Jackson, MS
Another long day. I knew there wouldn’t be any place to eat lunch, so I planned to get lunch before I left, didn’t, and ended up about being right that there was no place to eat lunch.
I hate being right.
Not eating makes me immensely tired, very bizarre in the head and generally irritable. So why was it that I had a grin on my face all day despite the hardships?
For one thing, I was out of the city and back in the country with absolutely nobody around. Barely a car on my road, barely a human to interact with. For another I was on semi-familiar terrain in parts. And for a third, I was doing a Civil War trip. All three calculated to make me a happy man.
My intent was to follow General Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign. I followed the Natchez Trace Parkway north out of Natchez. After a short ride through the boondocks to the Windsor Ruins and Bethel Church – both sites passed by Grant’s army in 1863 – I picked up the Trace again and generally followed the route of march: through Port Gibson and Grand Gulf, Rocky Springs and Dillon’s Plantation, Raymond and into Jackson.
Raymond was particularly entertaining. I came into town from the west on MS 467 and as I approached the outskirts of town I suddenly realized I’d been that way before. And just up ahead, past the houses of secessionists with their shutters tightly closed we should round a curve and climb a hill and see the Stars and Stripes raised over the county courthouse as the long, dusty column of blue behind and around me burst into a thunderous cheer. I had marched here before, ten years ago. And there was the tree on the courthouse green under which I’d spent the night after being abandoned on a Mississippi back road by a taxi driver after I ran out of money. And there’s the route down to the event site over which a gentleman gave me a ride in the back of his pickup truck. And goddamn if that Raymond Military Park doesn’t have a road through the woods on which I distinctly remember halting on the march and lying down for a bit to my colonel’s chagrin. Hell, there was even a water spigot back amongst the trees – a remnant from our march ten years ago.
I felt a little like one of the old fellows coming back to a battlefield years after the fact and marvelling at the details you remember of a place you visited and deeds you performed long ago. A very eerie feeling. A very happy feeling.