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.