There’s a disorienting moment on US 78 west as it crosses into Mississippi from northwest Alabama where the road color changes. It turns from black asphalt to something like deep blood red concrete or whatever the hell it is. It doesn’t matter what it is, because it’s deep red and the landscape around you is fundamentally different.
The shrub is lower, the trees more sparse, and the earth pure, yellow and blood red. That’s north Mississippi. The area around Council — with the way the Mississippi River flows through that part of the world, and by the quirks of state lines — forms a virtual island, bound by the Mississippi and jut out of Arkansas.