day 2 -- clarksville, TN to batesville, AR

anyway, back to tennessee. it was another day of trails...the trail of tears, the purple heart trail, the crowley ridge trail (and forgot to mention the bourbon trail the day before in kentucky). america loves paved trails. tennessee trails led westward into the american bottom. and where there's flatness there's order and homogeneity and measured civility...nothing like the freewheeling bootlegging chaos of appalachia. that of course makes tennessee fascinating since this long skinny state connects the top of the appalachians with the mississippi. there's something of that intersection of the south and the midwest in the tennessee accent. I love tennessee-speak...genteel and slowtalking and not south carolina militant, alabama jangling, georgia defensive, or mississippi mushmouth. I reached the edge of the bottomlands somewhere around paris, tennessee...that's about where I started to smell sand. stopped at a county courthouse farmer's market (more like local folks' garden market) and ended up with some sourdough. visions of a roadside picnic of san fran sourdough and st andre slipped by briefly, but I knew that dixie sourdough is sweet and soft, and that sharp cheddar was the best I'd find in the kroger. instead of a roadside park/rest stop (none here) I ended up wolfing some down by an abandoned garage in blinding sun next to US 412 in missouri. I'd forgotten the desolation of the floodplain bottom and the increasing distance from civilization the closer you get to the river. towns that chains haven't reached, ever sparser traces of people beyond the endless acres of tomatoes and peppers and, on the arkansas side, rice paddies. oppressive flatness, totally different from anything in the upper midwest. not the broadly rolling ancient sea floor that entranced william least-heat moon and kathleen norris in the dakotas and kansas, but flood-scoured nothingness. then a dead zone within 20 miles of the river...no towns, no houses, one cluster of abandoned silos.

then the progression in reverse after I climbed over the river into missouri and crossed into arkansas...miles of rice paddies, then fading towns, then snapping into standard american...golden arches and supercenters and so on. and I was just starting the climb toward the ozarks when that '88 ford bronco inched out from a driveway and then roared out into my path. dangit.