The Alleghenies: The Forgotten Mountain Range

Sorry that blogging has been non-existent in the last week – I guess I just can’t be a successful blogger because, you know, life gets in the way. Anyway, wife and I foisted our son off on a babysitting cast of thousands, then made our way south to beautiful Tunica, Mississippi, for a few days of rest and relaxation. (By “beautiful,” I mean “recreational gaming destination that offers nothing but recreational gaming.”) Tunica lies just a hair south of Memphis, Tennessee, in what used to be the poorest county in America, before a unique agricultural blend developed at the University of Mississippi in the mid-‘90s caused casinos to sprout up among the miles of cotton fields. Tunica is really the gaming mecca of Middle America, like no other between the Mississippi River and the Alleghenies.

(A lengthy aside: Isn’t it strange how you never really hear about the Alleghenies except in geography and history textbooks? Well, I don’t, anyway. Seriously, you never really hear about them the way you do the Rockies or the Smokies – which are the southern extension of the Alleghenies. I recall a factoid in one of my Indiana geography books from elementary school: “Indiana is the smallest state in the continental U.S. west of the Alleghenies.” I remember thinking, “Wow! Indiana is the smallest state in the continental U.S. west of the Alleghenies!”

(I don’t know that the Alleghenies have been immortalized in song, the way John Denver sang “Rocky Mountain High” or Ronnie Milsap crooned “Smoky Mountain Rain,” which wasn’t really about the mountains anyway. Besides, what would “Allegheny” rhyme with? Aside from “rainy”?

(So. Here is a couplet for some songwriter to lift if there is ever a need for a song about the Allegheny Mountains … if Randy Newman ever needed a song for a Pixar film called “Mountains” …

(Just like the Zapruder film is grainy
She blurred my heart in the Alleghenies.

(Randy, you can take it from here. No charge.)

Back to Tunica. The drive down there is long and arduous, though it seems to go quicker once you get out of western Kentucky. To stay solely on four-lane roads through Kentucky, you’ve got to go south through Henderson to Madisonville, southwest to I-24, west/northwest/southwest around the end of Kentucky Lake to Mayfield, then southwest to Fulton. It’s almost as if you’re on one of those Popeye cruises, where a New York-to-London path across the ocean goes extremely north, extremely south, and loop-de-loops in the middle about eight times before reaching London. I hope that a trip to Tunica go quicker once I-69 is built through there (if Indiana would get its shit together – the rest of the world, it seems, is waiting on us) – it’ll probably cut at least an hour off the travel time through Kentucky alone.

Through Missouri and Arkansas on I-55, the towns listed on the “next exit” signs are often listed in such a way that they read like first and last names. At one of the last exits going south in southeast Missouri, you can run into Cooter Holland, who you caught sober at the local auto parts store this morning but who’d spent the previous night in jail for public intox. In Arkansas, you can probably play a bridge game with older high society women Marie Lepanto (which won the “Rejected Bobby Bare Song Title” contest held a few years back) and, a little further south, Marion Sunset Wynne (which also sounds like a name you’d read in an obituary: “Marion Sunset Wynne, 85, died at 3:25 pm yesterday at Shady View Rest Home in Oolitic.”).

To get to Tunica from points north, one must traverse Memphis. You can either take I-55 all the way through to Horn Lake, Mississippi, then cut over to 61, or you can get off at 61 in Memphis and drive through the urban area of town. Inevitably, we always choose the latter. While fried chicken joints and check-cashing places abound on that stretch of road, one place in particular caught my eye – a liquor store called “Three Star Liquor.” Three stars is pretty good on a four-star scale, but only middling on a five. I’d assume that they don’t offer your fancier beverages there – Arbor Mist is their top-shelf wine, and Colt .45 is their top malt liquor. (“The Memphis Commercial-Appeal gives “Three Star Liquor” three and a half stars!”)

The town itself is only home to about 1,100 people over about 0.7 square miles, but the concept known as “Tunica” is spread over about 10 or 15 square miles, and draws about 10 million people per year. It lies about a half-hour south of Memphis. The casinos are typically grouped in threes. In the northwest corner of the Tunica area, the Horseshoe, Gold Strike and Sheraton are all lumped together, with Bally’s just a mile or so east of that complex. The Gold Strike appears to be about 15 or 20 stories tall, and can be seen for miles along Highway 61. It’s the tallest building in Mississippi, which seems rather incongruous – having a “tallest building” amidst the cotton fields strikes me much like the time that I was a little kid and wanted to build a Howard Johnson’s in the woods behind my house (none of that Holiday Inn crap, dammit).

The exterior of the ‘Shoe, on the other hand, probably most closely resembles my mental picture of Vegas. The first time I went there, about 10 years ago, my buddy John and I arrived in the middle of the night, and I saw it all lit up and was pretty impressed by it.

Bally’s, meanwhile, tries to inspire an “Old West” type of feeling with its architecture and interior – there’s a faux grain silo outside of it with the logo painted on it, for instance, and the face of the building looks like some Old West town (Sam’s Town does the same with its exterior, to much better effect). To me, being in Bally’s has always inspired a “lose your money” type of feeling.

To the east of Bally’s lies the Grand. I avoid this place at all costs, having historically been better off throwing my money into the river.

Somewhere in the middle, sitting by itself south of the Horseshoe complex, is Fitzgerald’s. We’d always stayed at Fitzgerald’s before this particular junket. There isn’t much particularly distinctive about it – there’s a quarter-drawn vertical iron gate that you drive through at the edge of the property, and the architecture resembles some sort of pre-1800s castle motif (though with all of the modern conveniences of today’s hotelery), so I think they’re trying to capture some sort of medieval mood. We’ve typically enjoyed our time there, though we’ve enjoyed only moderate success, cashing out a hundred here, a couple hundred there, losing a grand …

At the south end of the Tunica area is Sam’s Town, Resorts and the Hollywood (I avoid this place at all costs, having historically been better off …… you know how the rest goes). The East Tower of Sam’s Town used to be the Isle of Capri casino; my wife and I honeymooned there. Apparently, we broke it, whatever “it” is, because the building is now only a hotel, and doesn’t house a casino anymore. I think they have the occasional boxing match there (in a ring, not in the rooms when the wife gets pissed that the husband’s blown their entire $1500 gambling budget about 8 minutes into their stay).

We stayed at Resorts, which is an odd choice of name for a hotel. Resorts used to be Harrah’s, but after the sale to Resorts, the Harrah’s name is now absent from the Tunica market, despite the fact that Harrah’s Entertainment owns at least a couple other casinos there. I expect the name to reappear at some point.

Oh, how’d we do, you asked? Not worth a shit, really. We did manage to play on house money for the biggest part of the trip, eventually giving it all back and a little extra for their trouble. At Resorts, wife hit a four-of-a-kind on a Let It Ride table (a nice followup to her four-of-a-kind at Aztar last month!), and I hit $750 on a Wheel of Fortune slot – one symbol away from $8.1 million, but it might as well have been 12 miles away. We somehow donated our winnings to Resorts and the other casinos we visited (Sheraton, the ‘Shoe, Fitzgerald’s). Overall, we managed to do OK, but we’re not ready to retire and go tooling around the country in an RV on the professional gamblers’ circuit just yet.

Still, I can’t go back soon enough.