2005/04 Deep South trip - Jeff Busby |
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Saturday April 9th
When we awoke we couldn’t even see the lake, as it was socked in by fog, but that cleared by mid-
morning, and we set off in the sunny mid-sixties. The parkway passes by the town of Tupelo, birthplace of Elvis. The Trace was a lot busier near town on a sunny Saturday morning, but most of the traffic didn’t seem to be interested in walking around nature trails and burial mounds, and we pottered our way along slowly in pretty scenery. As we progressed south, the trees carried more leaves, and the redbuds’ flowers were about done, but the dogwoods were at their best. We even found a few spots where wisteria had established itself in gigantic stands, a Chinese vine in the Mississippi valley.
There were a few interesting historical points like the site of an old Chickasaw village, but plenty in the “boredom” category. As some of these were of the “Hernando de Soto may have passed near here” category, I thought that the historians could have been a bit more inventive. The Trace passes near the Yazoo and Tallahatchie rivers, so how about an “Up the Yazoo” picnic spot, celebrating the birthplace of that American expression. It’s also famous as one of the places where General Grant got drunk on duty, but I don’t know if that gave birth to the expression or how it relates to “up the wazoo, gazoo, or kazoo”. Ain’t language wonderful? On a musical note, how about a Tallahatchie Bridge rest stop, near where “Billy Joe Macallister jumped off” and gave Bobbie Gentry her one and only hit song?
We ended the day in the eighties at the Jeff Busby campground. Its major attribute is that camping there is free, part of the parkway. Supposedly it has 18 campsites, but everybody cooperates to fit more people in and there must have been 40 campers and trailers squeezed in together. We were just south of the Quebecer contingent, and next to a pair of twins who’d abandoned Minnesota for the warmth of Mississippi back in the 1970s.
We took a walk up the hill through the forest, much of which had been burned off to clear the undergrowth. I
heard a very soft tap-tap-tap coming from above and found the responsible bird. Our book identified it as a “yellow-bellied sapsucker”, a name that I’d thought was just a joke, but I guess it’s real. The sapsucker is a low-impact woodpecker that drills a line of shallow holes across the tree trunk. It’s just as well the holes are shallow or we’d have trees “folding along the dotted line”.
Next.