I drove up the Mississippi from New Orleans to Dallas City (Illinois) in two days, making stops in Vicksburg, Greenville, Clarksdale, Cairo, Hannibal, Carthage, and Nauvoo. This brief taste has whetted my appetite to bike the whole river. I had thought that such a trip might be boring: a river trip does not offer the kind of scenic variety a cross-country trip does. I think otherwise now. There is plenty of material: the health of the lower river, the runoff, and the dead zone in the Gulf; the hydrology and vitality of New Orleans; the old Plantations and the black/white divide along the lower river; the Delta Blues; Elvis in Memphis; then entering Mark Twain country in Arkansas and Missouri; Lewis and Clark and Jim and Huck at Cairo; the Mormons at Nauvoo; and north from there you enter placid and idyllic (and extremely beautiful) farm country in Wisconsin and Minnesota. What the source looks like I don’t know but would like to find out. And general questions about modern agriculture and urban development and race relations are in play all the way.
(Photo: sunset over the Mississippi from Cairo, Illinois, March 2011).
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