Day 2: The Crossing
The Mississippi River and Ohio River meet at the southern tip of Illinois in a town called Cairo. A town on two most important American rivers should be lively, or so I thought. In reality, it is a ghost town. A few old fashioned churches stand looking at dilapidating piles of houses and stores. The one new looking building is a barbecue restaurant where it seems many locals pass their time. I ask myself the same thing every time I see a town like this, “what do people here do?”
After stopping briefly to eat and look around, we carried on through Missouri and down into Arkansas. Hundreds of miles passed with the same few sights: eighteen-wheelers, farm land, pick up trucks, a small town, tractors that make you think “why on Earth does something need wheels that big”, grain silos, and — the most impressive of all — crop dusters flying 30 feet above the ground. At first, it seems desolate. It made me miss my home. How could people bear to live so far away from everything? What do people here do?
My first instinct was to romanticize and make myself more comfortable. I began to tell myself that all people here needed was the satisfaction of work, and the spiritual comfort from the small brick churches that dotted the road every twenty miles. But I couldn’t hold myself to it, there was no way that all 3,377 citizens of Corning, AK could be perfectly content with life. So then I looked at it as normal life. Everyone here must have some sort of job, or daily routine. They were, after all, real people.
Fun fact: Arkansas grows about half of all the rice consumed in America. Which means someone must know how to plant it, and water it, and harvest it. To harvest it they use large tractors, which someone must drive, and someone (else, presumably) must know how to fix them when they break down. There are also crop-dusting pilots who fly over the fields all day, which meant air strips with mechanics and technicians and janitors and whoever else was essential to the operation. And this is all just for the rice. Now consider all the stores and services that these people need for day to day life. Once I thought this way I began to realize an answer to “What do people here do?” They live, same as I do. I may not know exactly what they like to do for fun after a long day’s work, but I realized life even in these remote places is just as complex as anywhere else.
