Among the many joys of the Nashville Trace Parkway are its campsites. Managed by the National Park Service, they are available free on a first-come, first-serve basis. Since long before leaving Vermont I’d been hoping to find warm enough weather in the South to use my tent. “Warm enough” to me was a low above freezing, and tonight, wending my may through Mississippi looked good.
The map told me that there was a campground at about the right distance. It was just North of Tupelo, and an old song came to mind that I hadn’t heard since my 20s. Ray and Lucy’s was a dive bar in Hardwick, Vermont, popular with both young hippies and local pig farmers. A band called “Coco and the Lonesome Road Band” played there most Saturday nights, and one of their songs went like this:
It’s 42 below
I wish I was in Tupelo (Mississippi)
‘Cause in Tupelo
There ain’t no snow
Happy to have escaped the worst that December was bringing to my home state, I belted out the song as I drove.
The Jeff Busby campground is named after Thomas Jefferson (“Jeff”) Busby, a Mississippi congressman who first proposed and fought hard for the creation of the Natchez Trace Parkway. I arrived early enough to have my pick of the eighteen campsites, set up my tent, and headed to a short trail that climbed Little Mountain. It was aptly named. It would have been called a hill in Vermont. Size notwithstanding, it had some nice views to the east and I had the place to myself, despite the paved road that met the trail at the summit.
The sun was very low as I climbed down to my tent. “Climbed” isn’t quite right. I was strolling more than I was climbing (it really was a little mountain). As the sky darkened I noticed that a few others had arrived at the campsite. I didn’t meet anybody; they were all securely packed away in trailers or RVs that dwarfed my little tent.
I gathered a few twigs and used my cool little Kelly Kettle to heat up dinner by headlamp, painfully aware of another drawback to camping in December, even in a place as warm Tupelo. It wasn’t quite 5:00 PM, and daylight wouldn’t arrive until around 9:30 tomorrow. While it was warm enough to camp, there was no escape from winter’s long nights and short days even at this latitude. I wasn’t ready to sleep for sixteen hours. Unlike my neighbors in the RVs, I didn’t have Netflix and a comfy couch. Jeff Busby Campground didn’t offer a lot of nightlife.
Well, I had a book, spare batteries for my headlamp, and more than enough warm clothes to sit at the picnic table and read a few chapters. And it was going to be awfully easy to get an early start. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day. After a stop in Jackson, I would swing west, leaving the Natchez Trace, to visit Poverty Point, Louisiana, another enigmatic native American site.
On my next visit you’ll have to show me your Kelly Kettle.