Oakland, Calif.: Compass American Guides, 1997
(c) 1997 by Fodor's Travel Publications

AT MANY POINTS in your drive down the Mississippi, it is possible to take a hard right and turn into a land of rugged hills, mysterious valleys, and quaint towns. It is a land of illusion where a road bores down into a valley to follow a creek, while bluffs separate as though the land itself is pried apart. Hills spring from valleys and cornfields from mountaintops. It is a land of rivers, carved by rivers, and inhabited by them still, as if they were spirits dwelling in the body of the land, gurgling, shifting, sliding silvery and black into the shadows of steep canyons and foggy valleys.

Place names ring with strangeness: Looney Valley, Chosen Valley, Skunk Hollow, Paradise Valley, Wiscoy Valley, Rose Valley, Yucatan Valley, Funk Ford, New Yorker Hollow, Dog Square Ridge, Swede Bottom, Rattlesnake Ridge, Whiskey Hill, Money Creek. They seem vaguely Southern and conjure up a place old, isolated, by turns melancholy and hopeful.

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