We were not at all sure where this trip would begin to end. Maybe Santa Fe. Maybe New Orleans. It turned out to be Oklahoma City. After three days of wandering around Norman and OU, the Bombing Memorial, and the First Americans Museum, we headed back east, making our first stop, the Oklahoma City Botanical Garden, one block from our hotel.
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The trip east brought us to places we’d never heard of and to places we knew. We had the time to stay way off the beaten path. It would be nice to say that we were the only car on the road, but we can’t. We were close though! We successfully avoided interstates (and thus, encountered precious few trucks), and we often went for hours without seeing another car.
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Making new friends
The first foray of our journey took us to Shawnee, Oklahoma for a parting lunch with one of our many new friends, Linda Capps, the Vice-Chair of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a distant cousin of our really good friends the Amdur-Clarks, Fred, Cindy, and Tanner.
We had spent a morning with Linda a few days earlier learning about the Citizen Potawatomi. We enjoyed each other so much, we wanted to spend more time on the weekend just becoming friends, talking about grandkids and family and life in general. She’s one of those people we plan to stay in touch with and hope to see again somewhere.
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McAlester, Oklahoma
We tried to plan our driving around points that might have decent lodging, but since we never knew what we would find and how long we’d get hung up some place, we just couldn’t plan much.
Our first stop was McAlester, a dustbowl of a town that is home to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary and, at 18,000, the largest town in Choctaw Nation. We found our home for the night, in this case, a really weird and totally comfy Travelodge that had absolutely no signage! (It is tucked neatly behind a Lowe’s and is invisible even after you are there. It caters to railroad crews changing direction, so most of its guests arrive and leave by van. Thank goodness for GPS and persistence.) With the lodging issue addressed, nourishment was next on the list.
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Captain John’s was well beyond the strip of chain eateries that surrounded the Lowe’s and the Walmart. We were in eastern Oklahoma, so what the hell, why not try the Louisiana shrimp boil. It was fantastic: large shrimp cooked to perfection, really tasty andouille, corn and potatoes. The best part of the experience was our waitress, Jami.
Young and energetic, Jami wore a classic western belt buckle, one of many she owns, we learned, from her successful career as a barrel racer in the rodeo. Jami hails from Arizona, but came to McAlester for a degree in cosmetology. She brought her three horses with her along with her 1997 Dodge pickup with headlights that blink on and off. (She was hunting for a mechanic who could fix the problem without breaking the bank.)
We enjoyed Jami so much, we asked her to join us for breakfast the next morning. What fun! She recommended Angel’s Diner, another total gem of a place that we visited, ironically, only a day or two after the death of Lisa Marie Presley. It is a classic Elvis-themed diner with Cadillacs in front, pink stripes in the parking lot, tons of 1950s diner junk, a genuine mug shot of Frank Sinatra, and the best ham and eggs I’ve eaten in years. It also happens to be directly across the street from the Union Stockyards, where hundreds of cattle are sold every Tuesday. I am really happy we were there on a Monday when the area was still odorless.
The stickers behind the counter revealed the red-state mentality of the joint: I’ll keep my guns, freedom, & money … you can keep the “change!”
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Frank Sinatra’s mugshot.
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The Ouachita Mountains and Mena, Arkansas
From McAlester, we’d hoped to get as far east as Arkadelphia, the next town with decent-looking lodging. We didn’t make it.
Instead, we found a damn-near invisible National Forest scenic road through the Ouachita Mountains. Rebecca and I both know US geography really well. Neither of us had ever heard of the Ouachita Mountains in southeastern Oklahoma and southwestern Arkansas. They’re gorgeous! (And I think we passed three cars in about four hours, none of them going in our direction.)
We stopped at every scenic overlook and took endless photos. By the time we arrived in the next town, Mena, Arkansas, we knew we had to stop for the night. We were tired, and we make every effort not to drive after dark. The only problem was limited choice. We found three places. The first was a pit that did not begin to meet even our feeble standards. The second cost $165 … for a plain old motel room in Mena … on c’mon, you’ve got to be kidding! We found the third on Hotels.com: the Sassafras Inn. We put the address into the GPS and went to take a look. It’s a room in a home, but not a B&B or an Inn. Just a room in a home in a neighborhood with a tiny sign that says “Sassafras Inn.” Fortunately, it was a comfy room, and thanks to the Hotels.com “stay-ten-nights-and-get-a-night-for-free” program, it didn’t cost us anything. The owner was a world-class talker. If we were still there, he’d still be talking … but he was really proud of his home and his lodgings.
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Our walk around Mena brought us to a memorable book store: deeply political books that revealed nothing about the residents of the town: Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity alongside Hillary Clinton, Kurt Anderson, and Al Franken. My Inner Sociologist could have spent days observing and jawboning the people who came in to browse, but any more than one evening in Mena was way more than we could tolerate.
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The Lure of the Delta
From Mena, we were heading to the Delta, one of our favorite parts of the US! (We look forward to spending an entire winter in the Delta sometime soon, either in Clarksdale, Mississippi or Helena, Arkansas.)
Only one decision dictated our route across Arkansas: where to cross the Mississippi. There’s nearly 100 miles between the US 49 bridge at Helena to the north and the US 278 bridge to Greenville in the south … and there are no ferries in between. Greenville won. It gave us more time driving in the Delta and gave us a chance to visit Indianola, Mississippi, home of BB King, and Leland, Mississippi, home of Kermit the Frog. It’s hard to do better.
Arkansas Route 8 to Greenville, like the Ouachita Scenic Highway the day before, proved to be a perfect road-tripping road: fabulous scenery and virtually no other cars all day. The drive from Mena to Greenville is only five hours, so we had plenty of time for a walk in Arkadelphia. We programmed the Desoto Bluff Trail into the GPS and off we went.
The trail was beautiful and the signage informative, but the whole loop from the parking lot to the bluffs over the Ouachita River was only ¼ mile, hardly enough for two weary road warriors. We thought about doing it 4 or 5 times but instead found the Feaster Park Trail alongside a nifty creek. The best part was the clumps of daffodils about to bloom in mid-January, exactly the reason we left Vermont. A few hours later, we crossed the Mississippi.
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The last time we visited Indianola and Leland was in 2017 with my brother Joe. We spent an entire day at the BB King Museum and had a blast with Harlan Malone at the Blue Biscuit right across the street. This time, the museum and the Blue Biscuit were both closed when we were there. No big deal. But we also noticed that Harlan’s pimped out school bus was gone. (Harlan had installed black lighting and a stripper’s pole into a re-purposed school bus. Rebecca never saw the humor.) We learned that Harlan has died, but his business partner Trish continues to operate the restaurant. Harlan was a beaut! R.I.P. Harlan. We miss you.
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I recollected the child-like wonder of Leland’s Rainbow Connection Bridge. I remembered crying when I was there last, feeling like I was on sacred ground, the birthplace of Kermit. Alas, memories can play tricks. The signage was dilapidated. The water was murky and gross. Jim Henson and Kermit were most assuredly not born in paradise.
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Fortunately, our memories of Clarksdale were much more accurate. Clarksdale is a magical, spiritual place. It is the home of the “Crossroad,” where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to be able to play the blues – Highways 49 and 61. I don’t know why it is. I just know that an inexplicable number of amazing musicians grew up in the flat, black-soiled cotton fields around Clarksdale. Like New Orleans, it is a place where I don’t think I could ever spend enough time. The dirt around Clarksdale grows characters and creativity and music even better than it grows cotton.
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We spent our first afternoon with Roger Stolle, founder and proprietor of Cat Head. A native of Dayton and a super nice guy, Roger is one of the anchors and heroes of blues culture. He has written two books on the old bluesmen. The first one, “The Hidden History of Mississippi Blues,” was superb. The new one, “Mississippi Juke Joint Confidential” is in the car waiting to be devoured.
Roger is not only a treasure trove of blues knowledge and a hero of Delta culture, he is also a hero of My Inner Sociologist. We talked over the counter of Cat Head for a few hours. It was the conversation I was most looking forward to in Clarksdale. He is endlessly interesting and interested. While we were there, a blues-loving pilgrim from Belgium lingered for an hour or so, jawboned Roger about local blues and European blues, bought a few hundred dollars worth of books, and disappeared. That is Roger’s life: promoting and sustaining Delta Blues from behind the counter at Cat Head. The “Juke Joint Festival” and the “Clarksdale Film Festival” are Roger’s children, along with his co-parent, Bubba O’Keefe, Clarksdale’s Director of Tourism.
Bubba, we missed you on this trip. Can’t wait to see you again soon.
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LEFT: Roger Stolle is a gem: knowledgeable, kind, affable, committed. His love for the blues and blues musicians is deep and profound. I am really glad to have met him and to be getting to know him. Thank you, Roger!
CENTER: So what that we were in Clarksdale mid-week. The Bluesberry Cafe was closed until the weekend, which bummed us out, but Red’s and Ground Zero were going strong, even if they were nearly empty. (Awful for the club and the musicians, but great for Covid-conscious vagabonds.) Thanks for your music and conversation, Steve Kolbus and the Clarksdale Blues Review.
RIGHT: Who’d a thunk??? In Clarksdale on a quest for great BBQ, we happened upon Rest Haven, one of the best Lebanese meals ever. Fantastic stuffed grape leaves and kibbeh. Thank you, Paula!
The Shack Up Inn
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Our lodging in Clarksdale was not our usual roadside motel. Far from it. In fact, our lodging was one of the coolest, most unusual, most creative places to lay your head on the planet: The Shack Up Inn. Its owner and creative force is Bill Talbut, an indisputable genius of junk. One of the reasons I want to spend a winter in Clarksdale is just to be able to hang out with and work with Bill for a few months. His brain is a marvel! (Bill, if you are interested, my labor is free … and since I am only one year older than you, you have a good sense of my work speed.)
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After a number of careers, including selling shoes in Houston, Bill found himself broke in Clarksdale in his late 40s or early 50s. He acquired some land just south of Clarksdale and started collecting and rehabbing old Delta shacks. He fixed them up, retaining all of their Delta personality, and rented them out by the night to travelers. First thing he knew, he had the Shack Up Inn. He now has about 50 units, one cooler than the next. The pictures do way more justice to the Shack Up than anything I could write … except THANK YOU Bill, Tory, and everyone else there! You guys all totally rock!
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Helena: A Sad River Town and the Elaine Massacre
In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, when riverboats plied the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, river towns thrived. Today, with railroads, interstate highways, and river barges that carry enough fuel and crew for weeks of travel, the old river towns continue their slide into decay. Clarksdale is an exception thanks to the Blues and the marketing genius of the likes of Roger Stolle, Bubba O’Keefe, and Bill Talbut. Helena, Arkansas is far more typical. We have the good fortune of having a friend there, a wonderfully creative and kind young man who grew up in Nebraska around Rebecca and her kids. I first met Amoz about 20 years ago in Wilmette, Illinois when he was a young architect studying the concrete details of the Baha’i House of Worship. Amoz and his wife moved to Helena several years ago where he set up an architecture practice.
A few years ago, Amoz won a contract to design and construct a memorial to the Elaine Massacre of 1919. (The Wikipedia entry on the massacre is extremely informative and well done.) The similarities between the Elaine Massacre and the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 are shocking in many ways. It is yet another testimonial to America’s violent past. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “the Elaine Massacre was by far the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history and possibly the bloodiest racial conflict in the history of the United States.” Five white men died in the conflict. Something between 25 and 856 Black men, women, and children died. Nobody knows the real number.
The conflict grew from the questionable practices of landowners who were cheating the local sharecropping cotton farmers. Theoretically, share cropping could be a road to economic independence. But the Elaine land owners deprived the sharecroppers of fair prices, fair payment, and adequate resources, such as seed, to succeed. Organizers from the NAACP and the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America worked to improve the working conditions for the sharecroppers, including trying to secure fair payments for their crops. The white population grew alarmed at the prospect of an insurrection – an uprising – among the sharecroppers, so the Governor brought in the military, resulting in extreme violence. The Tulsa Massacre. The Scottsboro 9.The Elaine Massacre. The Atlanta Race Riots. And on and on and on. We are just beginning to really learn our own history … just as Governor Desantis of Florida is tamping down efforts to expand our nation’s history curricula. What a disgrace! What flagrant and divisive dishonesty!
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Amoz plotted our route north out of Helena. He managed to keep us on dirt roads for the first 5 or 10 miles including a little side adventure to the confluence of the St. Francis and the Mississippi Rivers. The road to the confluence was totally deserted … or so we thought. We left the car at what seemed to be the end of the road and walked through the mud to the confluence. I thought the deep, muffled noise was a distant tow boat on the Mississippi. A hunter/fisherman had managed to back his Jeep to the river and was launching a small john boat filled with gear. I yelled down to him, asking if he was hunting or fishing. He yelled back that he had been out in his boat a few days before at the same time of day and had seen about 20 hogs and 10 deer. He was on his way back to see if he could snag any.
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The Best Memphis Ribs Yet!
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About 20 years ago, when my daughters were young, we went on a family adventure during February vacation to Memphis, then through the Delta to New Orleans. The trip began with my old college friend Syd. Syd went to five of the very best rib joints in Memphis and bought an order of dry ribs, an order of wet ribs, and an order of cole slaw at each. He then arranged a blind taste test for us. The next day, none of us could remember which BBQ joint won. They were all fantastic. We ate ribs all the way to New Orleans!
Before leaving Memphis on this trip, Rebecca and I needed to eat us some ribs. (Syd and his wife Lauren had fed us some kick-ass wild duck the night before.) Syd recommended The Rendezvous, a 75-year-old joint downtown, in an alley right across the street from the famous Peabody Hotel. It was perfect for three reasons. 1) We were headed in the right direction, since we planned to stay on the Arkansas side of the river for the first portion of the trip to St. Louis. 2) We got to visit the Peabody. 3) They were hands-down the best ribs I have ever eaten. The rub includes some Greek spices, like fennel and rosemary, that adds amazing flavor, and the meat retains some body and chewiness even after eight hours of cooking. The slaw, dressed with a simple mixture of yellow mustard and white vinegar, can’t be beat. (The pitmasters, by the way, cook FOUR TONS – 8,000 pounds – of ribs every week!)
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From Memphis, we headed north, starting the final leg of our journey home. We drove through Sikeston, Missouri. We had stopped at Lambert’s in Sikeston on the way west for their ridiculous quantities of southern cooking and “throwed rolls.” We did not stop a second time.