This place is half a mile from my mother-in-law’s house. How have I never seen it before? I grabbed a couple donuts on the day after Christmas and again on the morning of our drive home. They weren’t the best donuts ever, but they were far from the worst.
After leaving Fort Pillow, we drove south on Route 51. As we passed through Covington, Tennessee I saw a donut shop. I reacted immediately and turned into the lot. My wife was a bit surprised by my maneuver, but adjusted quickly and ordered a custard-filled donut.
I walked in to a large and rather sparse room. A young Asian woman was sitting at a table behind the counter with a boy of perhaps four. She came forward and asked how she could help me. I requested the custard-filled donut for my wife. The woman picked up a pair of tongs, grabbed the donut — and walked into the back room and disappeared.
I thought this was more than a little bit odd, and was chuckling to myself as I walked over to the cooler to see what sort of drinks they had. That’s when I discovered a man, I assume the husband of the young woman, lying on the floor with a blanket and pillow, looking at his phone. He looked up at me, then resumed whatever he was doing.
A few minutes later the woman returned, with the donut still grasped in the tongs. She put it in a bag, then asked if there was anything else. I ordered an apple fritter for myself, and a couple drinks.
I was laughing as I got into the car. I handed my wife her donut as I said, “I don’t know what they did to it, but here it is.” I explained what had happened, but we ate the donuts anyway. And they were pretty good.
The weather on Christmas Eve was beautiful — finally. We headed for Fort Pillow State Park, a Civil War site I’d never visited even though I’d passed it probably 30 times in my life while heading to visit family in Arkansas. There’s this thing called the Mississippi River in between I-55 and the park and no bridges between Dyersburg and Memphis.
But we were on the right (east) side of the river this time. I checked the web site to make sure it was open on Christmas Eve. It clearly stated that it was open seven days a week except Thanksgiving and Christmas. You know where this is going, don’t you?
The park entrance is 19 miles off the main highway, and the visitor center is another three miles from the park entrance. The highway passes through the middle of the West Tennessee State Penitentiary. We drove the 22 miles in a state of high expectation and arrived at the visitor center to find a small sign that said “Closed.” That’s all. No explanation. There was a box with brochures nearby. I took one and turned it over and read
Hours of Operation
8 a.m. CT until Sunset
8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Museum (7 days a week)
Closed Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day
Quite frankly, this makes me angry. I don’t get angry often. And I don’t even get very angry about this, but I do get a little angry. If your web site says you’re going to be open, then be open. If you’re not going to be open, change your web site. It’s that easy. It’s also polite and kind.
Anyway, it was a nice day, and there were remains of the fort walls all around and a sign at the beginning of a trail pointing to a section of restored fortifications where the primary battle took place. We decided to take a walk.
In short, the Confederates built the fort here in 1861 to guard the Mississippi. They named it after General Gideon J. Pillow. They evacuated the position in mid-1862 after the Battle of Shiloh. Union troops, many of them from Black units, occupied the fort in 1863, using only a portion of the works and a much smaller force. On April 12, 1864, the fort was attacked by a force led by General Nathan Bedford Forrest. With the advantage of surprise and elevation, the Confederates overwhelmed the defenders. A huge percentage of Black troops were killed, and the battle is generally considered to have been a massacre.
We walked down one hill and up another. The trail cut through a patch of woods, down an old road bed, along a power-line clearing. We kept seeing signs that the “restored fortifications” were just ahead. After about a mile and a half, my wife’s hip began hurting. We reached a ridge overlooking The Chute, a former section of the Mississippi that has been cut off and now, although forming the border of Arkansas and Tennessee, is on the east side of the river.
A sign — Restored Fortifications — pointed to a trail that led down the bluff toward the water. There was a road down there, and I figured we could have probably driven to our destination. We decided to go back and try from the other direction. We walked perhaps a mile back along a paved road. When we got to the point where the trail left the road, I left my wife sitting in the Red Chair in the woods and went back for the car.
I was a little insecure about abandoning her there. I ran part of the way back to the car and got there much quicker than I had anticipated. I started driving, but when I didn’t come upon another park road, I looked at the brochure map. That’s when I discovered that the road I’d left her next to wasn’t in the park. Although I was only half a mile from her by trail, I was about eight or nine miles away by road.
I won’t say I panicked, but I felt like a jerk. My wife isn’t all that into battlefields, although she likes a nice hike. I didn’t know exactly where she was (unless I walked back on the trail) and I thought she’d probably think I was gone a long time. I sped through the park, far exceeding the speed limit, turned onto the state road and watched for the turn off to the road where she was waiting. When I got to the road, I was further befuddled. The name of the road on the brochure was Cold Creek Road. On the sign, it was called Crutcher Lake Road. What to do?
An electric company truck was parked a short way down the road. A guy in uniform was just packing up the last of his stuff to leave. I stopped and asked if this was the way to the fortifications. He said no, that I’d have to go back to the main park entrance. I didn’t want to tell him I’d left my wife in the woods, so I said that I’d been there already and thought there might be an easier way down this road. He wasn’t sure. So I showed him the map and told him I was looking for Cold Creek Road. He pondered and replied that Cold Creek could be reached by driving down the road. He was a very friendly guy and would have chatted for hours. I was in a hurry. I cut him off, thanked him profusely (to lessen my rudeness) and sped off.
Finally I arrived at the bend. I could just see my wife’s red shirt off in the woods. I’m sure nobody else driving on the road would have noticed. She saw me and came walking with the chair.
I apologized over and over, but she wasn’t sure why. She agreed that it would have made more sense for her to have walked the rest of the trail with me, but we hadn’t known. She said I was gone maybe half an hour and that she had enjoyed a nice, quiet rest on a nice day.
We drove down to the bottom of the bluff but saw no way to get to the fortifications. (I think the place where we turned around on the trail was probably very close to them.) So we left. It was not at all the way I’d planned the morning to go.
I planned an Option A and an Option B for this afternoon. If the weather was nice, we would visit Garden of the Gods in the Shawnee National Forest and do some hiking. The weather was not nice. We went with Option B — driving a somewhat serpentine route through nine counties in Illinois I’d never been in before.
We drove north from New Harmony to Interstate 64 and almost immediately arrived at an accident scene just moments after the emergency vehicles got there — they’d actually passed us on the way. Two semi’s were off the road. One was tipped all the way over on its side. The other, a hundred yards or so down the highway, was upright in front but the back end of the trailer was twisted and lying down.
We cut north for about six miles to get Edwards and Wabash Counties, then got back on I-64 and drove west into Wayne County. The we headed south and spent the next three hours far off the Interstate.
We made one stop along the way to get something to drink, in Harrisburg, at the only McDonald’s we saw all afternoon. I pulled next door to get a shot of Big John in front of a grocery store.
The rain continued all afternoon, with only occasional let-ups. I was looking forward to our drive through the National Forest, but that’s when it began raining the hardest. As we approached the hills, I could see them disappearing into the rain. Whatever the rain equivalent of a white-out is called, that’s what we had. I drove slowly through the woods, avoiding downed branches that were scattered all over the pavement.
When it finally let up a little, we saw a flock of about 15 Wild Turkeys stroll across in front of the car.
And then the storm passed and it turned into a lovely evening, complete with rainbows and sunsets. During the course of the afternoon, I took photos through the windshield of the various skies we saw. (For the rainbow picture, we stopped and I got out.)
A flock of blackbirds crossing in front of us.
Crossing the Ohio River into Kentucky.
In the southern outskirts of Paducah. Even along here, we ran into showers.
We drove until we got to Dyersburg, Tennessee and stopped at a Hampton Inn with an unlit parking lot. It was rather old and run down by HI standards, but OK. With very few attractive options for supper, I agreed to go to a Cracker Barrel, one of the restaurants on my “Not if I have anything to say about it” list. My wife insisted that her meal was good. My breakfast skillet was mediocre at best.
For the record, the other Illinois counties I added to my list were White, Hamilton, Gallatin, Saline, Pope, and Hardin.
This part of New Harmony was decidedly less weird. There were about three blocks of attractive old storefronts, including three pretty good antique stores that were actually open.
This one, in an old firehouse, had some really tempting stuff, but we got away with just a case for Double Cola and a mug. When I asked the pleasant woman who ran the store how business was, she slipped into a community propaganda spiel. She and her husband live upstairs.
We ate lunch at the Yellow Tavern. My cheeseburger and my wife’s fried bologna sandwich were excellent. The “specialty” bread pudding we had for dessert, not so much.
It was an “eat peanuts and throw the shells on the floor” place, but unlike most of that sort of restaurant, they don’t clean up the shells. They just sweep them into deep piles along the walls and counter. You can see one of the piles under the stools.
While we ate, we watched the weather report which was predicting violent storms all across the area. It sorta felt like our last meal before we died.
It began raining hard before we left, then let up a bit. We visited one more antique store, where I bought a Holiday magazine from 1949. The cashier looked at it and said, “I was 12 when this came out.” I said, “I was minus 9.” She thought that was pretty funny. While I looked around, my wife went next door to a shop that sold homemade organic soaps and bought a couple bars. We hung around a bit too long. The storm hit and a wall of water fell from the sky. After about five minutes, we made a mad dash for the car and arrived alive but decidedly wet.
