Cairo feels temporary, even though it's so old. Ben and I stayed at a highway motel right inside the city limits. No one was really around except the proprietors and two mangy cats. At one point Ben happened to look out the window and saw seven empty school buses that hadn't been there an hour before. There they were, just lined up in a row along the edge of the lot, less than 100 yards from our room. We also didn't hear anyone, let alone 7 busloads of passengers. The buses were gone when we got up in the morning.
As we pulled onto the main drag in town, we passed under a metal arch that read "Historic Downtown District," past dozens of abandoned homes, the marquee of a defunct, boarded up theater called the Gem, and a bunch of spooky, ivy-covered warehouses, each windowpane broken or missing. We got coffees and a woman asked us, "Is this your first time here?" We said yes. She didn't ask us any more questions. There were two other people behind the counter. They whispered to each other, then left.
Cairo's small but persistent tourism industry is still pushing for people to recall its glory days during the Civil War. Its main attractions include the Custom House Museum, an old post office filled with Civil War era memorabilia and frightening life-size Lewis and Clark mannequins, in which three old white people followed us around asking if we had any questions, and where the only documentation of the intense riots during the 1960s in Cairo's failed attempts at desegregation--to the point where the National Guard was sent there in 1969--were 5 framed photographs of people sitting on their porches, with no written descriptions of who they were (though everything else in the place was surrounded by handwritten blurbs and editorials, random factoids and even little notes that read things like "If you have information about this parasol and the woman it belonged to, please let us know!").
The other attraction is Fort Defiance State Park, where the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers come together, and where Ulysses S. Grant was stationed, which was closed for cleaning the morning we tried to go there. Apparently it floods a lot, since it's situated at the confluence of two gigantic rivers. The entire city is surrounded by levees. One of them is blue.
Cairo made me tired and pensive and full of ideas. I tried for a moment to imagine what it must feel like to be very old, to observe change and to remain totally unconcerned or even completely baffled by it. Small town America used to actually repel me, and now I feel an odd attraction to know more about all the corners of this large, strange country. It doesn't make you feel all warm inside, but I'm pretty sure it makes your brain bigger.
We left at noon for the last 6 hours of road to Chicago and listened to This American Life with the windows down almost the whole way home.
1 !!!s:
windows down is the only way to travel when you're going so fast.
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