An impromptu road trip is cathartic, particularly when the destination is a first, as was the case recently with my wife and me. We had ordered last Autumn a hand-made hunting knife for our son from the renowned knife-maker, Bobby Rico (www.ricoknives.com), and when Mr. Rico called to say the blade was ready, I felt inspired to drive to Vaughn, Mississippi to pick it up and see the Vicksburg Civil War Battlefield on the way home. My wife was not only game for the trip, but willing to engage in an evening of intrepid tent camping to defray costs, the knife being no mean purchase. So it was that we tossed one of our three hounds into the car (my wife’s idea, and a good one – a dog makes camping all the more rustic) and made the 12-hour trek to the MS town where Casey Jones (of Grateful Dead fame), crashed his infamous locomotive a century ago.
I must compliment Mr. Rico on his Southern hospitality when we arrived at his home. He not only delivered a fine carbon steel knife with a handle adorned in local Mississippi Osage wood and Kansas buffalo horn, but showed us a demonstration of knife making on his forge, and entertained us with local lore over a cup of coffee in his lodge. His is a story of American exceptionalism, and my next knife purchase will be one of his trademark knifes forged from a railroad spike.
As so with Gettysburg, this year marks the 150th anniversary of the siege at Vicksburg, and I’m delighted to have seen both battlefields this Spring. General Grant made his name at Vicksburg, both in the way he tenaciously pursued victory there, as well as the way he showed compassion for the Confederates after the battle was won. These traits were to reach their zenith two years later at Appomattox.
I must say, only knowing of the place through the writings of Shelby Foote, William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, after our brief jaunt, I have already come to love the great state of Mississippi. I will no longer be a stranger to its verdant greatness.
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