So Sairdee came and we got up like it was another work day, hit the ground running with a delicious breakfast of coffee and more coffee. It was the 8th of December so I had on my long sleeves and long pants and took along a jacket just in case I needed it. Yeah, right. You heard of Indian Summer? I think in Georgia it needs to be called Indian Winter. The sky was straight out of Flannery O'Conner.
We rolled thru the sprawl in Rich's truck, past to old farms, past places that 30 years ago was someone's dream home by a pond, now being dismantled to make way for more McMansions. Carcases of deer on the shoulders of the roads, Rich recalling where something used to be, I could feel the place changing, like the caffeine in my system had sped the universe up enough that I could perceive change in a place I'd never seen. We came up on Lake Lanier, and I told him about how in my town we have a Lake Lanier, and a Forest Park and a Druid Hills, all names expropriated by my friend's father who had a plantation to subdivide, and a friend in Atlanta who he liked to visit. But this place, this Lake Sidney Lanier, was a far different place.
I had seen the drying lakes from I85 on the way down, but this place was like a skeleton, the barren earth like the dry bones of something long dead that the flesh had retreated from. We walked along a beach where he had taken his daughter swimming a year before, where she had picked Muscadine Grapes with her Grandmother, now it was just a patch of sand that had no connection to the water, being watched over by a retiree from someplace up north and his little dog on a leash. The sadness on that mans face was a book unto itself. We stood there, the 4 of us looking at the sight when from a thicket come a fox, and it bounded across the cracked dust toward what had been an island, to dissapear into the woods. Them Siberian genes in me jumping up and down in recognition.
And it was quiet, an eerie quiet broken only by the sound of the earth crunching under our feet. We were as well as on the moon, looking at the lost artifacts of peoples lives. The kids fishing rod that looked vaguely familiar, the corroded breast implant, the cinderblock that had been an anchor for a boat, the aluminum top to a pull tab can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, the seamed steel can long gone, and a foot away the pull tab itself. The joined shells of freshwater muscles exposed, the fleshy inhabitant long gone. There would come in time, at this rate, the foundations of farm houses knocked down by the Corps of Engineers and arrowheads of the Cherokee. The buoy markers warning of shallow water, now high over head on a small hill, sounded by fennel and pine tree seedlings, all waiting for more water, water that will one day drown them.
On the way to the dam we saw coves and inlets where peoples docks and boats sat high and dry, at that queer angle of a dead animal. The dam held a winding road, and a washboard road down to the the channel from which the Chattahoochee emerges. The Chattahoochee, where someplace down stream Alan Jackson is eternally on skis, hat on his bald haid and immortal. A young man from some place in Asia approached us and with out any apparent fishing apparatus and asked where he could go fishing at. Rich showed him, he being the sportsman. The only thing I ever killed in my life with a gun was a woodpecker and that was an accident.
Up on the other side, the lake side of the earthen dam to the park area where another beach was beached, stairstepped like a monument down to the still water. Signs admonishing visitors not to dive onto the rocks. I hopped down to the water, carrying my bag of goodies. Transported I was, it seemed so familiar. As I drew the little cigar out I realized what it was, remember I went to Tennessee to find out what had happened to Curtis, back at the beginning of this ride. I turned my eyes to the grey sky and called the great spirit to look at me.
I crumpled the cigar and cast the tobacco onto the still water in offering, and reaching back into the bag and got a bottle of water, opened it and poured it in to show what was needed. Please, I asked, send this land some water, send these people some rain. And I sat, and I let the stillness envelope me. Not a soul around, no boat, no plane, no bird, it was like something out of a Stephen King story, a world waiting to be animated, for its fizz to return. The air was still, and on a molecular level I could be convinced all had ceased its vibration.
From the dam we headed north, to Dalonega. I only learnt how to pronounce that name on the flight to SF in September. Cherokee is something you have to hear to get it right. Da-lon-eh-gah. When you break it up into their syllabary it is easier. It was the sight of the first gold rush in the US, circa 1828, which I think had something to do with the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Cherokee from these parts for modern day Oklahoma. It is an old town, home to a Military Academy, and a strange house where a "northern speculator" had lived after the Civil War and was rumored to have mined the earth underneath for gold. Turns out years later when the house was sold a trap door was discoverend and there was in fact tunnels going all over town, probably underminiding the houses and churches. I wondered what he did with the dirt, did he walk around town dropping it out of his pant leg like Andy Dufren in Shawshank Redemption?
Done up for Xmess, we toured the shops, tried on hats, collected marbles and purchased Kudzu Jelly. Wondered where Lynne was, if she was okay, how we would know if she wasn't. It all made us hungry so we retreated to Caruso's Italian Restaurant for beers and ravioli and pasta. Our waitress was Amander, she is 26 years old and brought us a stack of coasters to prop up the bent foot of the table. In came the tourists in their leather chaps and big hair, the locals in their hand knitted sweaters and caps, and we two sat, and shaped for anyone of them in ear shot, our world. Speaking freely of love and loss and longing and the joy of being unshackled from the perceived never ending pain of living in a world that existed in our heads. The world was now this table, this room, this restaurant. Amander was a part of it, The hundred year old Magnolia tree was part of it, the sun that had emerged was shining on it.
We made our way counter clock wize around the square, rolling up my sleeves, fanning myself with my hat. Came upon a western shop where the Alberta sky called to me in the form of a new blue bandanna, which I was ready to put on me neck, naw, the nice lady put it in a cute little bag made from recycled fibers and a sinsel handle a a tissue paper corona and I was like OMG lady this is western store. I didn't come here for that fru-fru BS. On around to the jeweler, the trays of turquoise, is there a more beautiful word in any language? The girl at the counter saying something to Rich about some ring would end the wrong message to women, pregnant pause, and the world continued as it had before.
Topic: Shakesthegrounds Rumblings (Read 2651848 times)