Hickman, Kentucky

  

Armadillos have made it to Illinois.  Just as in southern Kansas and Missouri, they were the dominant roadkill along the thirty-five mile snippet of Illinois I rode from Cape Girardeau to Cairo.  The Mississippi River has not stopped their migration, but that should be no surprise as the Darien Gap did not thwart their penetration northward from South America, where they originated.  

With no predators to keep them in check they should make it to Chicago before you know it. They could drive out the raccoons and possums and skunks and maybe even the coyotes, who no doubt won’t know what to make of these armored creatures.  I have yet to see a live one, but they may be the ones I occasionally hear rustling near my tent.

The bridges over the Mississippi and then the Ohio were a sharp contrast of ease and peril.  I had a nice wide shoulder on the four-lane wide bridge over the Mississippi from Cape Girardeau to Illinois, wide enough to stop and enjoy the view. It was a different story crossing the Ohio into Kentucky from Cairo.  The two-lane wide bridge was barely wide enough for semi-trucks to pass.  I was lucky the traffic was adequately staggered that not once did I have to suck in my breath.  

At least the skimpy bridge was in better shape than Cairo.  This once prominent city at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers is in such decline it doesn’t have a gas station or a grocery store or a fast food franchise, just a Dollar Store.  From a peak population of 15,000 in 1920 it’s down to a mere 1,700 clinging on.  Decades of racial tension, including a high-profile lynching in 1909 involving thousands, are partially to blame for the city’s demise, along with the diminishing of river traffic, though that hasn’t effected Cape Girardeau.  The majority of its buildings are boarded up and in a state of collapse.  Its monument of a library from 1883, before the Carnegie era commenced, is an extreme anomaly.  It was funded by a local woman in honor of her deceased husband.  At the time of its construction it was one of the few public libraries in the country and easily among the most magnificent.

Its internet wasn’t in operation, but it at least had Wi-Fi.  So few people take advantage of the library, the librarian asked me to sign a guest book.  She said she and most of the residents drive to Cape Girardeau to do their shopping.  It is a veritable boomtown in comparison with over 30,000 residents.  It doesn’t have a library though to compare.  It had a much understated Carnegie, not trying to match the library in Cairo thirty miles down the river.  It has been annexed to the large city hall adjoining it with its entrance turned into a window.  A statue of a Black soldier honoring those who fought on the Union side during the Civil War stands in front of it. 

The sprawling library that replaced it was built on the outskirts of the city not far from a large park where a Statue of Liberty stands at its entrance.  

The city had an abundance of motels and hotels.  I thought I might avail myself of one since it had been eight days since my last, but I felt the tug of crossing the Mississippi in the quiet of a Sunday evening rather than in the hectic Monday morning rush hour.  I was hoping I might be able to camp along the Mississippi, but it was too marshy.  Instead I pitched my tent four miles inland behind a derelict building that gave me a foretaste of Cairo.  No armadillos came around this evening.

The Carnegie in Cape Girardeau finished off Missouri.  It was the ninth in Missouri of these travels, joining the twenty-three others I had visited on previous forays across the state.   Only three of its thirty-five had been torn down.  Now it’s on to Kentucky, a state of twenty-seven Carnegies, of which twenty-four remain.  I’ve been to twenty-one of them, including a dandy cluster of nine in Louisville of which two were intended for “Coloreds” back in the era of segregation.

The first on my agenda in Kentucky was in Hickman on the Mississippi eighty-three miles from Cape Girardeeau.  It was a pleasant, relatively flat ride through forests along the river.  It was a reprieve from all the climbing I’d done the day before approaching Cape Girardeau, the first day of these travels that exceeded four thousand feet of climbing, nearly fifty per mile for the eighty-three miles of the day.

The flat day had a few climbs, including one shortly after crossing into Kentucky to a ninety-foot tall cross on a high point overlooking the confluence of the two mighty rivers.  It was erected in 1999 replacing a couple of smaller crosses that had stood in the vicinity, the first put up in 1937.   In 1984 the idea was proposed to build a cross tall enough to be seen in three states.  Thus began a drive to raise $150,000 for the project.  The cross sits on a two-acre tract, large enough to host weddings and memorials and other services. 

The Hickman Carnegie stands on a high point too, though the lush vegetation below obstructs a view of the Mississippi.  It is now a museum behind the new library, which isn’t that much bigger.  Wikipedia had the wrong address.  When I went looking for it down behind a huge dike along the Mississippi where the old jail and post office resided there was an empty plot of land.  I feared it had been torn down.  

It was early evening with no one about other than three kids playing in front of their house.  They, of course, knew nothing about an old library, nor did their mother.  All they knew about was the present library.  They were very helpful otherwise, filling my water bottles with bottled water, saying the tap water wasn’t fit to drink.  The mother offered to make me a bologna sandwich.  When I declined, she said, “How about a hamburger.”  If the light hadn’t been waning, I might have taken her up on the offer. She asked if I intended to take the ferry, as the last one of the day was departing in a few minutes at 6:30 less than half a mile away.  It’s one of the few still operating on the river.  

I headed back into town hoping to find someone who could confirm the Carnegie had been torn down.  I waved down an old guy in a pickup who, if he were a local, ought to know.  He told me the Carnegie was behind the new library, which I had stopped at on the way in for Wi-Fi and info.  It had closed at five and required a password for its Wi-Fi.  I would have saved half an hour if I had noticed the old library behind it, but I would have missed the offer of a bologna sandwich.