WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5
Magee, Mississippi to Wentzville, Missouri
(appx. 650 miles)
This was a fun, but also endless day. I woke up quite early and went to the Dairy Queen next door. More deja vu; I stopped here several times when I'd go to Jackson in grad school. Magee is about the only thing between the two cities, and it's definitely the only place that has anywhere to eat. This morning I had a ham and egg biscuit, which was dry and unsatisfying, togehter with cold watery coffee. Nice way to start the morning, eh?
... We took I-20 west through Jackson and onward to Vicksburg. A couple of the kids commented on the beautiful forest. It is really pretty around Vicksburg--mostly old oak trees--and it's probably just as good that we drove through the paper mill pines futher south in total darkness.
Our first stop in Vicksburg was at a brand new McDonalds on the Clay Street strip. A few of the kids did a double-take when we walked in and were the only white people in the place. Vicksburg is a virtually all-black city; McDonalds was no different than anywhere else in town. ...
* * * * *
[We then saw] the national park where they honor the famous Civil War batle that took place here. We saw the museum and then drove around the area. Some of the kids really seemed fascinated by the park, while others were bored by it. I've had both reactions myself on various occasions. Today was not one of the more exciting occasions. Mostly I was anxious to get on my way again, and before long we did.
We crossed the Mississippi at Vicksburg and ... drove northward. On our way we ... saw a lot of crop dusting. That's something you almost never see in the Midwest, but it's still very common in Dixie (probably because of looser environmental regulations). Cotton especially is very dependent on chemicals in modern times, and the airplanes wee out spraying the coton fields as we drove along. ...
Before long we stopped at the town of Transylvania. For a couple of the kids this place (which is nothing more than a wide spot in the road with a stupid name) was the one thing they really wanted to see in the South. We stopped at the convenience store, while several of the kids bought souvenirs. I had already gotten my Dracula mug a few years ago, so I just bought a bottle of pop. ...
* * * * *
Not far north of Transylvania we came to Lake Providence. Time magazine did a feature on Lake Providence about a year ago, hailing it as the poorest town in America. ... They based that on the fact that East Carroll Parish, of which Lake Providence is the parish center ... had the lowest per-capita income and the highest welfare rate in the nation. More than two-thirds of the families here are on public assistance. It's easy to tell there's not a lot of money in Lake Providence. It's a relatively large Southern county seat, but there's no Wal-Mart. In fact, there's not even a Family Dollar. What businesses there are look run-down, as do most of the houses. The only new construction in town was a lovely new bank building, which looked quite out of place amid its surroundings. What's strange is that, as poor as Lake Providence is, just north of town a number of beautiful homes line the lake for which the town was named. The vast majority of people are dirt poor, but obviously somebody here is making money.
* * * * *
We drove back across the Mississippi, back into the state whose namesake is that river. We crossed at the city of Greenville, the chief market town for the Delta region. Greenville looks like a place trapped in the '50s or '60s. The main part of town has enormous shade trees towering over brick-paved side streets. Then there's the shopping strip on the edge of town, where it looks like nothing has changed in thirty years. In most cities the discount stores and fast food places go through a face lift periodically to keep them looking fresh. Not so in Greenville. They still had a metal-front K-Mart with that bright red "K" and garish turquoise "mart", and they had a Burger King with a glass front and a severely slanting roof in that space age style that looked like it was going to take off.
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Just east of Greenville we turned north onto US 61, that same highway that Bob Dylan "revisited" when he brought the blues to pop music. Highway 61 is the main road through "the Delta", which is both the poorest and the most famous region in Mississippi. I was especially conscious of the Delta on this trip, because of a documentary series I had recently seen on the Discovery Channel. The Promised Land traced the "great migration" of black people from the rural South to the urban North. Between 1945 and 1965, five million blacks came northward, almost a million and a half from Mississippi alone. By far the largest number ended up in Chicago (which I was also to be visiting this summer), but they also settled in every major Midwestern city, as well as in smaller places like Peoria, Racine, and Waterloo. (I found out when I was at UNI that almost a fourth of the people in Waterloo--i.e., the blacks--trace their ancestry directly to Bolivar County, Mississippi.)
The Promised Land explained how the invention of the cotton picker created a need for the great migration, because blacks were no longer needed to work in the fields. At the same time that this vast unemployment occurred in Dixie, the industrial North was booming, and northern companies recruited blacks to come north. Once there they faced in many cases worse segregation and discrimination than they had encountered in the South. Those who overcame the obstacles became the successful black suburbanites we see throughout the Midwest today. Those who didn't spiraled down the economic ladder as the factories that had lured them northward left the Midwest for cheaper labor in the South or overseas. They are today's inner city underclass.
After watching The Promised Land I also re-watched Eyes on the Prize, the acclaimed public television documentary of the Civil Rights movement, which I taped when it was originally on. Many of the great Civil Rights leaders came from the Delta. Probably the most famous was Fannie Lou Hamer, who lived her entire life in Sunflower County, Mississippi. She was the co-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which in 1964 went to the National Democratic Convention in ATlantic City and challenged the state party, which was then all-white. Her speech to the convention ... is probably second only to "I have a dream" as the most-quoted civil rights speech. ("Is this America where our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as free human beings?")
The TV documentaries got me in the mood for the Delta, which really is a fascinating place. I've described it in other write-ups of the South. Most of the towns have limited businesses, together with either run-down shack-like houses or cheaply built subsidized apartments. There are some surprises, though. We stopped for lunch in Cleveland, a town that on the map doesn' stand out from any other county seat. As I mentioned with Lake Providence, even most county seats around here don't have a lot of business. Cleveland, though, had every kind of fast food you could want ..., as well as a brand new shopping center.
We parked at Wendy's, and when we got out it was HOT. A bank thermometer read 96 degrees, and the forecast was for over 100. The freshly asphalted parking lot at Wendy's absorbed all that heat and more, and we all just fried as we got out of the suburbans. ...
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Eventually we made our way north to Tunica. If you read the travelogue from the first trip I made to the South, you'll hear me describe Tunica as the most forlorn of places. That was before Tunica was Las Vegas East. Today all the big Nevada casinos have branches in Tunica. They must be catering to nearby Memphis; there can't be enough local people to make a go of it, and it's surely not someplace tourists would go out of their way to visit. Gambling has made Tunica look prosperous, at least on the surface. They're four-laning the highway through here, and there are new convenience stores, restaurants, and mini-malls at every major intersection. Just off the road you see the old town, though, and it doesn't look a whole lot different than it ever did. It made me wonder just how much of the gambling income is trickling down to the people who really need it.
... Muriel wanted to see Graceland--not to see it in the sense of the $20 tour, but seeing it in the sense of snapping a picture from the parking lot. We drove over to Elvis Presley Boulevard and headed southward toward Graceland. I turned into the parking lot, only to discover that they were no charging for parking. Neither Muriel nor I felt like paying to park, so we turned out of the parking lot. Unfortunately, we turned in opposite directions, and before long we had lost each other in traffic. ... Before long Muriel contacted me on the CB, and we managed to meet at a convenience store that was directly across the street from Graceland. ... A few in the group snapped photos, and before long we were on our way again.
Traffic was surprisingly light in Memphis, even though we hit the city right at evening rush hour. We drove north through Arkansas ..., crossed into Missouri, drove past the same Super 8 we had stayed at in Marston before, and then drove on to Sikeston, Missouri.
We stopped for supper at a Taco Bell in Sikeston. [One of the girls] called home, and I was amused to overhear part of her conversation. Her parents asked her where she was calling from. She had no clue, as this looked no different from any other exit strip in the country. Her response: Taco Bell.
It quickly got dark as we drove north from Sikeston. I-55 winds through beautiful countryside in Missouri, but we didn't see much of it. What we did see was a lot of traffic and then -- CONSTRUCTION! Just south of St. Louis they were doing repairs on the interstate. It's probably a good thing that they do their construction at night, so it doesn't goof up traffic during the daytime. It's nasty to drive through at night, though. They have flood lights on the work areas that are absolutely blinding. I pitied the poor people who live nearby. Once we passed the construction it started raining. Between the rain and the lights from the oncoming cars, I couldn't see at all where I was on the road. Somehow I negotiated I-55, and then I-64, and then U.S. 61, and finally I-70, until we eventually came to the suburb of Wentzville, in the extreme northwest corner of metropolitan St. Louis.
We checked into an enormous Super 8 in Wentzville and dashed through the rain to get to our rooms. Some of the kids watched a movie, but I quickly fell asleep--the end of an extremely long day.
THURSDAY, JUNE 6
Wentzville, Missouri to Algona, Iowa
(appx. 525 miles)
Again this morning I woke up quite early; it seems I'm always up early when I travel. I got up quietly and left the room. I was surprised to see the hallway filled with furniture from other rooms--TVs, mattresses, dressers, and the like. I knew it had been raining heavily all night, and I wondered if perhaps they were having troubles with leaks. I stayed at another motel in Missouri once that had that problem. It turned out ... they were actually ... re-carpeting the rooms. It seems strange to do that overnight, but then I guess that's why I didn't major in hotel-motel management.
* * * * *
When I got back to the motel, I noticed a poor dog in the parking lot. The motel did not allow pets, so the family who was travelling with this dog just tied him to their pick-up truck. It was pouring all night, and when I got there the dog was cowering and shivvering under the truck. I would think they could have at least put him in the cab (or, better yet, left him at home), but no one asked me.
Before long the rest of the group was up. ... We hit the freeway to make our way into St. Louis. It was rush hour, but we certainly did not rush. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever driven through more of a traffic jam than we were in this morning. It's about forty miles from Wentzville to downtown St. Louis, and today it took over an hour and a half to cover that distance. ... What was surprising was that once we actually got into the city proper traffic sailed right along. ...
We cruised past downtown, sneeking a peek at the Gateway Arch and Busch Stadium, and then drove southward to the Anheuser-Busch brewery. We made it there easily, parked, and then dodged the rain across the parking lot to the visitors' center. Unfortunately their tours were delayed because of the rain. ... [So we] just visited the gift shop and went on our way.
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At some point in the distant future highway 61 will be the Missouri leg of the Avenue of the Saints. Unlike Iowa, which has over a hundred continuous miles of four-lane from south of Iowa City to north of Waterloo, Missouri has chosen to four-lane highway 61 in bits and pieces. We'd drive for a few minutes on interstate, and then it was back ... to the winding scenic two-lane. Most of the parts that were four-lane weren't really all new road. They kep the old road with its curves and hills and then built a modern road right beside it. Needless o say, it seemed as if the northbound traffic always had the older road.
* * * * *
I bought a ... newspaper in Hannibal. ... There was a special Fathers' Day insert section with the winners of a contest where they searched for fathers and sons who looked most like each other. I got a laugh reading through the captions to find what people are naming their sons these days: Chase, Jupiter, Majors, Tyrus, Bubby, Dilliard, Denzel, Whitley, Armour, Austin, Darius, Dugan, Kyleigh, Dalton, Utah, Caraban, Shaquille (for a very blond white boy), and Lucifer (in the heart of the Bible Belt, no less). ...
* * * * *
Beyond Hannibal the road was entirely two-lane. We wound our way northward toward Keokuk, stopping only briefly to maintain the tradition of buing fireworks that Father Feierfeil had started last summer. ... The woman who owned the stand we stopped at said we brought more business at one time than she had had in months.
* * * * *
Crossing into Iowa brought back the deja vu as well. Southeast Iowa really is my old stomping grounds. Whenever I return here, regardless from which direction I arrive, it looks and feels like home. Algonans find it hard to believe that there are places in Iowa where the land is more hilly than flat and as much of it is forest as farmland. I've found it equally hard to comprehend the utter flatness of north-central Iowa, where you can drive for miles without seeing a tree that isn't part of a windbreak. It's a different world down here, and I never return without being impressed by it.
* * * * *
[We drove on to Mt. Pleasant], where at the kids' request I drove quickly past the home where I used to live (which is almost totally unidentifiable today) and nearby Lincoln School. Several of the kids commented on what a nice little town it was. Perhaps they were just being polite, but Mt. P. really is a "pleasant" place (even if there is no mountain anywhere around). ... The town has grown a lot since I was here (with close to 10,000 people, it's almost half again as large as it was in 1980), but there's really not much that's different. The place has always been extremely industrial (just about the only Iowa town I know without a grain elevator), and they've been building homes and apartments continuously since before I lived here. Mt. P. never did know whether it was a city or a town (or a tourist trap, for that matter) and it's always had the best and worst of both lifestyles. On the plus side there's a sall town friendliness ..., combined with far more cultural opportunities than you find in a place like Algona. On the minus side there's the secret shame of Iowa's highest drop-out rate (nearly 20%) and crime that would make most Algonans shutter.
* * * * *
... We drove west from Mt. Pleasant to Fairfield and then on to Ottumwa. ... Then we went north to Oskaloosa and Pella, which we skirted on a lovely new by-pass, ... and headed on to Des Moines.
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From Des Moines we headed up I-35 to U.S. 20. We went past Webster City, then north on highway 17 to Eagle Grove and eventually Wesley. From there it was only a short drive back to Garrigan and home. We had a send-off this year, so we didn't have a welcome home celebration. That was just as well, considering how we did. The kids unloaded their stuff, I double checked to make sure the suburbans were clean, and the trip was finally over.
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