Highpoint #16: Hoosier Hill, IN (1257')

As flat states go, Indiana is one of the flattest. Its high point is less than 1000 feet above its low point, and almost all of that elevation change is gradual. Knowing all that, I was expecting Hoosier Hill to be a joke.

And it would have been, if it hadn’t been told with such earnestness.

I peeled off the interstate at Richmond, IN, and headed north. The town soon gave way to lightly rolling farmlands, still bare in mid-May. A few turns, the last one marked with an “<-- Indiana’s Highest Point” sign, brought me to the single-lane road to the highpoint.

Hoosier Hill looms proud in the distance.

I crossed a field, passed a farmhouse and a dairy barn, and arrived at the high point.

Side Trip: Mississippi and Ohio Rivers (280')

After Taum Sauk, I headed east to Cape Girardeau, MO to visit my cousin. Situated on the shores of the Mississippi, the Cape is the central metropolis of an area of very small towns—or, to stretch a metaphor, a medium-sized fish in a pond of minnows. On my way into town, in the early afternoon, I hit traffic for the first time in several days. The town was large enough to offer a full complement of civic conveniences, so I grabbed some lunch, then holed up in the (surprisingly nice) local library until my cousin got off work.

Just as the Deep South differed from the Appalachians, so too did Missouri from the both of them. The accents were gone, for one, and the place-names took a sharp swing towards the bland. I was still solidly in the Bible Belt, though, with all that implies: pro-life signs along the road, Christian pop playing overhead in stores, churches all over the place, and so on. This is the Midwest, I suppose.

My cousin showed up around dinnertime. While we dined (at an Italian place in the old town), we caught each other up on our lives. She lives in Cape Girardeau, but works 45 minutes away as an engineer at a plant in [Bloomfield?]. Hardly an ideal living situation, but it’s the norm for a spread-out place like southeastern Missouri. She took the job—her first out of college—hoping to be promoted and reassigned somewhere more urban, but after spending a year in town she’s come to like the place… even with all the flooding.

Highpoint #15: Taum Sauk Mountain, MO (1772')

I spent the whole next day driving through the flats of Arkansas:

And they are flat, lemme tell ya.

in order to get to the hills of Missouri. I probably could have made better time, but like the previous leg from Driskill to Magazine, I was fighting the prevailing road-direction, so I burned at least an hour missing turns and getting lost.

I arrived at Taum Sauk Mountain State Park just in time for the setting sun to blind me all the way up the summit road. Not far from the top, I came to a fork in the road. All I could see was the roads themselves: one tine was paved, the other only gravel. I took the paved road, thinking it would lead me to the high point, and wound up in a wide grassy area on top of a gently-sloped dome. There were restrooms, a few locked sheds, and a metal observation tower, but nothing that advertised a high point.

Gamely, I climbed the tower for a look at the place. Those rickety old things always give me the chills. Up there in the air, with nothing but a few creaking slats of metal between me and oblivion... it makes me appreciate the solidity of a good ol' rock wall.

Highpoint #14: Mt. Magazine, AR (2753')

I woke up at midnight in that church parking lot in Louisiana, unable to breathe. My car is airtight with the windows up, you see, and I always leave them up when I'm sleeping for safety and bug-proofing (I'm super-sensitive to mosquitoes, and nowhere in Louisiana is far from swampland). A carful of air usually lasts me through the night with minimal discomfort, but for some reason, that night it just wasn't enough.

I sat up in the backseat and pondered my options. I could crack a window and ventilate the place for an hour or so before going back to sleep, but who knew how many bugs would let themselves in, lured by the delicious scent of my skin? I could suck it up and go back to sleep, but I'd read too many horror stories of oxygen-deprived mountaineers to sleep at peace in palpably bad air. The only choice left was to drive on to Arkansas and catch up on sleep when I got there.

So I did.

Highpoint #13: Driskill Mountain, LA (535')

Just like my drive up the length of Alabama the previous day, the drive down the length of Mississippi was long, hot, flat, and tedious. The few miles I spent on the Natchez Trace Parkway after leaving Tishomingo were nice enough--the road's meandering, recreational nature reminded me of the Blue Ridge Parkway back home, only without the mountains. But I swear that I-55 from Batesville to Jackson is so monotonous that they've built artificial hills into the median to force traffic to turn around them every once in a while--either that or I got stuck in a time loop while driving past the one real hill in central Mississippi.

I turned west at Jackson and crossed the state's eponymous river shortly thereafter at Vicksburg. The Mighty Mississippi, they call it, but I've gotta say it passed pretty quickly at 60 miles per hour. I would have stopped for a picture, but there weren't any pull-outs or exits. Don't worry, you'll get some later when I cross back over.

If Mississippi was flat, Louisiana was flatter. I-20 ran straight as an arrow through mile-wide fields, obstructed only by road work. The one thing that state had going for it was its gas prices. I refilled at some tiny town east of Monroe for $1.90/gallon, the cheapest fuel I saw all trip.

It was decidedly late in the afternoon by the time I finally arrived at Mt. Zion Presbyterian Church in Bienville, LA. No, I hadn't had a sudden crisis of conscience, nor had I given in to the local Biblemania (on a Friday evening?). Its parking lot serves as the trailhead for Driskill Mountain, the third-lowest state high point in the Union (topping only Delaware and Florida).

Side Trip: Tishomingo State Park, MS

As it turned out, Tishomingo State Park was right down the road from the high point--or it would have been, had I not made a right where the sign said to turn left and spent 15 minutes following a gravel road to its end in the Mississippi countryside. Suspecting my error, I did an about-face (well, more like a three-point turn) and backtracked to the main road, where signs for Tishomingo beckoned from across the street.

That park, I must say, was a pleasant surprise, one of only two places on this whole south-central tour I'd care to revisit (along with Mina Sauk Falls in Missouri).

I arrived around midafternoon (on Thursday the 12th, for those of you who like to keep track of dates) and found the park nearly empty--and all the other folks were in RVs, so I had my pick of tent sites. While registering at the front desk, I mentioned to the ranger that I had been to the high point. She apologized for the lackluster display up there--apparently there had been more signs and such, but they'd been taken down due to persistent vandalism. This is why we can't have nice things.

Rather than return to my campsite by the road, I took a trail through the park. The hiking brochure promised rock outcroppings, and the trail delivered.

Highpoint #12: Woodall Mountain, MS (807')

In retrospect, Florida was a turning point in my trip. Out of the Appalachians, the high points were lower and the drives between them longer. I went from hiking an average of five miles a day to driving an average of six hours, from shivering in the alpine cold to sweating through my shirt in a hot, airless car, from marveling at mountain panoramas to squinting at road signs. At first I welcomed the change, but as the miles stacked up and my legs went from rested to restless I began to wonder why I was doing this. What bizarre calculus had urged me to drive all those hours through the middle of nowhere just so I could walk a few hundred feet up a hill and stand atop a state best known for its flatness? Completionism? Stubbornness? A desire to "pick off the easy ones" (fueled mostly by laziness but also, more sinisterly, by self-doubt)?

No matter, I suppose. I did it, and it's done, and I don't ever have to do it again.

In all fairness, this leg of the trip wasn't entirely without value. I saw places and things I don't reckon I would have ever seen otherwise (i.e. Arkansas), got more practice driving on twisty mountain roads, added a few birds to my life list (though not the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker), and gained deep insights into the life of a long-haul trucker.

But let's return to the story at hand.

The first thing I noticed after crossing into Mississippi was how red the ground was: the dirt, the rocks, even the pavement:

Like that.