On Selling Your Soul to the Devil

From the blue grass of Kentucky, we hit the road west and south towards Clarksdale, MS, home of the legendary "Crossroads," where guitar-picker Robert Johnson reputedly sold his soul to the Devil in return for amping up his guitar-picking skills. Though Robert Johnson doesn't still stand there with his guitar and can of Budweiser, Abe's Barbeque stands as a magnetic beacon to hungry travelers craving the spicy tang of Mississippi sauce.

A random Shell fueling station along I-40 W witnessed the momentous transition from hiking boots to flip flops (for most of us--Annie's still holding out). By the time we reached Abe's, it was positively balmy.

As soon as we crossed into MS from TN, the sheer flatness of the landscape struck us immediately. Compared to the gentle hills of central Kentucky and the 9% grade of Rt-50 in West Virginia, the empty air where land should have been cradling the road seemed a little spooky. Tara radioed from the other car (yes, we have walkies. and two cars) to explain that we were now in the flood plain of the awesome Mississippi River, and that the "hill" to our let was in fact the natural levee created by the river's historically unfettered flow. Now, however, the US Army Corps of Engineers has straightened the Big Muddy's banks, dammed its waters, and "controlled" its natural flood habits so that the plain no longer receives its nutritious alluvial deposits.

Fields lined both sides of the road, despite the lack of natural fertilizer. Tara again radioed from the other car:

Tara: Name that crop!

Rachel (joking): Sorghum!

Tara: No, cotton!

Rachel, Annie, and Julia: Holy crap!

Thus we northerners set our eyes on our first fields of cotton. The winter sun beat down through our windshield, making us uncomfortably warm. We all agreed that we couldn't imagine how terrible it would be to have to work those fields in the dead heat of summer.

We closed in on the Crossroads to the soundtrack of rumbling stomachs. I'm sure that if any of us had been offered a delicious barbeque sandwich in return for our everlasting souls, it might have been a tough decision for some of us. Luckily, we weren't forced to make the choice, and we rolled into Abe's in prime condition to enjoy one of this trip's simple pleasures: fantastic, cheap, locally-specific food. As we ate, four men at the table behind us talked crops, winter wheat harvests, and water pumping, all while scribbling notes on yellow legal pads and chomping numbers with handheld calculators. A high-powered business meeting in Clarksdale, it seemed.

Bellies contentedly full, we left Abe's and headed to our fourth and final state of the day, Arkansas. We crossed over the Mississippi, looped around to the north, and camped in Lake Chicot State Park, near Lake Village, AR. Lake Chicot is an oxbow lake, and we thoroughly enjoyed that fact (I don't know how, exactly, but we did). Our arrival was timed perfectly to not only coincide with pitch darkness, but also so that we would miss the Visitor's Center's hours of operation by a full 2 hours. We drove around for a bit, decided to wing it, and ultimately pulled into a random campsite and called it home for the night. Setting up camp turned out to be fairly easy, and we curled up in Tara's giant 8 person tent to the sound of each other's scribbling pens and the wind rustling our tent flaps.