Journeys Afoot in North America
Part I, Early Walks
The train was leaving, but I wouldn't accept that I'd missed it and ran alongside to grab the handrail. "You can't do that!" But I did, holding on for a quarter-mile until they let me in. After a severe lecture and an elegant breakfast, I was away from Chicago headed for an early spring walk across the northern Ozarks of Arkansas.
Leaving the train at Cairo I got a third over the Mississippi River bridge before a patrol car pulled up. "In trouble already," I said to myself. But the sheriff and cattlemen were after rustlers not me, and I appreciated the lift over a narrow bridge. On the Missouri side it was a day or two walk into Arkansas, where dogwoods weren't yet blooming.
On dirt roads part of the time, I took sanctuary one rainy night in an unlocked church. It was frame, but next morning I walked into a Stone County with houses and fences of ancient grey fieldstone outlined in green moss. On the cold days it was good to rest at noon against a sunny rock fence.
When there was no shelter I slept on oak leaves that crackled in the night. A welcome sound, if it warned away copperheads, which I knew were already out since their dead bodies could be seen on the narrow highway. "What you do is jam on the brakes just as you hit the snake," natives told me. Once I saw a truck back up, "to git him again."
Groceries were bought in village and crossroad. But Ben Hur that I'd counted on had no longer even a postoffice. It was a ghost town with ghost groceries, and no chariot stopped, which reduced me to meadowcombing.
Plum blossoms are awful, both wild and domestic. The little clover you can't get much of is good; big clover is bitter. But redbud, that blooms before it is in leaf, is delicious. (I later read that it is a well-known survival food, sometimes called Canadian lettuce.)
Lifts were few but I enjoyed meeting the country people who did offer. They reminded me of relatives, and pickers I'd known in the cotton fields. It was explained to me near the end that my pack had put the highlanders off; they thought I was a government man looking for whiskey stills.
Too soon my Easter walk was done. At its end in Fort Smith I tried to call on the poet Edsel Ford, but he was off reciting. The bus back to Chicago went by way of Tennessee, recrossing the wide Mississippi at Memphis.
At the West Memphis end the silent redneck
Turned around and said quickly:
"I worked on this bridge with a boy
When it was done he jumped off
His car was parked in the middle
They found him three miles down
It took lots of guts I guess
I worked with that ol' boy twelve years."