Here I am in the Ozarks again

Tuesday (Sep 25)

It’s still raining on and off, but there are no other living people in my part of the park. I’m loving it. The fly strip experiment is an epic FAIL. First of all it’s gross and poisonous and smells poisonous, and secondly my permanent cohort of flies was not remotely tempted by it. I hung one overnight, no flies. I had to take it down to move about, then tried to I re-hang before driving. By lunch time it had fallen off it’s hook and got it’s nasty poisonous goo on my shoes, and still had not attracted even one fly!

What do you call a fly strip that doesn’t catch flies? “Trash!”

That was the end of the fly strip experiment.

The first town heading south is Eminence. I had a very nice lunch there at a place called Ruby’s. Pork tenderloin sandwich, collards and mashed potatoes+white gravy. Now THAT’s a meal! The county courthouse is right across the side street. As I sat and ate facing out the window I was entertained by a minor drama of three courthouse guards chasing off some disgruntled yahoo. The sign says Eminence was a big deal back in the day, and it does have the feel of faded glory about it.

I camped at a spring five days in a row on the 2016 trip. one was Alley Spring, which is in this neck of the woods. I mention this because as I motored south on Route 19 out of Eminence I passed a county rest area that looked familiar. I realized I had done exactly this route in the opposite direction two years ago, getting from Big Spring to Alley Spring. Then as now, I noted what dangerous, demanding, no margin for error road it is.

Eventually I got to US 60, the major east-west artery around here, and the driving was easier. I have the time today, so I am going to visit Big Spring, because it is a natural wonder of the world IMO, and because I read about flood damage there I want to gawk at. So I take a right just before Van Buren for what I remember to be a short 3-4 mile drive to the spring. From 2016 I remembered fondly the pizza place at the corner, because it had wifi and was a very pleasant place to eat in the early afternoon. It was shuttered and out of business, and there was a brand, spanking new Godfather’s Pizza 20 feet away. Yuck.

Anyway, at the top of the first hill, the route to the spring was closed for bridge repair, and I was routed a back way over hill and dale that gets one to the spring without crossing the (not so little) outflow creek. The volume of water leaving the spring all the time, every day 24/7 is just amazing, and the setting is quite beautiful, so I was glad I made the little side trip. I stopped at the camping area on my way out and thought long and hard about staying here for the night. It’s going on 4:30 after all, and I know from two years ago that it’s quite pleasant and the showers are deluxe and cheap. I probably should’ve stayed, but the idea of sweating profusely and swatting mosquitoes for the next six hours until bedtime with no connectivity didn’t appeal to me, so I moved on. Sad to admit, but if there was good phone reception I probably would’ve stayed. I ended up sleeping in a parking lot instead!

Get back on 60 and head east to Poplar Bluff. Outside Poplar Bluff the terrain rather abruptly flattened out. No more Ozarks. I stop at the local DQ for a sandwich because it’s late and I’m tired and I didn’t feel like sitting and waiting for service. After that I am driving through cotton fields!

Since 2016, the Allstays has added a boatload of alleged free camping sites listed by the Missouri Conservancy. There was one a couple of miles off 60, so I checked it out. It was a unkempt, gloomy, smelly-looking parking lot that looked like pretty awful as a place to sleep. So, back to the app. Next possibility is another parking lot, at a place called Lambert’s Cafe in Sikeston. I did a drive-by, and hey, it looks pretty nice! A huge parking lot, with a row of trees and grass on the west edge, only one other truck there. I think this is tonight’s spot!

As discussed many times, even nice parking lots aren’t really awesome places to hang out, so I google the local public library. I have a little over an hour til it closes, so I head straight there. It was a beautiful little jewel of an experience, as those local libraries often are. Nothing remarkable, just a little slice of life in Sikeston. I haven’t had decent connectivity since the cafe in Osage Beach two days ago, so it felt great also. The Ozarks really are a backwards part of the country.

I am back at the parking lot by 8:15. The cafe is open til 9, so I decide to thank Lambert’s for a place to sleep by dropping in for a “light meal” before bedtime. HAH! That was a pretty good joke! Lambert’s does not understand the concept of a light meal. I now know that the whole shtick there is conspicuous over-serving of food. I don’t think they care if you eat it, but it’s important to pile it on you till you ask them to stop. IMO, some kind of hillbilly reaction to depression-era scarcity. How American is that?!

It was a weird experience. Wasn’t too sure at first, but I think it was weird in a good way. It was NUTS! An overweight young fellow in a button-down shirt and tie and funny hat greets me just inside the door and leads me down a 60 foot hallway, then around the corner to a large mess hall kind of room – rows of long tables covered in butcher paper. He seats me, and another similarly dressed white boy drops off a napkin full of hush puppies. This “free hush puppies whether you need ’em or not” seems pretty standard in these parts. Seems like if you don’t bring each customer some hush puppies you can hardly call yourself a restaurant. But here they take it to 11. Over the course of eating my pork loin sandwich and coleslaw, various white boys in those funny hats came by with baked beans, mac and cheese, cornbread … oh, and their signature trick: a loudmouthed dude who throws biscuits at you. He’s not as dumb as he acts. He knew not to throw a biscuit at me, but if you’re into it, he’ll toss ’em from so far he often hits your neighbor! Fun for all! I talked to him a bit on the way out, nice guy actually.

And all I wanted was a quiet snack….

So another unhealthy night :(  I ate that heavy meal then the only exercise after it was walking across the parking lot. Oddly I slept quite well. Go figure.

Wednesday

Lambert’s parking lot was a lot quieter than many campgrounds! After my deep, sound sleep, I looked outside around 9:930-ish and there was not another vehicle within 50 yards. I lazed for a while then realized that the peace and quiet was not gonna last. Lambert’s opens for lunch at 10:30, so things would be hoppin’ soon. So I hustled off to what turned out to be an very, very pleasant coffee house – Parengo Coffee – in historic Old Town Sikeston.

I researched my day – identifying the Mississippi River ferry described below. I asked the barrista about the ferry – neither he nor any customers had ever done it! But in further talk he did recommend that I check out the local history museum a half block away (free!). Sikeston has a lot of history – who knew? It turns out this whole corner of Missouri (The Bootheel) was a giant cypress swamp back in the day. It went something like this:

• The native Americans prospered here, until …
• The European settlers came. They thought the swamp was useless and moved on to greener pastures.
• Then came towns. Some smart fellows realized there was a gold mine in old-growth hardwood – walnut cherry, etc – in there. They rape the swamp of its big trees.
• That was the 1850’s. Now those geniuses are paying taxes on useless land. It’s a really useless swamp that just sits there being useless until …
• The early 1900’s when a new generation of entrepreneurs realizes the soil is incredibly rich and fertile from being a cypress swamp forever, so if they can drain it and get the stumps out it’s worth a whole lot.

It seems that draining the place was relatively straightforward – a big job, but big jobs is what the Army Corps of Engineers is all about (my beloved lakeside campgrounds are just a sideline for them). The real hard work was clearing the land, one giant stump at a time. The pictures and the story were pretty impressive.

The pictures of the Night Riders were especially interesting. They wore black sheets and were NOT (I think) white supremacist terrorists like the fellows we’re used to seeing in the white sheets. They were economic terrorists … or warriors depending on your p.o.v. … fighting Big Tobacco.

I’ve been thinking that the answer to – when do I go from the Midwest to the South? – is right about here! Folks on the Ozark Plateau are as back-country as it gets. but they aren’t really southern (IMO). They are hillbilly, a different thing. Here in Sikeston I am surrounded by cotton fields, i.e. southern. But Lambert’s is over the top Lil’ Abner hillbilly style, and that’s Ozarks. I an oddly pleased with this bit of meta-analysis.

Next stop from here is Reelfoot Lake. Maps tells me that the straightest route involves a ferry. How very exciting! The on-line description is of an extrememly low-tech affair, which is worrying. But it runs every day and everyone evidently makes it to the other side every day, so why not me too?! Let’s give it a whirl!

It was indeed a real adventure! The other side, the Kentucky side is the main office.  It’s a little more impressive. There is more river business, gravel barges and such, over there. But my side, the Missouri side is pretty unimpressive. 30 miles of increasingly narrow and empty county roads, State Route 7 to County Route A. When you road has a letter instead of a number, you know you’re in the sticks.

Eventually County Road A peters out into a little spur with a sign that says “This road ends in water“. Oh really!?  And sure enough the road after that goes straight down an incline and into the water.

It’s a pretty bleak scene. There’s a tree, a picnic table, and a telephone pole with a red button on it. You push the red button, and a disembodied voice squawks something unintelligible out of the speaker on the telephone pole, and that’s it! You’ve done everything you can do. Back to the van to wait around and hope you called the ferry!

It’s sort of an act of faith. I resisted the urge to press it again and again, like a doorbell when you’re in a hurry. I busted out the binoculars and scanned the far shore and … saw nothing. But it turns out I wasn’t looking far enough down river. Eventually a modest little object in the river got close enough that I noticed it was a barge with a tugboat pushing it, chugging upriver headed for me!

It docked at the ramp, and disgorged a motorcycle and a tow truck towing a compact car. The latter had to exit carefully, but after he did, the dude waved me in. I expected more instructions, but it was basically “park anywhere”. Then the little tugboat started chugging and we moved a few feet offshore, then it did the most amazing thing: It turns out that the engine unit – what I’m calling a tugboat – is permanently attached to the barge only at the center, on some kind of a pivot. So once we were little ways from the shore the mate un-moored the other of the tugboat from the end of the barge, and rotated 180° on the pivot to re-moor it at the other end of the barge, facing the other way, ready to push the barge back where it came from. I thought I filmed this, but to my extreme annoyanc I did that thing where I turned the video OFF when I thought I was turning it ON. God I hate doing that. :( I do it more times than not when something unexpected happens and I try to catch it on video. sigh ….

Anyway, the trip across was quite fun. We idled in the middle of the river for 4-5 minutes to let a huge barge go past, then we chugged to the other side. Turns out directly across the river is a wooded peninsula, downriver a bit is a little stillwater bay created by the peninsula, and that is where the ferry pulls up on the Kentucky side. I got off, and 3-4 cars got on. Rush hour must be starting :)

I was in Kentucky for about four miles, then I was in Tennessee. The Missouri side of the river that I just left is a drained, “recovered” cypress swamp. This side is basically still a cypress swamp. I follow a series of lonely under-maintained state roads until Tennessee 22 along the eastern edge of the Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge.

I am super excited to see exhibits about the earthquakes in 1811-12 on the New Madrid Fault which created Reelfoot Lake in the memory of European settlers! It turns out I will FAIL at this, but right now I am excited about it. First stop is the Visitors Center for Reelfoot Lake NWR. It was nice enough, but apparently earthquake info is not in their charter. There were no exhibits about it and the desk lady just moved there from Florida last month and was useless. So I was unfulfilled, and kept moving.

The  Florida transplant had figured out the fish restaurant scene, and named the four restaurants on the lake in my direction. The first one up was in the tiny town of Samburg and said to be right on the lake. So I stop for a tasty afternoon catfish dinner at The Boat House. I enjoyed my late afternoon meal here. Catfish, white beans and cole slaw. The fellow that seated me hung in the next room playing his guitar and singing a ballad he wrote about Reelfoot Lake. I had the feeling it was all kind set up to reel me into some kind of tourist expenditure, but whatever, he was pretty good and it sure added to the ambience. It is right on the lake, but the lake right here is covered by giant lily pads which kinda ruins the mood.

Next stop Reelfoot Lake State Park, no alcoholic beverages permitted in State of Tennessee parks!

It is a real nice (or “reel nice” ?? :) campground, spacious, level, right on the lake, nice walking path extending along the lake. A unique feature are the sawed-off cypress knees dotting the mowed grass all over the campground.

Lovely evening walk, out of the northern edge of the campground, between the road and the swamp for 1/3 mile, then through a group of very high end cabins (satellite tv, the works!) that the state rents out. Some were even occupied by very high end people, having work conversations on their cellphones and watching football on TV. What a waste.

A little further on the trail ends at a bridge. I’ve pretty much run out of daylight anyway, so time to turn back and do that thing I love to do, namely walk as far as I can into the dark without having to resort to the flashlight. I made it all the way back this time – woo!

There’s a basketball court in the middle of the campground, so even though it’s basically dark I shot a few hoops. It’s quiet and late, so I tried to minimize dribbling. Even so I got a yappy dog in somebody’s RV all worked up. The people must have been off to dinner, because he yapped for a long time. It is surprisingly un-buggy, so I sit outside till 9:30-ish. I left my ball and some other stuff outside, so of course it rained.