Water logged

Not much to write about today. The rain began (love the sound on the Airstream!) early this morning and has continued all day. We had planned to visit the Mississippi geo-site, but any outdoor activity is pretty much a wash-out today. Tomorrow, and the rest of the week is supposed to be clear and sunny; cold overnight, but still, sunny during the day.

We have spent the day planning future travel, but a day like today can be a challenge when it comes time to do the blog. Fortunately, I have a few pictures that didn't make the first cut on a particular day's blog.

We have been traveling through the Mississippi Delta for the past week. What we have learned is that the "Delta" is basically the lower Mississippi Valley. The river "bottomland" is rich farmland and has supported agriculture for centuries. A revolution in Delta agriculture took place after World War II. Machines replaced people. First came the motorized tractor. A basic two-row cultivator tractor, with one driver, could do the work of ten men and their mules.

Next is the mechanical cotton picker that was first demonstrated in the 1930s. It uses spindles (metal fingers) to pull lint from the bolls. Since the early 1960s, the Arkansas cotton crop is now completely machine picked. This mechanization displaced thousands of sharecroppers and farmhands. Many headed north to cities like Detroit and Chicago. Agricultural counties in the Delta lost population dramatically. In 1945, there were 99,000 farms in the Arkansas Delta with an average size of 78 acres. By 1987, there were only 15,000 farms but the average size is 530 acres.

The Delta is amazingly flat, and not in the same way that Iowa is flat. I think it is because the bottomland sits low all around you. And there are not the trim and attractive farms of the midwest. These farms seem to be a collection of covered farm machinery shelters with homes that are little more than small bungalows. And everything seems to be slightly askew, leaning to the left or to the right. But the people are extremely nice. The other night we had pulled off to the side of the road to study a map to fine a place that might have internet access. A young man and his dad in a pick-up truck drove past but then backed-up to see if we needed any help. We told them we were looking for a coffee shop (we had something like Starbucks in mind) and they told us we would have to go to DeWitt, 13 miles away, to find one. They then offered to show us and took us the 13 miles and pulled into the parking lot of the Catfish Shack where they said we could find a cup of coffee or something to eat (November 14th blog).

Roadside art - a friendly tire man.

We think this is rice. Rice, along with cotton, seems to be the predominant crop along our route.