#southern-landscapes

There are 3,245 counties and county-equivalent places in the United States, and already, after only two spins of the randomizer, I am beginning to suspect that this project is going to be less about “discovering hidden attractions” and more about learning how much of America exists in a state of deep roadside quiet.

The second county it gave me was Yalobusha County, Mississippi.

Yalobusha sits in north-central Mississippi. It was founded in 1833, named after the Yalobusha River, and has the unusual distinction of having two county seats: Water Valley and Coffeeville. Its population is a little over 12,000, which makes it much larger than the first stop in this series, Gosper County, Nebraska, but still small enough that the county feels, from the Street View roads, mostly rural, dispersed, and watchful.

What surprised me first was not how unfamiliar it looked, but how familiar.

I expected Mississippi to feel much farther away than it did. Instead, many of the roads could almost have been roads I know from North Carolina: nondescript pines pressed up along the shoulder, reddish dirt pull-offs, modest houses set back from the road, trailers half-swallowed by vegetation, the occasional patch of kudzu performing its slow green takeover. The details differ, of course. Every place has its own weathering, its own light, its own roadside grammar. But the broader visual language was unmistakably Southern.