Read This Blog! Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

I’ve been reading Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi on this trip; last night, I read this passage just before putting the book down for the night:

I had myself called with the four o’clock watch, mornings, for one cannot see too many summer sunrises on the Mississippi. They are enchanting…. The dawn creeps in stealthily; the solid walls of black forest soften to gray, and vast stretches of the river open up and reveal themselves; the water is glass-smooth, gives off spectral little wreaths of white mist, there is not the faintest breath of wind, nor stir of leaf; the tranquillity is profound and infinitely satisfying…. When the light has become a little stronger, you have one of the fairest and softest pictures imaginable. You have the intense green of the massed and crowded foliage near by; you see it paling shade by shade in front of you; upon the next projecting cape, a mile off or more, the tint has lightened to the tender young green of spring; the cape beyond that one has almost lost color, and the furthest one, miles away under the horizon, sleeps upon the water a mere dim vapor, and hardly separable from the sky above it and about it. And all this stretch of river is a mirror, and you have the shadowy reflections of the leafage and the curving shores and the receding capes pictured in it. Well, that is all beautiful; soft and rich and beautiful; and when the sun gets well up, and distributes a pink flush here and a powder of gold yonder and a purple haze where it will yield the best effect, you grant that you have seen something that is worth remembering.

I didn’t have myself called with the four o’clock watch to see sunrise, but there it was anyway when I woke up.

We’ve been steaming towards Memphis all day; there hasn’t been a lot of development along the riverbanks. About the biggest settlement I saw was this one, which I think is a collection of vacation cabins around river mile 579. The cabins are on the Arkansas side of the river, but they’re actually in Mississippi because the river has moved since the state boundaries were established.

The first speaker today was our Riverlorian, Curt Lietz, who has been paddling down the Mississippi for years and is about 2/3 of the way through (he paddles about one week per year). His talk was titled “From Source to Sea”; he talked about people who’ve written journals about their paddling trips down the river and what he’s learned during his trip so far. I wish he’d been with the ship the entire trip; it would have been great to hear more from him.

The second speaker was Andy Flory from Carleton; this time, he was talking about Memphis Soul music. It was a very good talk with great music to back it up.

And then it was time for our farewell reception and sunset.

We started the day with a walking tour of Vicksburg, “Historic Vicksburg Comes to Life”. Vicksburg is a very hilly city, so they took us up to our first stop by bus and we walked the rest of the tour. That first stop was Anchuca, an antebellum house which is now a tour home, restaurant, and B&B. It’s loaded with Confederate memorabilia, including a flag which was flown over the house by its original owner soon after the Confederacy was originally declared, probably in 1861.

The ladies’ parlour is the only room I could get a decent photo of, so here it is.

We left Anchuca and walked around the neighborhood, stopping outside the Duff Green Mansion, another antebellum house which is now a B&B. It had been used as a hospital during the Siege of Vicksburg, with both Union and Confederate patients, and came through the shelling almost unscathed.

We walked down the block to look at Christ Episcopal Church, which was also used as a hospital during the siege (as well as holding services every day during the siege).

Our next stop was outside the house of Vicksburg’s first rabbi, Rabbi Herman Bien. He was an inventor and poet as well as a rabbi.

We continued walking until we reached the Old Court House Museum, which had exhibits about various facets of Vicksburg’s history. There was a lot about the Civil War and the siege, of course, but they also gave a good amount of space to the struggle for voting rights.

Vicksburg’s Jewish population has dwindled to a very few elderly people, no longer enough to support or maintain their synagogue, Anshe Chesed (Men of Loving Kindness), and they donated many items to the museum so they wouldn’t be lost.

The men’s room featured a sink which had been taken from Saddam Hussein’s palace by Mississippi soldiers serving in Iraq!

The court room was upstairs and reminded me of a place of worship. There was a picture of Jefferson Davis on the front left side, and a room dedicated to him and his wife, but I didn’t have the time to go in.

Vicksburg was the first place that Coca-Cola was bottled for home consumption (instead of only being available at soda fountains), so our final stop was the Biedenharn Coca-Cola Museum. It was loaded with Coke memorabilia, ads, merchandise, old bottles, special bottles, and more.