Monday, February 13th, 2006 - Rocky Springs, Mississippi.

We started our day exploring the remnant of the old Natchez Trace that passed near our campground. I really enjoyed walking on the same path that Americans were walking as our country expanded to the west. Of course, I enjoy historical sites in general, but it was nice to have one that was completely peaceful in nature rather than being related to one of the many wars that shaped our country. Thinking about boatmen walking back from a trip to New Orleans was much more pleasant than imagining the difficult life of soldiers at Valley Forge or the desperate battles fought during the Revolutionary War and Civil War.

The original trail passed by the site of the town of Rocky Springs for which our campground was named. However, the only surviving building from the town was a plain but pretty little Methodist church. It was situated on a hill overlooking the site of the town with the town cemetery off to one side. The interior was, like all Methodist churches I have been in, quite plain and devoid of ornamentation but it was clear that they still held services there regularly although the town has long since disappeared.

Although once a prosperous town of 2,600 inhabitants on the old Natchez Trace, the town of Rocky Springs had failed by the mid 1800s mainly because the cotton growers did not practice any type of soil conservation and ultimately the fertile topsoil eroded away. Since even George Washington was aware of the problems of erosion due to continuous planting of one crop back before 1800, I was a little surprised that those cotton growers seemed to be ignorant of that problem 50 years later. Or maybe they knew there would be a problem but just chose to ignore that knowledge. I imagine people in the future might look back and wonder why the people in the U.S. completely ignored the knowledge of global warning before it had catastrophic consequences, so in some sense history is repeating itself once again, only this time on a much broader scale.

In any case, the town had so thoroughly disappeared that we could not even see the outlines of old buildings or basements. All that was left of the town was a couple of safes, one of which had apparently been used by the local post office, and two cisterns for storing rain water. The rest of the land all around was still very deeply eroded even a century after the over-cropping had destroyed the farms. However, the second growth forests were making a comeback in the parkway area and it was very pleasant to wander among the trees on our way back to our campground.

Since it was sunny, I set up our new photovoltaic array to help charge the trailer battery while we spent the day driving the truck around to see some of the nearby sites on the parkway. Just to the south of us was Owens Creek waterfall. Since Owens Creek doesn't usually have water in it anymore, the waterfall is typically dry, but since it had rained a couple days back there was a bit of water flowing in the creek on the day we visited. That enabled us to take some nice pictures of the waterfall with at least some dripping water to show how it might have looked back in the old days. The ledge over which the water fell must have been quite a bit harder rock than the stuff underneath, because the lower layer was eroded back several feet under the lip of the waterfall.

Another form of "erosion" was a wooden bench that had large holes and gouges pecked in it. Having seen a pileated woodpecker slowly peck a big log to pieces in my back yard, I had my suspicions about the perpetrator. Sure enough, a short distance away we saw a pileated woodpecker ripping into a tree trunk, so I expect my hunch was right.

Driving back north a bit, we drove up past the Choctaw Boundary, a line of trees that marked the western boundary of the Choctaw nation. Curiously, that line of trees had been there for well over 200 years. We stopped at the Visitor Center at Clinton, a pretty place with a nice little gift shop and some historical exhibits. The ladies there told us about a nice local restaurant called "Tates" that specialized in barbecue dishes. That sounded good so we drove into Clinton and found it in a small shopping area on Northside Drive. This was a real "down home" type of place with checkered plastic tablecloths and plastic utensils, but the food was excellent. I had the barbecue chicken luncheon and Monika had the barbecue "Texas Steak", and what wonderful meals those were! Mine was 1/2 a chicken plus a baked potato and green beans while Monika ended up with 5 big slabs of beef plus a baked potato and coleslaw.

Thoroughly replete, we drove back down the parkway to our campsite and started a campfire just for fun. I had carried sections of 2x4 lumber in the back of truck all the way to the west coast on Wanderung 8 and not burned it, but that afternoon I finally got my chance and we enjoyed it thoroughly. Somehow it seems like a camping trip is not really complete unless we can have at least a couple of campfires along the way, and this was really our first chance during Wanderung 11 since Texas had a ban on all outdoor fires and in Louisiana we had been rained out. As the sun set I disconnected the solar cells and we retired into the trailer for the evening.

Unfortunately the night turned out to be far less restful than we would have wished. Around 1 a.m. we were awakened by a "thunk thunk thunk" sound coming underneath our cabinets roughly in the place where our trailer's propane furnace is located. The trailer was getting cold and it soon became obvious that the furnace was not working. Monika tried to light the stove burners and sure enough we were out of propane, so I had to go outside in my pajamas and uncover the propane bottles so that I could switch the supply line over to the full bottle. I hoped that would do it, but the furnace continued to make the "thunk thunk thunk" sounds and blow cold air. Since the low battery warning was also peeping whenever the furnace tried to light, I went back outside and hooked up our emergency spare battery to the trailer's batter. Still no luck. I was fresh out of ideas and not eager to wander around outside in my pajamas anymore, so we turned off the furnace, bundled up with another layer of clothes, and crept back into bed for the rest of the night.