Day 27, 0 miles, rest day, Blytheville, AR
Day 26, 76 miles, Brownsville, TN, to Marion, AR
Day 25, 63 miles, Huntingdon to Brownsville, TN
Day 24, 70 miles, Dickson (Montgomery Bell State Park) to Huntingdon, TN
Day 23, 41 miles, Nashville to Dickson, TN
The Mississippi is big. A mile wide from Memphis, Tenn., over to West Memphis, Ark. Crossing the Mighty Mississippi on a bike takes a while.
Here on Day 26 of my 70-day xUS bike trip, I enjoyed every one of the 15 minutes or so (with photo/video stops) of the crossing along the Big Crossing bike bridge, from the gleeful approach:
…to the joyful traverse (Memphis on left, reversed for selfie):
And the finish into anti-climactic West Memphis, Arkansas, passing through miles of backed up cars and trucks waiting to cross over the river on the diverted route from I-40 (bridge out in case you haven’t heard).
Growing up in Iowa (until age 14) as a lover of books, the Mississippi always held an aura of mystique and historical significance for me. I voraciously consumed Mark Twain’s tomes about the great river, and imagined Huckleberry Finn’s great adventures on the water every time I came near the river, secretly wanting to steal away on a raft, too.
Our family had close cousins who lived in southern Iowa in a river town, Fort Madison, and every time we visited there we’d go to River Park and stare across that mile-wide expanse of hydraulic power.
I’ve since visited the Amazon, and seen China’s Yangtze from a distance, legendary rivers in their own right. But even those rivers, winding and meandering their way through their respective lands, don’t present the straightforward, land-bisecting undeniability that the Mississippi does.
The Mississippi also carries outsized importance on a xUS bike trip. It divides the continent, nearly in two equal halves. In other words, it’s the de facto, conceptual halfway point, if not literally so. Crossing the great river means you’ve covered some ground, you’ve made it to the middle, you’ve passed a point at which returning would be idiocy. You’re committed now.
And while I still have a few days to ride before my actual halfway point, crossing the Mississippi means I’m very close, a couple hundred miles away. At this point, I’ve ridden more than 1,400 miles, passed through 11 states, with five more to go. Of course, western states are a lot bigger than eastern states, and they take longer to cover. A few days of Arkansas, and Texas looms with its unfathomably vast expanses of flat scrub land, its dust storms, its western emptiness, abandoned businesses and dwellings, and sun, too much sun.
Here I come. So long, Tennessee.