Tennessee has no shortage of places with a good story attached to them, but Reelfoot Lake is playing a completely different game. This is not your standard pretty-water-and-picnic-tables kind of lake.
It exists because the earth violently lurched during the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812, reshaping part of northwest Tennessee in a way that still feels a little unreal.
Instead of a neat shoreline and clear open water, you get a flooded forest, miles of shallow water, and towering bald cypress trees rising straight out of the lake like they’ve been there waiting on you for centuries…