[Author’s Note: Before this post, I had not been using “Read More” links in these posts. Mainly because I didn’t want it to seem like I was trying to drive pageviews to the actual website at the expense of the people who like to stay on the Tumblr Dashboard. But this post is ~1800 words, and the rest of the posts aren’t going to get much shorter, so I am putting a “Read More” link for these posts starting now, as a consideration for people who don’t want a wall of text on their Dashboard]
I rose in the morning with Shreveport as my destination, but before making my way to Louisiana I wanted to drive further into Arkansas. Texarkana is barely within Arkansas, and I technically slept in Texas, so if I’d left Arkansas then, I would already not be doing a very good job of seeing all of the contiguous states. So I drove to Murfreesboro.
I followed Highway 67 northwest as it paralleled I-30 until Fulton, then took AR-195 to Washington, where I continued my climb north on US-278. I saw more towns with three digit populations during this foray into southwest Arkansas than I had ever previously seen. I even passed by a town in the double digits. That’s not even a town. It’s insane to think you could take an entire town, put them in the same house, and no one would even feel claustrophobic.
Shortly after turning on Highway 278, I spotted a woman and two teen boys standing in the road. Since they were occupying my lane, this was a problem. Slowing down, I saw that they all had orange road worker vests, and the lady was carrying a stop sign. I came to a complete stop in front of them, and none of them gave any sign of notification that I was feet away from them, or that they had interrupted my journey because they had indirectly instructed me to. After remaining confused for more than a few seconds, I decided that it was meant as a “come to a complete stop, look both ways, then continue” type of stop sign, and began to slowly creep around the trio. If the woman had not given me any recognition before, I now completely occupied her focus, as she jumped in front of my car, almost throwing herself on my hood. “Can’t you read?” she screamed at me. “S – T – O – P! Stop!” I was beyond embarrassed. In my mind, getting called illiterate in Arkansas is like being called malnourished in Ethiopia. I sheepishly put the car in reverse and backed into the right side of the road. After at least fifteen minutes of waiting, with a line of vehicles stretching into the horizon behind me, a caravan of vehicles appeared in the distance. The lead truck pulled to the side, and the rest of the procession passed us, surely thankful to have both lanes available again. The government truck acting as our pied piper did a 180, the stop sign lady turned the sign around to SLOW, and we finally started moving again. We saw the cause of the road block half a mile later; six feet worth of the entire left lane was missing. I reasoned that this was an acceptable justification for the inconvenience of a one-lane road, though they could have set the road block closer to the point of incidence. Oh well, the road is not perfect, and neither are we. The rest of the drive to Murfreesboro passed without complication.
Murfreesboro has a significant place in my family history as well, if not slightly less than Texarkana. My father had spent his toddler years there, and it was the birthplace of his youngest sister. The town still hosted a number of distant cousins, though unfortunately I didn’t have time to make house calls. As I pulled into the town square, I spotted billboards for Murfreesboro’s two biggest attractions, diamond mining and arrowhead excavating. When I was a boy, we came up for a weekend of doing those two things, and I have a great fondness for Murfreesboro because of it. Nevermind the fact that we found no diamonds, and didn’t even have a chance to search for arrowheads, due to a freak storm that made us have to cut our weekend trip short. I wouldn’t be hunting for arrowheads this time either, but this was OK since I was decidedly less interested in it at this point in my life.
Murfreesboro is one of the few places I’ve been to with an authentic town square, and it is as delightful as it is quaint. At the center of the square is the Pike County Courthouse, a three-story building with a fading brick exterior that makes no denial of its 80-year age. The square’s perimeter consisted of various old-timey shops which would have been considered antique shops, if they were located in a town besides Murfreesboro.
After walking around the square for a bit, and just for a bit, as it’s not big by any imagination, I decided to get lunch at the square’s only restaurant, Simple Simon’s Pizza. It turned out to be a buffet, staffed by two girls, neither of which could have been over seventeen. After taking my order, the teen working the cashier stared at me as if she had something to say, but wanted me to initiate the conversation. Just a few seconds later she decided she couldn’t wait.
“You missed the ‘citement!”
There was no harm in humoring her. “What happened?”
“’Bout thirty kids from Center Point were here for lunch!”
“Where’s Center Point?” I asked.
She shot her left arm up and pointed to the side of the building. “Somewhere round that way.”
Yes folks, that is what passes for the high point of some people’s days. Ribbing aside, Murfreesboro was a fantastic place to visit. The buildings were picturesque, the pizza was better than it had any right to be, and the people were sincerely kind. I was glad I made the trip up.
It was time to leave Arkansas and go south to Shreveport, but I knew I wasn’t leaving Murfreesboro the same path I came up. I may be dumb enough to drive around a lady in the middle of the road holding a stop sign, but I’m not stupid enough to return to the one lane timesink. Instead I took AR-355 back to Fulton, Highway 67 west to Texarkana, and US-71 south all the way to Shreveport.
I learned two things about Louisiana shortly after crossing the state border. The first is that they do not have “city limit” signs, they have “corp limit” signs. I learned afterwards that this is because they are incorporated cities. But they are still cities, and thus should have city limit signs. I don’t know why this bothered me, but it did. The second thing I learned about driving in Louisiana is they have “speed zones”. This is a misnomer. When I passed my first “Speed Zone Ahead” zone, I got excited. “Oh boy! I found the Cajun Autobahn!” I said to myself. Instead, it was the opposite of a speed zone. It was an anti-speed zone. Now, I have no problem with this, we have these in Texas too. But at least we’re honest about it. Our signs say “Reduced Speed Ahead”. Let’s cut the bullshit, Louisiana.
When I talk about Shreveport, I’m really talking about the Shreveport-Bossier City metropolitan area. The Red River physically separates the two, but thanks to Interstate 20 you’d hardly notice it. Shreveport emitted a sadness about it. You could tell that the city had once been hip, with the kind of nightlife that could have rivaled New Orleans. But now Shreveport seemed to exist solely to host the gambling boathouses, and at the same time the gambling revenue was the only thing holding the city together.
It may seem an exaggeration, but everything in the city glorified the gambling boats. Every few feet you saw enormous billboards advertising them, which was silly since you could turn your head slightly and see the casinos and their hotels. The freeway exits were identified by which casinos you could reach, and roads were named after the gambling establishments. Don’t get me wrong, I know the river boats provided many jobs to the local residents, and a city with an economy powered by gambling is better than not having that money flowing through the town. It just saddened me that I knew the Shreveport I was seeing was merely a shadow of its former self.
After driving up and down Shreveport’s access roads, trying to find escape from the casinos, I happened upon a boardwalk that sat on the Red River. Actually, it was an open-air mall with a boardwalk at the end, but I like to pretend that we still live in a time that a boardwalk could be built for a reason other than increasing the already sky-high consumerism per square foot. I sat on a bench overlooking the Red River, which commanded more respect than I had given it while passing over on the interstate. The river was the reason Shreveport had been created; the steamboat traffic that passed through made the town an important trade junction in the early 19th century.
Peaceful as it was, I couldn’t sit and listen to the noises of the river all day. In a matter of twenty-four hours, I had gone from having a place to stay in Shreveport for the night to being homeless. The house I had planned on staying was no longer available, and I had to figure something out before it got dark. I pulled out my laptop to look for a nearby motel, and I instantly noticed something was amiss. After searching my duffel bag and the trunk, I realized what it was: my laptop’s power cable. I could think of only one place it could be, as I frantically pulled out my phone and called my cousin.
“Hey did I…”
“Your power cord?”
“Shit. OK, well…I guess I’ll be back for dinner.”
I cursed myself. Not just for being forgetful, but for being so reliant on technology that if a situation like this happened, I would have no choice but to go back. I remembered, however, to be thankful that Texarkana was only an hour and a half behind me. If this had happened after driving 600 miles, I don’t know what I would have done. Probably cried.
As I started navigating back towards Highway 71, the weather seemed to notice my foul mood and decided it wanted to play along. Out of the blue sky, a torrential downpour began. It was raining so hard I didn’t know if I was going to make it out of Shreveport alive. Drivers were pulling off the road and parking beneath underpasses. I continued heading north at a slow pace, and was well outside of city limits before I escaped the storm.
When I made it back to Texarkana, I decided I would spend the night again. I was none too happy about this. Over the course of the day I had driven close to 300 miles, and yet my car was still sitting in the same spot as it was when I woke up that morning. Worse yet, I was 36 hours into my cross-country road trip and I was sleeping in Texas yet again. I resolved that the next day would be a new beginning, and I would make it out of Texas, through Louisiana, and well into Mississippi. But before all that I would sleep in a comfortable and familiar bed.
