Blue Goose ~ Day 275

February 26, 2015 ~ Vicksburg, MS to Greenwood, MS

At least it was dry this morning, although not warm. I left reluctantly as Vicksburg had grown on me. It is a relatively small town, on the Mississippi; an old town on a hill with the National Military Park, Lorelei Books and an adjacent coffee shop....paddlewheel steamboats come on by.....

I carried on the inner dialogue about going back to the bookstore before I left but decided not to. Except I got five miles out of town and saw a sign for Washington (the bookstore street) and at the last possible second turned onto Washington and back into Vicksburg where I spent time and money and chatted with Laura, the owner. As we talked, the sun very briefly came out. I could immediately sense the change in light quality. The bookstore faces west and the street outside lightened perceptibly, although only for one minute. Still, I could easily imagine how it would be. What could be better than sitting out on your upstairs deck after a day working in your own bookstore on southern evenings, in this downtown setting, an area that is slowly undergoing a renaissance as some of the old stores and buildings are renovated and made into places that entice people to linger and talk and wander and settle for a couple of hours.....not on a grand tear-down scale but retaining the unique charms of a town on a river bluff.

Washington Street ran below the hills closer to the river (and the flood plain), with modest homes, trailers, churches, railroad tracks...a Black community that was old, slightly weary, half country, half an outlier of Vicksburg proper. It felt rich with history....southern, military, river, racial history as so many places are in the Delta.

Five miles north of Vicksburg, MS

The rest of the afternoon, I drove through neatly furrowed cotton fields with snow sharply defining each precise row. The land is totally flat in the Mississippi Delta with extremely fertile land. Wikipedia notes that the the Mississippi Delta is "technically an alluvial plain" which means it periodically floods, with the last two major floods in 1927 and 2011. It is the land of the blues and jazz and cotton. It is often confused with the Mississippi River Delta at the mouth of the River, 300 miles south.

Birds were pecking on the roadsides, including dozens of cardinals. One field had a small group of very well-camouflaged Greater White-fronted Geese for which I did a GUT (Goose U-turn). I am careful when I stop on the shoulders as with so much rain lately, all the earth is mushy.

Author David L. Cohn wrote that the Mississippi Delta "begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg". 

(The next morning as I was checking out of a motel, a gentleman was talking in the lobby and mentioned the Peabody Hotel and then said, "Let's just go on into Memphis and see what happens....")

Mississippi Delta - MS

I declined the rates at one motel and went on to Greenwood, where an East Indian gentleman was extremely friendly and very proud of the "full breakfast" his motel served...."not just some toast and cereal but a full breakfast....very nice ma'am..." 

The heat was not working in my room so I had to change, carrying my booted-up work laptop and plugged-in foot pedal, which then didn't work and I spent two frustrating hours troubleshooting but finally got it working.

I turn on TV lately which I half-watch while I work...shows about wreckers on the snowy Highway to Hell in British Coumbia or modern day gold miners or Alaskan bush families or State Troopers in Alaska. 

Greater White-fronted Geese - MS