2005/04 Deep South trip - End of the Trace |
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We were almost at the end of the parkway, but there were a few things left to see: waterfalls, rivers, a 
graveyard in the woods, and Indian Mounds. The last of these, Emerald Mound, is gigantic, a football-field-sized mound with smaller mounds at each end, all created by Indians long ago. Standing on top of one of these I could see that the whole horizon to the west was grey and black. Sure enough, as we left the parkway for Natchez it began to rain. We crossed the mighty Mississippi River there, but it was too dark to see much of the river.
There were all kinds of warnings for flash flooding and tornadoes for where we’d been in Mississippi but we were now into Louisiana and after an hour or so we passed out of the storm. If you look at a map of the border you can see that it follows the line of the Mississippi River, or rather, the river as it was two hundred years ago. So the border includes all the old bends and oxbows in the river, but the river has long since moved miles away. (In case you didn’t get the same geography class that I did, “oxbow lakes” used to be bends in the river until the river broke across the neck of the bend and left the remains of the bend cut off from the river.) It’s interesting that in the past people just coped with the river moving after every big flood, but today we have to fix the border even though the river moves, as government can’t deal with farms and land moving from state to state.
At Alexandria we crossed our outward path of five weeks ago for the first time. All we had to do from there was find our way to Valentine Lake in the Kisatchie Forest. Unfortunately, the road to it crossed the main road in two places. Our national forest book gave directions to one of these crossings and then followed it up with directions to the lake from the other crossing. We drove up and down for a while trying to find an easterly turn off a road that was already going due east! This gave us the opportunity to drive past Hicks High School a few times. Yes, really, we were in the town of Hicks. Can you imagine having to quote the name of your high school as “Hicks”?
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