Mississippi Fried Chicken

The rain followed us all day. Natchez, as we were often heard saying, was burning. Actually, it was underwater, soaked by a rainstorm that was as relentless as it was heavy. After a few stops in Baton Rouge – to move a refrigerator, oversee a veritable vegetable garden and say goodbye to a dear, dear ol’ salesman (the author of the Hoyle, Tanner Chronicles) we finally pointed the jeep north and headed towards Mississippi. It wasn’t until we reached Louisiana’s border and those soft rolling hills of the lower Delta that the trip began to actually feel valid. 

Our plan is to drive leisurely like grandmothers – an option we feel is necessary what with the 8-cylinder former Lexus engine under the hood sucking down gas like a pig in a blanket. And so we did. Well after lunchtime we reached the Old Country Store in Lorman, MS, voted on the Food Network as the best fried chicken in the United States of America. I will say only this – it lived up to its name without fail or compromise, and left us bloated and beaten upon the meal’s conclusion. We parted ways with our dinner guests, the cyclist father/daughter combo from Atlanta, who had traveled to Lorman in search of the same mythological deep fry recipe as we did. Naturally they left satisfied as well. 

After that, we spent a little time hunting for a Civil War era ghost town down long gravel roads deep in the backcountry near the Mississippi River. Apparently, there are “two white families and four black families” that live there, according to an old Mississippian who pointed us towards the town after stopping to ask us what we were doing in the middle of the road (we were taking a picture of a box turtle). The town was magnificent. It had two churches, one that was built in 1827 and had a cannon ball stuck in the brick above the door from when it was shelled by a Confederate gunboat out on the river. Lots of run down architecture. Lots of overgrown weeds. And surprisingly, those families were there. How they make their living way out there in the middle of “nothing” (as that same old timer described the place) we can only fathom. 

Our next stop was the Windsor Family Ruins – a once huge home decorated with enormous columns that burned down in the 1800’s. Only the columns remain. It was there that I slipped and fell off of one of the columns and plummeted to what was surely a tragic end, except that I managed to get a handhold of brick and stopped the ground from rushing up to meet my feet.  A little blood. A little adventure. Thus is our trip. 

Vicksburg came and went as we followed the Natchez Trace north, a winding road bejeweled with rich forests and sweeping farmland, but which is void of any and all commercialism. Eventually, after dark, we made it into Jackson. The town, as we were often heard to say, was burning. Nonetheless, we eventually found a state park with an unguarded rear entrance. We found a suitable spot to camp, left our money in the drop box up at the front, and settled in for the night. Only then did the rain finally start to abate. Later, an off-duty ranger scolded us for our lack of a reservation, lack of a tent and for our free-roaming pup without a leash. Good thing she was off-duty. Thus is our trip.