61 Highway

Rolling south out of Memphis, down Third Street, the famous US 61 sign suddenly appeared on my right. It was a sign I was very familiar with. I grew up only a few miles from its northern extension. It paralleled the river up from the Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin tri-corner, wound through Minneapolis and then snaked north to the Canadian border some four hundred miles away. Another fellow Minnesotan, and University of Minnesota attendee, Bob Zimmerman, was equally familiar with this road. It tracked to the east of his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota (but straight through the city of his birth, Duluth). He would later change his name. And he would write a song about it. Bob Dylan, "Highway 61."

As I crossed the Mississippi State line, some 20 miles outside downtown Memphis, I began to see billboards advertising various casinos. The frequency of these signs grew as I approach Tunica. At one point, they appeared virtually every fifty yards. Just north of the Tunica Corp. Limit, to my right I could see some of the casinos themselves, peeking above the levee, next to the mile-wide Mississippi.