June 7, 2006
Miss Sourit, the smiling lady
We are now in Missouri, the prettiest state yet. Part of that could be that it is reminiscent of south-western France, with its green fields, winding roads and wooded hillsides. The rest may be that it is so clean. It's not as prosperous as Virginia - I expect few places are - but, again unlike Virginia, there's no litter. Don't ask me why but people here no longer throw drink bottles and the fried-chicken wrappings out of their car window.
On a bike you appreciate that: it gets depressing to have a rubbish-filled ditch on your right for hours on end. Of course, it could be that the people of Missouri find room for all their cast-offs at home...
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Now, I forget how far we got. I seem to remember that the last time I caught up was to say that we were about to pass into Kentucky and that the locals had warned of wild dogs, depressing poverty and people who have to uncross their eyes before they speak.
Well, there was none of that. There was poverty, yes, but only of the sort that I'd find in any community dependent on agriculture for its wages. I have seen worse in England, in the Fens for instance. And as for the dogs and tales that nobody got across the state without a dozen tins of Mace to fend them off... yes, more dogs than usual but hardly drip-fanged monsters eager to tear the flesh from your carves.
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We crossed from Kentucky to Illinois on a ferry across the Ohio. Funny thing it was too, this ferry, because it amounted to a barge with the nose of a tug-boat joined to it by hinge halfway down its length.
It's as though two neighbours found that one owned a barge and the other a tug and pooled their resources. To cross the river, the tug sails straight ahead with the barge hanging off its bows. When it approaches the bank, the tug swings out sideways and pushes the barge crabwise to the shore, when experience ensures it meets up with the ramp left there for it.
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Anywhere else, a river crossing would be a tourist trap. But in Kentucky there was nothing and on the Illinois side there was just an apologetic village whose idea of a good time was a night at a brick building that called itself the Little Opry in the hope of reflected glory from the Grand Old Opry in Nashville.
Things never got better. The next village should have been a gem. The wide rippling water was beautiful and the place should have been full of visitors. As it was, other than a small hotel which looked as though it was doing all right, the village looked as though in another 30 years it could just crumble to dust.
It's unfair to expect places to be more than they are, just for your sake. It's good when they make an effort but sometimes even that can make you smile. Our last town in our brief crossing of Illinois was Chester. You can't escape its boast that it is the home town of Popeye, the cartoon character.
There is a Popeye museum - "cute little place, takes all of three minutes to visit" - and Popeye and Olive Oyl figures through which you can poke your head and have your photo taken. And the last thing before crossing into Missouri is a bronze statue of Popeye beside the road.
But the sad thing is that, while the cartoonist who drew Popeye was born in Chester, he never lived there when he created the cartoons. Popeye first appeared in the theatre at Chester and he was based on a real-life Mississipi sailor - a "scrapper" - but Popeye himself began his inky life in California, to which the artist was presumably pleased to move to escape Chester.
Anyway, the Mississipi bridge has taken us into Missouri and the Ozark mountains. Not mountains by any normal standards but plenty high enough and, in keeping with the cleanliness of the state, crossed by a succession of sparkling streams. The peace of one of which was seriously disturbed yesterday by a flotilla of noisy cyclists in canoes.
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