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!

Time for the Holidays

I am back in Minnesota flagrantly sponging off of friends and family for the month of December.  Current plans are to hit the road again in January.  Anyone reading this, take care of yourself.