My roommate (Stuart) and I are on the road this week. He has some business in Indiana and Minnesota, and I like trying new Cracker Barrel’s, and we both thought it’d be nice to spend Thursday back home in Crystal Lake.
Last night, we were driving through Southeastern Missouri, and let me tell you: that place is something.
To start, let’s look at a map:
That’s a lot of states in a very little area. One wrong step and we could end up in any number of places: back in Arkansas, over in Tennessee, up in Illinois (that’d be a right step, actually, since that’s where we were going), over in Kentucky, or somehow in that strange little disembodied toe of Kentucky right in the middle of the map.
See it?
See the disembodied toe?
Here’s a nice blown-up depiction of it:
Weird, right?
I thought so too.
I didn’t go to the trouble yet of finding out exactly why this strange situation exists, but I’d venture it has something to do with our friend the Mississippi River being quite the wiggly boy over that stretch:
Look at all that wiggle!
What are you trying to dodge, Mississippi? We dammed your brothers with our concrete and damned your sisters with our unwillingness to put garbage in the appropriate receptacles—you can’t hide from us!
Meanwhile, we’re driving past signs for a Toll Ferry to Kentucky, because bridges evidently aren’t getting the job done, and signs for various bayous, because those evidently exist in more places than Louisiana.
And then we get up close to the southern tip of Illinois, because, oh yeah, here comes the Ohio River strutting in like it’s the life of the party:
So yes, quite a lot over that hour or two of dark driving through the twilight zone of America, where the South and the Midwest wrestle and all the big rivers meet up.
But then we crossed over the Cairo I-57 Bridge, with a barge all lit up in the water to our left and the stars above us. We were into Illinois, heading north.
