“The Mississippi Delta was shining like a National guitar,” sings Paul Simon at the start of “Graceland,” his marvelous 1986 song. “I am following the river, down the highway, through the cradle of the Civil War. I am going to Graceland, Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee.”
That road, presumably, was the Great River Road (GRR), which is the focus of today’s #stampoftheday, a 5-cent cent stamp issued on October 21, 1967. This stamp, and Simon’s song, bring up memories of marvelous trips in the past, sadness about the lack of those trips today, and hopes for similar ones in the future.
I’ve never travelled the GRR, which was created in 1938 from a network of federal, state, and local roads to form a single route along the Mississippi from its headwaters in Minnesota to its mouth in Louisiana. Because it often changes direction, frequently crosses the river, and passes through a variety of off-the-beaten path towns, that route is about 50 percent longer than comparable route along the interstates.
“If the road itself isn’t your destination, don’t take it,” notes roadtripusa.com website which adds: “The GRR is nothing if not scenic, and anyone who equates the Midwest with the flat Kansas prairie will be pleasantly surprised. Sure, farms line the road, but so do upland meadows, cypress swamps, thick forests, limestone cliffs, and dozens of parks and wildlife refuges.”
However, the site also warns, “it isn’t all pretty. There’s enough industry along the Mississippi for you to navigate the river by the flashing marker lights on smokestacks, and a half-dozen major cities compete with their bigger cousins on the coasts for widest suburban sprawl and ugliest roadside clutter. A pandemic of tacky strip malls has infected the region” and because of “the astounding growth in casinos…you’ll never be more than 100 miles from a slot machine.”
Other concur with the website’s assessments. “Along the Great River Road, we found a little bit of everything,” wrote Peter Kujawinski a New York Times travel section article recounting a 2017 trip he took with his wife and three young children, 16 years after a car accident ended honeymoon trip on the same road. “Heavy industry, civilizations thousands of years old, the horrors of slavery, wilderness, hawks, and turtles. And our own personal history as glimpsed through two trips 16 years apart.”
He added: “The Mississippi River is a movable feast, an ancient waterway filled with the ambitions, sorrows and joys of countless lives. I imagine myself decades in the future, an old man, crossing over the river yet again and swimming in the memory of my children yelling out the river’s name. The river is deep enough and long enough to hold it all.”
Learning about the road, reading about Kujawinski’s trip, and thinking about “Graceland,” makes me yearn for the time when I can again take a meandering road trip – perhaps by cars but more likely by bicycle, or perhaps an e-bike. Over the years such bike road trips – which have taken me, sometimes with my wife, sometimes with my whole families, and (a long time ago) with friends, have allowed me to explore a host of wonderful places including western Ireland, southern France, Prince Edward Island, southern Quebec, northern Vermont, coastal and inland Maine, western Norway, and Bohemia in the Czech Republic. Hopefully, we’ll not only get back on the road again, but will do so at a time when I don’t have to minimize my interactions with other people and new places. Like Paul Simon, I need it because “for reasons I cannot explain, there’s some part of me wants to see Graceland….I’ve a reason to believe, we all will be received in Graceland.”
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, travel safely, and work for peace.