On the Road Again: Songs of the South

Hello from a cabin in a small set of hills that calls itself the town of Trenton, about twenty minutes south of Chattanooga. After driving six hours through Bible belt backroads to see the Georgia Guidestones, I danced my way between Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee before returning to the first.

The experience of driving through rural Georgia is not so different from that of driving through rural Florida — both have towns with names like Citra and Spuds and Suches, which are accessed (or bypassed) on roads whose names are numbers.

It’s true, though, that when you cross the state line into what we Floridians know to be the Real South, there’s a shift in the radio. In south Georgia, the airwaves are like an embodiment of Dixie’s longstanding racial tensions writ large: either poppily-disguised Christian tunes interspersed with FOX-based news bulletins, or hip hop. Nothing else. As I worked my way north, there were more bland country stations to choose from, every song’s lyrics like Target wall decor; I’d occasionally find an 80s or Spanish-language station thrown into the mix for spice. By the end of the first day’s drive, that shitty “Meant to Be” song was stuck in my head with a vengeance, and sure enough, the next time I turned the ignition, it was playing.

In Clarkesville, I stopped at a roadside produce stand for a dozen eggs fresh enough to retain their unbleached colors, ranging from pastel blue to speckled brown; I passed a lumberyard that made the whole valley smell of fresh-cut pine. Further up, a collapsing barn stood slanted, as if suspended by a spell; silhouetted inside, an old carriage waited untouched and rigid. North Georgia towns have roads with names like Nonchalant Lane and Self Drive; the bigger towns have churches in their strip malls. These are places with more steeples and cemeteries than actual people, as if the only thing to do in them is die or dream of it.

I wound my way through the Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia and watched whitewater rafters fling themselves through the Ocoee in Tennessee, taking the road’s curves slowly to watch them struggle. I passed through Sautee Nacoochee and the weirdly Bavarian Helen, where everything’s done up like a German fairy tale; I snapped photos at untold multitudes of scenic overlooks. Everywhere, billboards bleat yellowly into the ever-present green of the treetops, advertising Huddle Houses or Days Inns or So-and-So’s Gun Drug and Gun — a business that does exactly what it sounds like, its marquees heavy with amber bottles and gleaming pistol barrels. A corollary: the abundant opioid recovery hotlines, splashed across signs and repeated on the radio with the promise we care.

On the faster highways through Georgia’s hills, it seems more signs are turned backwards than toward you. Despite its openness, this is a place you can get lost in, a place where it’s easy to go the wrong way.

But for all its contradictions, the south is undeniably beautiful, especially in the spring, all slight hillsides covered over in washes of mauve and yellow, postcard-perfect barns accompanied by silos and sheep. The people here are kind, even if their smiles beam beneath Confederate-flag-printed headwear; in Lavonia, the hotel clerk — Rosemary, her nametag said — was baffled when I wouldn’t take the paper receipt, her puzzlement only compounding when I explained I already had one by email. But still, she wished me farewell gently, watching me walk through the sliding glass doors unburdened.

Somewhere along the Richard B. Russell Scenic Highway, I pulled out on an overpass to take a photo of the hills, framed prettily through the verdure. But just beneath the photo op, I heard a whole swarm’s worth of buzzing; a deer had been torn in two and dumped there. Another car pulled in, and a young man got out and stood beside me, taking the same photo. “Just don’t look down,” I said to him, trying a subdued smile.

“Oh no,” he responded, pulling his shirt up over his mouth. “Poor guy” — though it was a doe. He looked genuinely saddened before he lifted his phone to take the picture.

His Subaru had Florida plates, and he was alone — and attractive. I wondered where he came from, where he was going, why. But instead of asking, I said safe travels and turned on my heel and left, told myself I wasn’t carefully scanning the rest of the pull-offs as I continued.

But even that small melancholy, the sting of what might have been, but likely wasn’t, there — I am at the point in my travels, still, where even that feels sweet. There’s so much more ahead of me, so many more such chances. (And besides, you know what they say…)