Memphis may be famous for things other than music, but darned if we can figure out what they might be. This sign is displayed from the side of a building as you enter the city on I-40. Photo by Roni.
The same sign you saw in the previous photo is replicated outside the Memphis Visitor Center as a mosaic on a giant egg. Presumably the egg symbolizes birth. Photo by Roni.
Just in case there was a doubt, Elvis is still very much The King in these parts. His statue in the visitor center is larger than life. Photo by Roni.
Glenn poses for a photo outside the visitor center with downtown Memphis in the background. That bridge behind him is part of the monorail that carries passengers to the Mud Island River Park. Photo by Roni.
This pyramid-like structure is known simply as "the pyramid," but it does have an official name that we can't recall and no one much seems to care about. Up close you can see Egyptian features such as sphinxes near the entry points. This is a prominent landmark as you enter the city from the west. Photo by Roni.
Here's another shot of the I-40 bridge over the Mississippi. That's some fast water underneath its piers. Photo by Glenn.
Mud Island River Park is hard to describe, but essentially it is a half-mile scale model of the Mississippi and its tributaries that runs along the concrete walkway past shops and benches and an amphitheater. There are several of these plaques with water cascading down the front, meant to show the watershed areas that feed the river. Photo by Roni.
The "river" is plainly visible in this photo. The building in the background is the museum (left) and the gift shops (to the right of the archway. The river model is designed to resemble the Mississippi's actual features. A city along its banks is represented at lower left. Photo by Glenn.
Mud Island River Park offers several spots where you can look out at the river. This shot is looking south, with what may be the I-55 bridge in the distance. Photo by Roni.
We are now on Highway 64 through eastern Arkansas, driving past one of many cotton fields that are here. That cotton is just days from harvest. Photo by Glenn.
The only thing you see more of than cotton here is soybeans. From the road at 60 mph, it is all a blur. Photo by Glenn.
Earle, Ark., is a quaint community of about 3,300 with a lot of historical pride, as evidenced by this painting of a steam train on the side of a downtown building. Earle is named for a Union Pacific railroad foreman. Photo by Glenn.
Parts of Earle are is a state of gradual decay, such as this grain elevator we found on one of the backroads. It doesn't look too bad from here, but up close you find that plants are taking over the structures. Photo by Glenn.
We stopped for lunch at Village Creek State Park near Wynne. This is the trail that leads out to the picnic grounds near Lake Austell. Roni has our bag with lunch. Photo by Glenn.
Roni and Ben dig in to our lunch from the Cracker Barrel. Ben is disappointed with his ham sandwich. Photo by Glenn.
This is Lake Austell, which is pretty deserted on a Friday afternoon. Ben enjoyed hanging around the shoreline and plunking rocks. Photo by Glenn.
Is it kudzu or isn't it? When I shot this vine climbing up a tree at Village Creek State Park I was convinced it was, but now I'm not so certain. The leaves aren't quite right compared to some descriptions I've seen online. This might just be an innocent forest vine. Photo by Glenn.
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Arkansas traveler
Friday, September 24 (Day 8) — We began the homeward leg of our vacation today by visiting the birthplace of rock and roll music, Memphis, Tenn. The funny thing is that, as much as I am a huge fan of music and music history, my interest in checking out Beale Street and Sun Studios and Graceland was about zero. I'd much rather hear the recordings and ferret out information about the artists on the Internet than walk through a museum with artifacts of their lives. Being that Roni and Ben are less interested than I am in music history, the decision to skip all those attractions was a relatively simple one. Still, Memphis was an important city on my itinerary because it factors into a novel I have been trying to write for the past two years. Memphis and portions of eastern Arkansas provide much of the setting for my story, so when we planned this vacation a couple of months ago I made certain that one of our destinations would be here.
We checked out of our room at the Holiday Inn about a quarter to 10 a.m. and picked up some muffins for breakfast at the Perkins restaurant where we had eaten the night before. Roni says there is a Perkins in Brentwood back home, and if so we'll have to eat there soon. The food is very good. I-55 and I-40 meet right at the exit where our hotel was located, so this time it was an easy entrance to I-40 east, which took us the six miles or so back to the bridge over the Mississippi River and into Memphis. There are 650,000 people living in this city, but it feels much smaller. At least the traffic wasn't too bad by the time we arrived. We had no agenda for what we wanted to see, so I let the road take us where it felt right. The first exit was for the Memphis Welcome Center, so that is where I drove to. The center has a huge bronze statue of Elvis Presley in the front window. Inside there is another statue of B.B. King, and racks filled with travel brochures. We looked around for a few minutes and took pictures, but the thing that really caught our eye was the monorail running from a parking garage across the street to a place called Mud Island River Park. We had a pamphlet on it that said it was a museum and promenade with free admission. Did they say free? We're there!
We fumbled around on the surface streets for a couple of minutes until we found the entrance. Once inside we parked and ate our muffins at a table overlooking the Mississippi and the attractive I-40 bridge over which we had just driven. This is perhaps the best look at the river we have had our entire trip, which is a good thing since it was to be our last look at it. Mud Island is a very cool place that combines public art with a shopping mall and entertainment venues. It is essentially a half-mile scale model of the Mississippi River made of about 1,500 concrete slabs shaped to resemble the river's course and various depths along its route from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico. A sign I read said the model uses about 1.2 million gallons of water. We followed the river's course to the end, Roni and I taking a steady stroll while Ben meandered his way along the banks. There is a large fountain at the Louisiana end of the walk which I joked must have been Hurricane Ivan. We visited a couple of the gift shops and I added to my postcard collection. I like anyplace that has postcards, but I would have liked Mud Island regardless.
The last stop in Memphis we had to make was a swing-by of Elvis Presley's home and museum, Graceland. It is located appropriately on Elvis Presley Boulevard off I-55. Unfortunately you can't see any of it without coughing up the admission price, so we contented ourselves with saying we were near it and saw where it is located. Besides, we didn't have a lot of time left to poke around Memphis because I wanted to have some time to see the eastern Arkansas countryside.
We returned to where we had started, at the I-40/I-55 junction in West Memphis, Ark., and stopped in at the Cracker Barrel restaurant to order some sandwiches for a picnic lunch. My plan was to get off the interstate and follow Highway 64 west to a place called Village Creek State Park where we would eat. The park was about 35 miles from West Memphis, so I figured maybe 45 minutes until lunch. Boy was I wrong. See, the major mission for the day was to observe in fine detail the sights that make up the towns and countryside along Highway 64, not so much because I have to precisely identify things along this road in my novel, but because I want to capture the general feel of the area. I have been making a lot of assumptions about what eastern Arkansas might be like, so I wanted to confirm or debunk those preconceptions. Doing that required more than simply driving Highway 64 and observing -- it also meant getting off the road and driving into sleepy towns we would have otherwise missed, and that added perhaps another 45 minutes to the drive. Without going into exhaustive detail here, these are some of the things I discovered:
First, cotton is a big crop just like you might have suspected, but it does not appear to be as big a crop as soybeans, which dominate the countryside not otherwise occupied by trees. The cotton is at its peak now, and most of the fields we saw are just waiting to be picked. I don't know enough about soybeans to know when they ripen, but the leaves of the plants are currently turning from green to a dull yellow. I suppose these will eventually be turned into soy sauce or printer's ink. There is a UP railroad yard just outside of Crawfordsville, and a fairly busy railroad line that connects to it. The tracks rise above the level of the highway for several miles, traversing forested areas and crossing trestles covered in kudzu vines. Kudzu is a non-native, highly invasive plant that smothers just about everything here in the South, from trees and telephone poles to houses, barns and entire creek bottoms. In Texas we photographed a barn that was blanketed with the stuff, and although I didn't take any photos of similar activity in Arkansas, I can attest to the fact that vast areas are overrun by it.
We pulled off Highway 64 at the town of Earle, population 3,300. It is a community caught in a time warp, with brick buildings dating back at least 50 years and in some cases more. The downtown seemed to be busy. There was a corner market, some auto repair businesses, a library tucked into a storefront. Typical small-town stuff. It was interesting to note that the population is predominantly black. Call it prejudice or shortsightedness on my part, but I assumed more of a racial mix. The Baptist Church has a strong hold on the religious scene here, but we also noted a couple of Methodist churches. There was a high school consisting of several old-fashioned brick buildings right next door to a stately Baptist church with steeple. We ducked down a frontage road near the train tracks and ran across some abandoned grain silos covered in kudzu.
Earle may have been small, but not as small as Parkin, which has barely 1,300 people. This town appears so poor that its city hall is crammed into a dilapidated building. There are banners hung up on some of the lamp posts featuring a picture of a small wooden bridge and reading: "Parkin, bridging our past with our future." If this town views itself as progressive it still has much room to progress. The main street passed some rundown trailer homes, a few old houses, and an auto body business that doubled as a junkyard. The road hugged a dirty, overgrown river and eventually dead-ended at a private driveway on a weed-covered dirt path. We turned around and retraced our route to Highway 64.
A few miles later we reached the turnoff for Village Creek State Park. What a contrast. The road follows the Crowley's Ridge scenic parkway, which offers some beautiful tree-lined roads and fancy custom homes. There is a golf and country club, a few peach orchards, pastures with horses and white rail fences. This isn't the poverty road we saw earlier. The park itself is a shining oasis in the middle of it all. We stopped first at the visitor center where we raided the gift shop and picked up some maps. I bought a T-shirt I liked that reads: "Keep Arkansas wild — Village Creek State Park." Then it was on to the picnic area near Lake Austell. The picnic tables are set under dense forest, offering no view of the lake or its gravel shoreline. They don't allow food on the beach, so we pulled out our now-cold lunches to start our picnic. I had to run back to the car to collect the Off bug spray (the mosquito should be declared the state insect in these parts!), and by the time I returned, Ben was in a tizzy over his lunch. Apparently the Cracker Barrel had prepared it with a grilled bun, which he absolutely could not eat, he said, and worse they had given him country-sliced ham with the bone still in the meat. He objected to having to eat it, referring to it as "chest meat." I tried some of the sandwich after he gave up on it and have to agree that it wasn't very good. Being cold after an hour and a half in the car was only part of the problem; the meat was on the salty side.
Fortunately, Ben forgot his disappointment at lunch when he was allowed to go down to the beach to plunk rocks and hunt for guppies. Being a Friday afternoon under very gray skies, no one else was in the picnic area, so we had the park and lake essentially to ourselves. But it was already after 4 p.m. and we had some driving to do to get to Little Rock before nightfall, so we left the park and rejoined Interstate 40 west. Did I say that I-55 through southern Mississippi was dull? I-40 through eastern Arkansas isn't much better. There are a few turnoffs to hidden towns and more open fields than in Mississippi, but mostly you see more trees. Zzzzz. And trucks. Roni handled the driving duties until we stopped for gas about 30 miles outside of Little Rock, and she was rattled by all the big rigs that flew past her doing 70-plus. I hate trucks. It is interesting to me that here in Arkansas the interstate basically bypasses all those little towns like the ones we saw today, whereas in California the interstates are the lifeline for commerce and development, hugging right up to the towns' doorsteps. It is no wonder that Parkin and Earle are anachronisms, or that they will continue to be so.
We arrived at our hotel -- another Comfort Inn -- in North Little Rock a bit after 6 p.m. We have stayed at enough Comfort Inns on this trip that we have earned a free night somewhere. We just booked two more nights in Dallas starting tomorrow, so perhaps we'll have another freebie coming. It would be nice to help offset some of the expense of our travels. We crashed in hotel room 109 for about an hour until dinner, which tonight was Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Believe it or not, they actually have a restaurant in town that combines the two franchises into one. So our dinner consisted of tacos, nachos, chicken hot wings and mashed potatoes. I'm getting a queasy stomach just thinking about it. We washed it down by going over to a convenience store across from the restaurant and buying Baskin-Robbins ice cream for dessert. The clerk who made my two-scoop sundae claimed he didn't know how to make one. Not good. I guess one should worry about an ice cream shop that shares space with a place called "Bubba B's Bodacious BBQ."
Tonight I got to chatting with the woman at the front desk of our hotel and learned the secrets of alcohol sales in this state. Some counties in Arkansas, including the one we're in, have a law that you can't purchase alcoholic beverages on Sunday. Period. She says they literally have to chain the shelves shut at midnight on Saturday until Monday morning. Of course there is a brisk black market in Sunday beer sales. The Baptists are in control here, and as long as they are, she says, the laws regarding alcohol won't change. Same goes for the lottery. Apparently there is no lotto or Powerball here. The clerk at the convenience store where we bought our ice cream and from whom Roni purchased lottery scratcher tickets said there was no lotto because "they want to keep this state poor." Our hotel clerk confirmed that gamblers are undeterred and head to Oklahoma, Tennessee or Tunica, Miss., to drop their money at the casinos in those states. She is obviously passionate about the issue because she was talking so fast I could barely keep up with her. But there's nothing like listening to that Southern drawl. If I spend much more time in the South, when I get home I'm probably going to start using "y'all" in my conversations without even thinking about it.
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