Chapter 31 Greenville, MS, An Arrowhead Hunter, Rebecca

A Mississippi River towboat.

I am now 1300 miles from the headwaters of the Mississippi. The total distance is about 2100 miles to the gulf by bicycle.  Since St. Louis, I actually see the river very little.  The floodplain of the river keeps the roads and towns away from the river. The only time I see now it is when I make crossings. Still I can feel its presence.  I know it's out there over my shoulder somewhere beyond the levee.
The next town of of consequence is Greenville, MS where I had planned to layover for couple days.

A abandoned smokestack in Greenville.

 It was a town of about 35,000 and promises to have the services I need. Most importantly it has a bike shop with spare spokes. Just outside of town, I visited an archeological site named Winterville.  It is a complex of ceremonial mounds and had a small but interesting museum chronicling excavations that had been ongoing there over the years.  It is manned by a affable pony tailed guy whom I   learned was bonafide archeologist. It was a quiet day so I sat with him in his tiny office and learned his story.  He told me he got his degree in archeology first and then found out it was a marginal (but interesting) way to make a living later.   He had worked all over the U.S. for companies that contracted out their services to investigate sites prior to development to make sure they weren't about to bulldoze an ancient Indian burial ground.  An interesting guy, he is basically an itinerant arrowhead hunter of sorts.  He told me his most valuable find was at a pre-revolutionary war era site out east where he unearthed several Spanish silver reales (the coins that are cut up to create "pieces of eight").  Only once had he found gold.  Technically that is. He had turned in his day's find to the cleaning team including some animal teeth.  It turns out one was a human tooth with a gold filling. They told him he had found gold. The most interesting find was when it was not really his objective.  One day during a survey of the perimeter of a military base, looking for evidence of prehistoric occupation, he discovered a WWII
German buzz bomb half buried in the mud.  It was intact and looking inside he could see Nazi markings on the parts.  He later learned these were captured toward the end of the war and brought to the U.S. to try and reverse engineer them to create our own version. Afterward, they were junked in this boneyard.  When he brought it to the attention of his boss he was told to quit wasting time picking over that "Nazi scrap metal" and get back to looking for arrowheads. It is probably still there.
I arrived in Greenville late afternoon.  It was immediately evident that this was a once much larger city that had suffered hard times.  Many buildings and businesses were boarded up and probably a quarter of the homes were vacant or simply gone like missing teeth from those that remained. Even a fairly new "Extended Stay" motel was boarded up, weeds poking up in the parking lot. I spent the night tucked away in a remote no man's land along the river in the shadow of a petroleum tank farm.   The next morning the first citizen of Greenville I met was fortuitous.  Rebecca Goodman was working out in the early morning by running sprints up the side of the river levee.  She approached me as I walked up along the top of the levee.  After he heard my story she was determined to shine the best light on Greenville.  Who to talk to, what to see, where to go. A one woman hospitality committee.  As an afterthought, I asked where I might get a shower-maybe a YMCA? She thought for a while.  "Wait here and I will see what I can do".  Twenty minutes later she returned with a hot breakfast in a foam container and a room reserved for me at the Roadway Inn a few blocks down the street.  Gratis.
At first, I wasn't sure I was heard her right but she was simply that kind and generous.
Clean sheets, AC, all the comforts of home sure beat the  oil tank farm again that night. I followed up on as many of her suggestions as I could and saw a better side of Greenville than my first impression.
I visited the Visitors Center and the small history museum.  The museum was in a downtown commercial area that was once thriving but now very quiet. I asked the curator what happened to Greenville's population.  He said it was a city of 50,000 in the 60's and 70's with multiple corporate employers and manufacturing. When NAFTA was signed they started to move operations to Mexico for the lower labor costs. A unintended consequence that really has hurt this area. That said, Americans still want their products at Walmart rock bottom prices made possible in part by NAFTA.
I finally rode out of Greenville into the waning light and arrived at Warfield Park several miles out of town after dark. It was recommended as a good place to camp by the locals being right on the river.  It was also shut up as tight as a prison when I arrived.  Apparently it closed at sunset.

My beach campsite on the River near Warfield Park

I groped around in the dark by flashlight and discovered a trail off the access road through some woods that eventually ended at a "private" beach right on the river bank.  A perfect  place to spend the night and watch the river glide by.  That night I often heard the steady drone of towboats passing my beach with their searchlights stabbing out into the night feeling for the banks. They temporarily blind me as they flash over my tent.  About 3 am a different sounding craft approaches.  It is overnight excursion riverboat that is lit up like a wedding cake gliding through the night.  I think about the passengers comfortable in their cabins who will awaken in the morning in a new town somewhere up river. In the morning the gate is open and I get  chance to see what I missed. In the daylight it is plain I probably could have easily found a way inside had I tried but my private beach was better.
Some time  after I left Greenville, I received a message from "Bill" the fellow MRT cyclist whom I had met back on the trail.  He had crashed his bike outside of Vicksburg.  He was traveling that day with another guy he met when they were attacked by 2 dogs. They collided with each other in their attempt to evade.  Bill went down fatally breaking his carbon fiber frame but he was left with only road rash.  He was hoping to get back on the trail after he bought a used  replacement bike in Jackson.

The bridge outside Greenville to Arkansas.