Delta Blues

10 November 2009

In Vicksburg, we also managed to arrive at the same time as the Kansas City Southern's Santa train, a once-a-year charity trip organized by the smallest and second oldest Class I railroad still in existence in the States. Wikipedia tells me this means it ships freight, in the middle south and through Mexico; but the train we saw coming across the bridge over the Mississippi was beautiful, black and gold and sleek. It looked like something out of a movie, albeit with a red and white striped locomotive and Santa's sleigh at the front.

We got to the top of Mississippi around sunset, and stopped for the night just out of Memphis, Tennessee. This makes seven states so far...and a bunch of kinds of American music. Honky tonk, alt-country, jazz, and now we're on the blues. Memphis is of course home to Stax and Sun Records, and thus Johnny Cash, Elvis, and about a million other icons, etc etc. However, it is extremely cold in Memphis, and we got about as far as Beale Street for dinner. Fortunately, we stopped at a place called Rum Boogie, which is a stupid name for a decent place, and which had live music, comprising about six middle-aged guys getting their Muddy Waters on. But they were great fun, and tossed out beads to all the girls, and only one looked like a middle-school music teacher on his night out.

Next morning, we were up bright and rather late for the drive. David's from a town called Carbondale, in deep south Illinois's redneck country, which is where we're headed. Okay, technically not the south. But it is about 6 hours from Chicago. First we had to negotiate the rest of Tennessee, via Ihop and their magical eggnog-flavour pancakes. Mmmm. Apparently these also come in pumpkin, apple cinnamon, and something else terribly festive. And are accompanied by massive amounts of sausage, eggs, hash browns and as much syrup as you like. I love America and her unhealthy obsessions with ever-larger quantities of food.

Then a cut-through in the western bit of Kentucky. Kentucky looks much like Tennessee, rural and Christian and lots of pickups. We stopped at a massive hill, overlooking the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers (non-Americans: these are important rivers and probably close to as big as all your country's rivers put together). The overlook is marked by a singularly enormous cross, erected for some mysterious reason by someone with a little too much money. Surely there are starving babies somewhere who could have benefited from the giant cross cash? Whatever. The rivers are grand and wide and unfortunately meet at Cairo, Illinois. This is said kay-ro,not like Egypt. Although this part of Illinois is called Little Egypt, to the point that there are other towns with middle eastern and Greek names--Thebes, Dongola, Palestine, Lebanon, Sparta and Karnak. The local university mascot is the Saluki--which, as you know, is an Egyptian racing dog. Seriously.

Back to Cairo, which is a crap town par excellence. It makes Camden, NJ, look like a nice place for a picnic. There are a total of two very nice 19th century houses, and that's about it. We've been almost completely around the world and no where else has David suggested locking the car doors. The abandoned buildings are rather desperately beautiful, in a remarkably depressing sort of way. In a local history book, we've read that in the 19th century, there were people who truly believed that Cairo would one day be the greatest city in America, because of it's location at the aforementioned confluence and the importance of shipping and god, were they wrong.

In case you were wondering? Egypt is because there was a famine in northern Illinois in the 1830s, and the hungry folks wandered on down through the wilderness to this land of milk and honey--a sort of 40 years in the desert in reverse.

Next stop: Makanda. This is the little town outside Carbondale that is technically where David lived while in high school. There's a shop called The Smelly Hippy, a post office where you can buy stamps from a postlady who isn't quite sure where Singapore is, and a big smiley face water tower, as well as 419 people. It's pretty, though.

And to cap off a fairly interesting day, the Cleveland Browns finally won a game that we got to watch. Bliss.