Texas No. 2 - Learn As You Go

I learn things as I travel. For instance, one rest stop was named the Trail of Tears. In 1838 and 1839, as part of Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy, the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokee people called this journey the "Trail of Tears," because of its devastating effects. 

In the winter of 1838-39, Cherokees camped at the site of the southbound Trail of Tears Rest Area on Interstate 57, mile marker 32, near Anna, Illinois. I didn’t realize that movement had reached so far north.

[https://www.facebook.com/pages/Trail-Of-Tears-Rest-Area/156654481013772]

This trip also took me near Memphis, Tennessee and into Missouri and Arkansas before entering Texas at Texarkana. Missouri was an expanse of flatness outlined with bare trees. The trees punctuated geographical features much like mascara can highlight somebody’s eyes. In many fields, long, slender booms of irrigation arms reach across fields. Sometimes you’ll see them side-by-side like team mates linking up for a game of Red Rover. 

Missouri was a surprise because I found it where I was not expecting it. I’d thought my path would take me to western Tennessee, and then into Missouri. No, instead it took me from Illinois, across the Mississippi River into Missouri, and then into Tennessee near Memphis before leading me into Arkansas.

Going south on I-55, I noticed that people decorate their properties with car-casses. The shells of once-fine automobiles lend their fading colors to the landscape. Within a one-mile stretch I saw an automotive parts business, with many cars roughly sorted and stored out in the open. Several nearby properties have a few automobiles (or as many as a half dozen) neatly arranged perpendicular to a fencerow; landmarks, no doubt, to help navigate the sameness of the view.

Further into Missouri, the weather became a grey, hushed affair as low-hanging clouds hung closely over a brown landscape. From the clouds emerged more than a dozen vees of migrating birds, loosely strung out across the sky.