could see where two and three tracks had been cut as each became too watermarked to use.  The last track, the one I was using lay mostly on rock so the erosion didn’t effect it as much.  However there are still has mud holes, a bane of the original road, since the park service occasionally uses it. This hike is what I was looking for, a feel of the trace in its original form.

I think those farmers who floated there crops south would have done it in late September or early October.  The trip would have been around 600 miles.  Mostly, they would have let the current take them, maybe moving 2-3 miles an hour, and they probably tied up at night unless there was a good moon.  That trip could have taken them around two months.  The trip back, along the Trace would have taken 2-3 weeks.

I’m here in March and there are no leaves on the trees.  Nights are around freezing and days are 40-60, it often rains and there is less than 12 hours of daylight.  These conditions aren’t exactly the same as late fall or early winter however they are close.  I’ve been through some nasty rainstorms and have felt thankful for a sound roof or dry clothing.  The men who used this Trace may have had neither.

Even in my current vigorous state, I walk a sedate 1 mile an hour.  In my farming days I could walk 3 miles an hour while carrying a pack.  However, I never walked 20-30 miles a day, day after day, for two or three weeks.  And the Tennessee part is all up hill.

Walking Because I Can

Last week I was at Big South Fork National Recreation Area.  It lies in both Kentucky and Tennessee however I was camping on the Tennessee side since it’s the only campground that is open.

And I’ve been doing lots of hiking since that’s what the parks down here offer.  In between regular daylong downpours I’ve walked to stone arches, waterfalls, stone houses and an old railroad bridge.  In most cases, the journey has made the hike worthwhile.  Oh, the sights themselves have been impressive though hard to photograph.  How does one show that a stone arch high enough to have full-grown trees under it in not very small with baby trees?

Other sights are equally hard to capture.  There is a giant-leafed magnolia that has leaves 2ft long.  Dried, they are white on one side and brown on the other.  When I come across an area where they grow, it looks as though someone has littered a box of kleenix sheet by sheet with several catching in trees.  Then the entire mess has been rained on a few times.  We’ve all seen kleenix like that; it looks a mess and so does a hillside littered with those leaves.  It’s eye-catching however not photo-worthy.

Eight-ten years ago some pine borer worked its way through the mountains so entire stands of while pine are dead.  Most are still standing.  Entire hillsides are covered with gray bones of 50ft trees that case a rather eerie gray light.  At the same time new white pine are growing in the under-story.  For the most part they are 3-8ft tall.  White pine have long needles growing at the end of their branches.  They are in constant motion so under the gray light is frothy green movement that looks rather surreal.

More impressive are the rock walls that suddenly appear along a trail.  The sides are usually weathered into curly ridges and pocked with holes as softer material weathers faster than the harder stuff.  In some places, entire sheets of rock have broken away leaving long shallow caves that are called stone houses.  The trails running along those faces typically have a drip line running down them.  Sometimes the rock face is still dripping so one weaves in and out of periodic droplets.  If there is moisture there is also lots of magnolias, moss and rotting downed trees.  The trees give off a pleasant earthy smell.  If there is sunlight, it makes the tops of the magnolia turn golden-green.  The combination of smells, color and dripping water create an impression of rainforest rather than hilly Tennessee.

If I go hiking the day after a heavy rain, and they have all been in the 2-3 inch range, there is still water everywhere.  It runs through some campsites, it becomes trickles that join together and form small streams often down the path I’m walking.  Or it leaps down hillsides in rock-strewn channels forming small waterfalls on its way.  Easy fords over those channels become challenging as previously dry stepping-stones turn into slimy water-covered foot traps.  The water force is so strong that it can undermine those stones causing them to shift when they are used.

The Big South Fork rises dramatically from those rains and becomes a roiling mass of yellowish mud-laden water.  Part of one trail wound along the river for a ways and I could see water-trapped leaves in branches higher than my head.  The trail I was on had clearly been covered with water; mine were almost the first footprints.  In a few softer places I could see a bobcat had preceded me.

There are also bear, wild boar, deer, raccoons and tree-climbing fox that have retractable claws.  I probably will not see any of them.   Next update will be from the Natchez Trace as I work my way south of Nashville and deep into Mississippi.

The Cumberland Gap

I beheld the Gap and the surrounding land and it was good, very good; until I talked to an inhabitant and learned the Gap used to be US-25.  I guess that’s not so strange considering it  started out as a game and then Indian trail.  Indians sold it to a man who hired Daniel Boone to blaze a trail through the Gap into the area that is now Kentucky.  Foot traffic became so heavy some businessmen built a toll road wide enough for two wagons to pass.  The slope from toll-road to US-road is small.

Looking into Kentucky from the Gap on the Wilderness Road

Looking into Tennessee at Tri-State Peak

The Gap is .3 miles from remains of an iron furnace.  How could anyone pass up the chance to stand at the very Gap that led to, ultimately, my state becoming settled?  I made it to the Gap. A half-mile total isn’t much even if it’s the first real walking I’ve done in a couple of months.  

Unfortunately the Tri-State Peak Trail starts at the Gap.  Heck, I’d been to Four-Corners so this is seems like a should-see location.  Peak is a key word here, along with no idea how far; this is a  bad combination.  And the steeper parts of the trail just happened to be covered with a thin layer of snow that had become soft and greasy as the day warmed.  Way too many steps later I arrived at a nice litter gazebo, sheltering the joining of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.  In spite of aching muscles I am glad I made the trip.  

A snack and a couple of stops later I returned to Scout thinking about my afternoon.  I sleep in Virginia at the Cumberland Gap Campground, I bought my beer in the town of Cumberland Gap, Tennessee.  Since there are no groceries in that town, I drove into Middlesboro, Kentucky to buy food.  No wonder I’ve been confused over which state I’ve been in.

If state confusion wasn’t enough, the people I’ve talked to are lots like the folks I talked to in New Mexico; nearly all the ones I’ve met have started out someplace else.  The Cumberland Gap shopkeeper did grow up in Kentucky so she may not count even though she lived in Florida for a dozen years. She and her family returned to the area so their kids could get a better education than they could in Florida where most of the other kids don’t even know English.  Education can be obtuse; the mother works in a half-full store called a market that only sells beer, pop and candy.

The Long Drive

What with tending to this and that, I did not leave on another jaunt until Feb. 8.  As youngson (who helped me get Scout out of the alley and onto the road) said, “there were a few snowballs”, however they all worked out and I headed off into the snowy yonder.

Originally, I was heading south until I hit 50/20 kinds of temperatures.  Well, weather being what it is, I decided 4foot drifts in Missouri was off-putting so I rapidly revised direction.  It looked like, if I stayed on schedule, I could miss all kinds of weather fronts by heading through Iowa, across Illinois and Indiana and then down Kentucky to a place called Cumberland Gap Historic Park on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. 

Schedule was fouled before I left the cities. Snowballs, snowballs, snowballs; all part of the adventure.  Enough to say I am now much wiser on how new trailer brakes work and what I need to heed in the future.  Roads were clear, wind was minor and I headed south into the depths of Iowa with Davenport as my evening goal.  I gave up about 100 miles short and spent a short night in a roadside rest stop.  It was more like a holding pen for trucks however the rumble of engines could be mellowed into very loud cat purring.  Since a sign said no overnight stays of any kind, I slept in the back seat of the car.  My winter-weight down sleeping bag kept me toasty warm and I slept until cramping legs and a crabby bladder roused me.

Although it was only 4am, I was awake and the road was empty.  Second night’s stop was Indianapolis so I hit the road.  Davenport breezed by however I did note that both motels and gas seemed to be very reasonable.  Illinois swept by and I reached Indianapolis by early afternoon.  Last I checked, a weather front was to sweep up from Missouri and hit the area with rain and snow about suppertime.  It made sense to keep going.  If I could drive pass the front, so much the better.  On I went; clipped a corner of Ohio near Cincinnati and turned south into Kentucky. 

The cloud cover darkened a bit and I saw a flake or two of snow as I approached Lexington just before rush hour.  Hah, I had been smart to keep going.  Now I was on the southern edge of the front and the rest of my drive would be a piece of cake.  Not!  First, I had crossed a time zone and it was rush hour.  Second, the front was sweeping through Kentucky, not Indiana.  Local traffic reports mentioned several accidents and I saw many more that did not involve tow trucks.  While I continued to move south, at 2 miles an hour, I put in a call to the girl-child.  Look up the weather for southern Kentucky I asked.  Back came reports of continued snow and maybe rain, while the radio told me county after county was shutting down.  Snowplows went by spreading salt and scraping not much off the roadway.  Cars turned off the freeway and speed picked up.  More cars left and then the semis were gone.  Eventually me and an occasional vehicle were all that was moving south while a steady stream of semis continued to roll north.

My exit came and I crept down a snow-covered ramp onto a snowier US highway.  The highway ducks under the interstate and then goes by a fair-sized town.  Two stoplights and two hills later I called it quits.  There was ice under an inch or so of fresh snow and I had no traction.  A well-lit grocery-gas-strip mall was a short slid away. An ample employee parking area provided me with parking and I curled into my sleeping bag for another night.  This time I tried the front seat and immediately fell asleep even though it was only 9ish.  A few hours later strange protrusions woke me and I crawled into the back seat for the rest of the night.

Daylight and sanding trucks gave a new view to the world.  I was only an hour or two from my destination so we started on our last leg of the long drive.  Everywhere is hilly, at least here.  I saw houses perched above the road and others set well below it.  If other drivers have traction trouble as I did, and there was no plowing of off-roads, I began to understand why entire counties shut down.  Road cuts look to be through shale or some other rock that lays in clay-color bands.  All the cuts had water coming out of the rock.  On the north faces they were frozen into dozens of mini-waterfalls.  Everywhere I looked was like a christmas card; evergreens had just enough snow, the ground was covered though not oppressed with white stuff, houses were nestled in trees with trails of smoke coming out of their chimneys and there were horses behind log fences.

I turned onto the campground road of bumpy ice.  Fortunately the uneven surface gave me enough traction to make it up and down a couple of smallish hills and into the camping ground.  In here, the road looked clear, a little snow but not slippery to walk.  I confidently started down the one open loop looking for a level spot that would be close to the toilet.  There was enough snow that I couldn’t see the edges of the trailer pad at several sites so I kept going to the end of the loop and started back.  Unfortunately, the way back is slightly down and then up hill.  I tried 2 spots before I found one I could actually back into without sliding off. 

Two hours later most of the snow is gone and I could move to practically any campsite.  However, Scout is resting well and gradually warming up.  I’ve had a hot breakfast, poked my head into the spacious heated shower room, tried the toilets and filled my water jugs.  We aren’t going any place for awhile.

Cumberland Gap campsite

Playing in the Northland

Bad news was Minnesota had more snow during December than it had for the last 40 years.  Good news is I like snow.  Yup, I shovel it, watch it fall and play in it.

Over Christmas break, when I visited my daughter and her family, we went cross-country skiing.  It’s been years since I’ve gone and the kids never had.  There was the usual getting skis and kids locked together, lost mittens and debates about trails.  Ski bindings have changed since the last time I went out and I too needed some help figuring out to fasten ski and shoe together.  Fortunately it was warm enough no one became too cold waiting, or working without mittens.  The kids picked up how to ski really fast.  It was so much fun some of us went out again the next day.

It was so much fun, I visited my storage locker to dig out my snow shoes.  There is no similarity between snow shoeing and cross-country skiing, except the snow of course.  Still, I have one and not the other so the remainder of my time in Minnesota will include regular bouts of snow stomping.  Woo-hoo winter!