Monday, 23 March 2020
Last night as I was taking the dogs on their last walk for the day, several boys about 10 years old stopped their bicycles and asked to pat them. I agreed, but I've been wondering since if that's something I should do in these weird times. People often ask to pat the dogs, who certainly enjoy it, but I've worried that these people could infect my puppies. Online information about the coronavirus says there's only been one case in the whole world so far of a dog that has reportedly gotten the virus. Scientists know so little about it yet that they can't say for sure, but they don't think dogs can get it and really don't think a dog who's carrying it could infect its owner. Such weird questions we're having to ask these days. I want to keep my babies (and me) safe but don't want to deprive them of affection they enjoy.
I had a delayed start to today's drive. When I stop at a campground and open the drawers in the kitchen, I don't close them again fully until I'm ready to drive away - trying to save wear and tear on those latches that seem to break easily. Today when I'd done everything else to get ready for the drive, I closed the drawers and found another latch had been broken. For a change, it was on a different drawer from the one that's always broken before, which was the only bright spot (if it's a bright spot). I put the few pots and pans I've been using in that drawer because it's the deepest and heaviest and most out of the way. All of which made replacing the latch more difficult, but I've gotten it down to a routine.
Fortunately, I had a spare latch so all I had to do was empty the drawer, turn it upside down, replace half the latch, replace the other half in the cabinet frame, turn the drawer rightside up and replace it in the frame, and reload the contents. It was just harder because the drawer was so heavy and the pans were bulky, and I'd never cleaned around it because how many of us do pull out all our drawers and clean behind them. Well, it's all clean now. I'll need to stop at an RV place somewhere and get another couple of spare latches.
So we started out a half hour later than I'd hoped, but at least we got going.
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| today's route |
The road south to Marianna
The road continued with s-curves and lanes that were only 8' wide. I know that's how wide they were because I had so much trouble staying in my lane (and constantly hearing that rumble from the corrugations in the pavement at the lane edges) that I looked in my rearview mirror. And I saw that my rear tires on both sides were just inches away from the edges of the lane. My RV's 8' wide, so I exaggerated - the lanes were actually 8½' wide. It made driving very uncomfortable to be constantly failing to stay in the lane and dealing with that constant rumble from the road.
Still on the Trail of Tears today.
I saw a lot of Blue Jays and Cardinals flying around the road - along the sides and across the road in front of us. Sure are pretty.
Not much traffic this morning, which I found surprising since it's a Monday. Maybe people are finally starting to stay at home more.
Just past Forrest City, pop. 15,371, "Jewel of the Delta," I passed a very large federal correctional facility. I'm assuming the jobs there are part of the reason Forrest City has such a large population.
I crossed the L'Anguille River twice today on 2 different highways. According to Wikipedia, that name means "the eel" and is pronounced "lan-GWEEL," which surprises me because that's how I was pronouncing it. Although it also says the local pronunciation is "LANE-GEE," and I can't quite figure out how the one comes from the other.
Just after the first river crossing, I came to the town of Felton, which I know only because a sign said so. I saw one house there.
I came to the town of Marianna, pop. 4,115 (though that may have dropped by nearly 600 in the last 10 years). Instead of bypassing it, as Google wanted me to do, I drove into town looking for a BBQ place I'd heard was one of the best and worth the drive. Jones Bar-B-Q Diner has gotten national kudos for its pulled pork and since I was in the neighborhood ... . Except I couldn't find it. Almost as soon as I tried to follow Google's reluctant directions, I discovered that the roads didn't do anything that Google said they would and they weren't named what they were supposed to be named. Actually, some of them may have had the right names but there were no street signs to tell me so. I ended up getting lost down a road so narrow I could barely turn around when I realized it wasn't getting me where I thought I should go. I retraced my tracks and decided to just give up. Even for good barbeque, there's a limit.
North on the Great River Road
Marianna's also where the Crowley's Ridge Parkway and the Great River Road meet, so off north I went. In Arkansas, as in many other states, no one road is considered the Great River Road. Instead, a lot of separate roads are strung together to create what should actually be called the Great River Route. When I joined it, I was on US Route 79.
Many of the rivers I crossed were wide and full - even flooded. St. Francis Floodway, St. Francis River, Cow Bayou, Cow Bayou Relief. I saw lots of ponds, though for all I know they were flooded crop fields. I saw lots of ducks swimming on various ponds and flooded drainage ditches.
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| Northern Shoveler |
I passed fields that I know were cotton fields because last year's plants were still standing - and they were flooded. Lots of huge emerald green fields, apparently planted with some crop that was already growing. Really pretty.
I finally started wondering if cotton's a perennial, so I looked it up and learned, to my surprise, that it is. But it's grown as an annual in most places to help control diseases. Apparently in the tropics cotton plants can grow quite tall - 6' to 12' if grown as a perennial, 4' to 5' if it's treated as an annual, which is the way I'm used to seeing them.
I passed a sign saying if I turned left, I'd come to Greasy Corner.
I'm guessing at this point I'm in Mississippi Delta country - the land is extremely flat. So different from the center and west parts of Arkansas, which really aren't that many miles from here.
I've seen some Kingfishers at these ponds, but oddly, I haven't seen one egret or heron all morning.
I stopped for gasoline as I was coming into West Memphis and had an interesting conversation with the owner. He was wearing a face mask and gloves, which seemed reasonable to me, but I asked him if he'd been getting a hard time from anybody, this being Trump country and all. He said mostly people were okay but a few told him he was overreacting, that the virus was no worse than the flu, etc. He told me he had relatives all over the world, including China and Italy and France, so he'd been hearing about this virus from its beginning. His relatives had told him to take it seriously, and that's what he's been doing, and teaching his kids to do. He said they'd had to drive down to Houston a few weeks earlier to get his son's passport renewed at the French Embassy there. His kids heeded his instructions to touch nothing, but when he himself opened doors (for instance) without using his hands, people asked about it. Most had never heard anything about the coronavirus, let alone the needed precautions. The Texas governor has been following the president's initial line of "nothing to see here, folks" and has done almost nothing to prepare the state for trouble, despite Trump's changing message in the last week or so.
While I deplored the level of almost willful ignorance many people seem to be choosing, what I was most struck by was the idea of having relatives living in so many different parts of the world, and having a young son who needs to renew his passport at the French Embassy. This is an international world we live in, and absolutely nothing stops at any borders any more. There are no moats left in the world, and no drawbridges we can pull up to protect ourselves. In the past, I've sympathized with the isolationist tendencies of many in the US, but I don't have to embrace 21st century technology to realize times have made that idea obsolete.
As an endearing side note, though, I saw several House Sparrow nests being built in the Citgo signs at the gas station. In the C and G of one sign and the O of another. Very sweet.
West Memphis is home to Arkansas State University's Mid-South Campus. They seem to have a sizeable campus - now mostly deserted - so we stopped for a while to walk around and have lunch.
I never saw a sign saying I was in West Memphis (pop. 26,000+), but there were lots of indications I was. Memphis, TN, was just across a bridge or two over the Mississippi River. The downtown buildings were easily visible in the fairly near distance.
The West Memphis High School building was quite large. I couldn't find a photo of it online, or even any information about it, but they might have a Facebook page which would have that sort of stuff on it.
Still going through West Memphis, I turned north on State Route 77 and came to the town of Marion, pop. 12,345. I saw a sign for the Sultana Disaster Musuem. I thought I'd misread it until I saw a second sign that said the same thing. I'd never heard of the Sultana Disaster and looked it up, and it sounds like a museum worth visiting sometime. Stories of the "Greatest Maritime Disaster in US History," per a Congressional Resolution, and the bribes and corruption that contributed to it, and the deaths of released prisoners from the notorious Civil War prison at Andersonville - it all sounds pretty interesting.
I'd stopped at that gas station back in West Memphis because, even though he was charging $1.94/gallon which I knew was more than some places charged, it was still the cheapest I'd seen today. Not far after that, I passed 15 more stations (at least) that charged $1.79/gallon. When you're buying 30 or 40 gallons like I am, that can add up to enough money to pay for an extra couple of gallons. Oh, well.
I passed through many small towns today - Soudan, Brickeys, Hughes (pop. 1,441), Sunset (pop. 198), Jericho (pop. 119), Clarksdale (pop. 371) - and they all look tired and like life and the highways have passed them by. I'm guessing most of them are farming communities because I see little in the way of industry around here, except in the bigger places like Marion and West Memphis.
The land is incredibly flat around here, and I know I have a visibility of at least 1½ miles because that's the distance I covered from when I could first see the trucks on an interstate to when I reached it. It looks like most of these fields are cotton fields, though I've heard rice is a common product around here.
At Turrell, pop. 615, I turned onto US Highway 61 - still the Great River Road - and saw a sign saying it's also the Americana Music Highway.
I found I was passing some very large fancy 2-story houses that were built on slab foundations level to the ground. At that point, the ground level was the crop fields surrounding these houses - crop fields that were now pretty thoroughly flooded. I wondered why on earth none of these home owners had thought to elevate their houses even a couple of feet. If you were paying for a very fancy home, wouldn't it be reasonable to elevate it both for safety and for grandeur? Momma's little 1928 house in Austin was elevated 3 steps' worth. Why wouldn't these folks take that elementary precaution. After all, the Mississippi River's not far away. You just wonder what on earth people are thinking sometimes.
I saw hundreds of bales of cotton in the yard by Lee Wilson & Co., followed shortly by a sign saying "Welcome to Wilson, Ark." Soon after that I passed the Producers Rice Mill Inc. and then another sign saying "Wilson (pop. 903). I looked all that up and learned that Lee Wilson & Co. was a family-owned and -operated agribusiness (long before that was a word) from 1885 until it was sold in 2010. For most of that time, they relied on enormous cotton fields, and established the company town of Wilson to house the workforce. They also produced wheat, corn and alfalfa, as well as lettuce, spinach, cabbage, sweet potatoes and strawberries, as well as cottonseed oil. Diversified, you see. In recent years, they focused mainly on cotton, rice and soybeans. Remarkably resilient, though apparently too reliant on cheap labor from freed slaves and, later, Mexicans imported for the seasons. But 3 generations from its founding, the company's sale brought $150 million, so Grandpa's investment paid off.
That Rice Producers Mill, by the way, is part of a very successful farmers' cooperative that's been operating since 1945. I'm thinking maybe those brilliant green fields I've been seeing might have been rice fields?
For some distance along this road I saw cotton bales stacked all over. These were the round yellow Q-Tip lookalikes I've seen before. That's a lot of cotton, I'd think.
By this time I'd decided Route 61 was the bumpiest road in the entire state of Arkansas. I've been pretty impressed with the quality of the roads here - in general, of course. Naturally there have been exceptions. But Route 61 is downright unpleasant. Rattles the RV and me and the critters and was close to giving me a headache.
I passed the Hampson Archaeological Museum State Park. This museum preserves and presents information and artifacts from a civilization of farmers that lived in this area for 250 years, 1400 - 1650 AD. They had their own art, religion, political structure and trading network. It must have all been successful - the US still has 6 more years to go before we reach that mark.
Not far from here is the tiny town of Dyess, home of Johnny Cash and the site of the Dyess Colony. This town was a New Deal creation - an agricultural resettlement community designed to give a fresh chance for hard-hit Arkansas families. Johnny Cash's parents were among those who took advantage of that chance, moving there from western Arkansas when he was 3. I wanted to go visit but saw online that these places are closed for the virus. (An odd side note: his legal name was J. R. Cash; his mom wanted to name him John, his dad wanted him named Ray, and all they could agree on was those initials: J. R. When he enlisted in the Air Force, they didn't allow initials as a name, so he called himself John R., and then Johnny when he started recording. I'm not sure which is odder - his parents or the US military insisting he change his name.)
Today I've been seeing quite a few horses but no cows at all.
By the time I got to Osceola (pop. 7,757) I decided I'd had enough Great River Road for this state. I never did get to see the river along here and the road wasn't going to get any closer for the rest of the way to Missouri. But I'd have still stuck with it if it had been even ordinarily smooth. The lousy road surface we'd started with had kept up all these miles and I'd had it. Instead, I picked out a shortcut on county roads to get me past Blytheville and closer to Jonesboro. Both the AAA and the official state maps told me the plan would work.
Unfortunately, the markers along the road didn't agree. Not one of the alternate roads I'd identified showed up on directional signs, and I ended up a long way out of my way heading back south toward Turrell.
Even though I was heading a ways inland from the river, I was still seeing flooded fields and churches insisting on holding group Sunday services. Wonder if there's a relation between the two.
I came to Mississippi County and for a few befuddled minutes I thought I might have somehow strayed into the state of Mississippi. I really did get jounced around a lot on Rt. 61.
I passed what was obviously a large orchard, though I didn't recognize the bare trees and saw no blooms or even buds on them. "Walnuts" is part of quite a few place names in this part of the state, so maybe it's a walnut grove?
I passed the St. Francis Sunken Lands WMA (Wildlife Management Area) and figured the name must have a story behind it. Turns out it does. This area of land became permanently submerged and became a swamp during the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812. There's a fault line running from this part of Arkansas up through Missouri's Bootheel, and it became active over a 3-month period that winter. It remains the most powerful earthquake (series) ever to hit the US east of the Rockies.
The effects were felt for about 5 times the distance as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake produced (by way of comparison). When I was in northwestern Tennessee, I stayed at Reelfoot Lake State Park which was created by this same series of earthquakes. There I heard stories of eyewitnesses saying they saw the Mississippi River running backwards from the shockwaves.
Back then, the damage was fairly minimal because this area was so rural, but times have changed - I saw fairly recent estimates by scientists that there's a 25% - 40% chance of a recurrence within the next 50 years (well, 35 years now) which could cause massive damage to the surrounding 7 states.
I finally made it up to State Route 18 at Black Oak (pop. 262) and stopped for a brief break at the empty Church of Christ. They were using slightly more sense than some churches, according to the sign on their door: "To slow the progress of the current sickness the Elders have decided to postpone Sunday evening and Wednesday evening services until April." Since they don't mention Sunday morning services, I assume they'll go on as usual, which is why I said their sense was only slightly better than some.
On the other hand, they have some pretty hyacinths in the tiny flower bed in front, the first I've seen this year.
More small towns and flooded fields and back to Jonesboro, where I'd stopped yesterday for errands. I went on different roads this time and saw plants for Butterball, Unilever, Ryder, Stouffer's, Hytrol (conveyor belts, etc.), and ABB. I looked up this last one and am still not quite sure what they do; their website says they're "pioneering e-mobility ... electrifying transportation, automating industries" and such like. Which tells me next to nothing. But Jonesboro is one of their many locations.
I heard on the radio that the Arkansas governor is calling a special session of the Legislature because of a recently projected reduction of state income of $353,000,000. Arkansas, I learned, has a balanced budget requirement (which I think is a mistake in governments for just this reason - disasters that the government absolutely must respond to without regard for the money involved), so this level of shortfall had to be addressed quickly, he said.
At the same time, state health officials said they were now seeing community transmission of the coronavirus in Little Rock for the first time, and they expected that would soon show in the rest of the state. Which means to me it's going to get much worse before it gets better.
I saw a sign saying I could turn to go to Goobertown, which is apparently a real - though unincorporated - town.
I got to tonight's campground and saw a Honda Odyssey parked near the office that had a bumper sticker saying, "Honk if a kid falls out."
Long day. Lots of driving.
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