Saturday, May 23rd

Girder Bridges

Saturday morning, breakfast started at seven. Yet when I arrived in the Hotel lobby a few minutes past, it was still dark and deserted. The night porter informed me that it was in fact only six. Ah, America. Fooled me again with your your time zones. Someone should write a book about them (someone probably has).

Understanding my plight, the porter kindly supplied me with coffee, anyway, and I went out to have a look at my motor vehicle. The crack had grown about an inch overnight and I decided that, indeed, I needed to swap the car. Luckily, Paducah had an outlet of my rental agency. I just had to cover the time until nine (local time) when they would open. Thanks to the wonders of American customer service, the exchange went smoothly and soon I left town in a red car instead of a silver one.

I headed west along a fast highway. A study of the map had shown that I could make it all the way to Oklahoma, the westernmost state I had to tick off on this trip, if only I stopped dilly-dallying and put in some serious driving.

The road went through a string of towns all alike: a collection of white houses, most small, some slightly bigger, had been scattered near the highway without much order or bother. Soon it came to its first formidable obstruction, the Ohio River, which it mastered wit a large grey metal girder bridge. Down on the river, lots of bulk ships were parked without any apparent reason. However, the second even more formidable obstacle was around the corner, the Mississippi River, for this was indeed the confluence of the Ohio. Perhaps transportation had to change between the two rivers.

This second obstacle, however, proved too much for the road. The Mississippi bridge was closed. Luckily, a second bridge for the motorway wasn’t too far away, requiring only a slight detour through Cairo, Illinois. Indeed, the rivers also served as state lines and this now was the southernmost tip of the self-termed Land of Lincoln which, as I had learned yesterday, was a bit of a stretch.

Cairo started off with a strong smell I couldn’t quite identify other than that it was quite terrible. The city itself made a rather poor, run down impression. The better buildings could have done with a new coat of paint, most deserved a full renovation. It once had been thriving thanks to the river crossings but once bridges had been built, business went away. Population went down from once fifteen thousand to a mere two thousand now, explaining all the empty buildings.

The road, my good old friend the Great River Route, left Cairo for Future City. Rather appropriately, this was a place of much green and rarely a house. North loomed the Interstate and with it the Mississippi crossing on a giant blue girder bridge.

West of the Mississippi, the land immediately turned flat. Grain farming started on fields irrigated by those spidery circular contraptions. I followed the fast highway straight west. About twenty miles in, a double line of hills provided a break in the flat country. The hills were densely covered in trees and hid Dexter. Another twenty miles to Poplar Bluff were the prairie ended.

I left the motorway and drove into town. My intention was a quick toilette break only, but I decided to have a look at the city, too. Sadly and as happens altogether too often in America, I shouldn’t have bothered. The only building that wasn’t a prefabricated business building was a giant red brick building on top of a hill. At first it looked like a government seat but this being the South, it was the First Baptist Church. The bell tower should have provided a clue right away.

Half a dozen traffic lights later I was back on the highway, now heading south. Since that was the entirely wrong direction, I turned off at the first occasion. Westbound again, I had left the world of fast highways and was back on narrow roads. Even though the landscape was starting to get seriously hilly, the road insisted on running straight. The new car’s cruise control was rather confused by the resulting roller coaster ride through an endless procession of small, weathered white houses.

A large sign reported the immanent arrival in Doniphan, home to the ‘internationally renowned and Grammy nominated’ Billy Yates, continuing the sudden and unexpected country music theme of this trip.

After the city, the road gave in and started to curve and wind. It would continue for six hours as it ran for 230 miles through the hills and forests of southernmost Missouri. This was a sparsely settled region. There were a few small towns and more often than not houses were strung along the roadside. Only West Plains, population a whooping twelve thousand, served as a reminder that not much was amiss: an endless collection of prefabricated, characterless shops and services, each with their own parking lot and bounded by a tiny strip of grass.

The shopping opportunities of the small towns, meanwhile, where rather limited. The only shop to be found reliably at even the smallest village in this part of the world was the Dollar General. I made a mental note to one day visit one of these to find out what exactly the General was selling.

Outside of towns, nature abounded. The flora was mostly forests. Several sections of the route were part of the Mark Twain National Forest, a bit of a misnomer, given that Mark Twain was in fact from northern Missouri whereas the forest was scattered over the southern half of the state. Fauna was surprisingly present, too, and not just in its more regular form of road kill. Where it was, big black vultures were feasting. More pleasantly, here and there turtles were crawling across the road. At one point, a huge brown owl struggled to gain enough altitude to not hit my passing car.

Butterscotch, my own little plush owl and mascot, kept falling over in the many bends.

Every now and then, the road crossed a wide river, almost always announced to be a lake. Each crossing was by way of a rusty old girder bridge. Before and after were little parks called ‘public use area’ where people were whiling away the Saturday afternoon. The last such crossing, part of the triple villages of Isabella, Sundown, and Theodosia, even featured resorts.

The quite part of the day ended at the beautifully named Kissee Mills. The road dove down into a valley of multiple rivers where it forked so it put girder bridges onto all of them. The branch I chose, the one that kept heading west, climbed out of the valley again to reach Forsyth resting on the top of a ridge overlooking the valley. It clearly was a tourism town, for there was an actual centre with actual shops in old buildings and lots of resorts.

The drawback of that was that on this Memorial Day Weekend, plenty of city folk was about in vacation land. All of them seemed to be hellishly afraid of curves and progress was slow. Which annoyed me quite a bit. Not only was I fed up with endless bends myself, but I also was increasingly worried about finding accommodation if I arrived too late. That left me in the wrong mood to appreciate Reeds Spring and Cape Fair, otherwise pretty little communities in river valleys. I very much rejoiced, though, when after Cassville the road started to run straight.

It wasn’t far, now, any more. But dark clouds loomed where I was headed. And indeed, soon the rain started. Just outside Anderson, last city in Missouri, it upgraded to torrential. Interesting observation: while horses seemed to try and find trees to stand under in this sort of weather, cows didn’t seem to care and just kept munching away.

Eventually, the state line appeared and soon I arrived in the first city in Oklahoma, Grove. I deemed that enough, found a hotel and, a little later, a Mexican restaurant. To the sound of rain drumming onto the roof, I ended a long driving day.