There are stretches of America where the road feels less like infrastructure and more like evidence.
Driving I-55 from Missouri through Arkansas to Memphis, Tennessee, is one of them.
Nothing dramatic. Just the slow accumulation of things that don’t work. Gas pumps that won’t start. Bathrooms locked or filthy. Lights half on. Card readers broken. Signs faded. Roads patched, then patched again.
Sometimes you stop at several stations before you can fill up and buy a bottle of water.
Even the places that appear “fine,” according to Google reviews, come with their own warnings: double charges, pumps that run while the tank stays empty, prices that jump for “outsiders.” It isn’t collapse. It’s malfunction as the baseline. After enough miles, you stop being surprised.
That may be the most unsettling part — not the disrepair itself, but the sense that no one expects things to function properly. The Mississippi Delta feels caught in a loop where decline isn’t a problem to be solved but an assumption everyone just accepts.
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