Out and About

Did a little traveling recently; it was just a short trip to Macon in central Georgia. By coincidence, as I was getting some things ready for the trip I threw in one of the discs from my Simpsons Season Seven boxset into my DVD player and ended up watching the episode where Bart gets a fake drivers’ license and rents a car. They opt on visiting the World’s Fair in Knoxville, which ended some twelve or thirteen years prior, but when they’re discussing beforehand where to go, Nelson the bully says, “I always wanted to visit Macon, Georgia!” Synchronicity, or did I subconsciously play that particular episode?

The trip itself was to attend a regional meeting of a student organization I’ve been affiliated with for the past fourteen years since my technical college days. Fortunately it rained on Saturday. Yes, I said fortunately. The inclement weather forced a change of plans and a tour of the Georgia Music Hall of Fame was the new order of the day. While browsing the displays for the blues, big band, and swing musicians, I happened to discover that the bandleader/trumpeter Harry James was from Albany, Georgia. “Harry James is from Georgia?!?,” I asked to nobody in particular. “Why didn’t I know that??” My apparent lack of knowledge lowered my self-esteem as a musician. I had been on the hunt for Harry James recordings for months with no success. Had it not rained I would have never have found Harry James CDs in the Hall’s gift shop. When I mentioned to the lady behind the counter how much trouble I had finding any of his music, she mentioned that the Hall has the same problem; their distributor occasionally can get their hands on them, but the usual state of affairs are that his CDs constantly on backorder. In hindsight I should’ve done a more thorough search of their CD offerings to see if there was anything else there that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere.

I can’t say that I’m a well-traveled person outside the state of Georgia, even though I’ve spent at least some time in a majority of the states east of the Mississippi. But it occurred to me on this most recent trip that I’ve traveled to and explored almost every part of the state of Georgia. History is a subject that I love, and much of Georgia’s history and heritage is rural and agrarian. And much of that heritage is out in the open on almost any given country road in the state—that is if you’re able to recognize it. Abandoned and ramshackle homes and sharecropper shacks, some better than one hundred fifty years old, dot the Georgia landscape; what I thought of as junk as a child I now see as an antiquing opportunity. As silly as it sounds, I would love to take a few weeks off and travel around the state, photographically documenting sights as I went—sort of a modern day Jack Delano. By way of explanation, Delano was a photographer for the Farm Security Administration during the 1930s. He documented images of daily life and buildings in the state of Georgia and elsewhere in America. His photographs, like some of these on this web page, depicting the ravages of the Great Depression brought its impact to the doorstep of every American at the time, and still serve to remind us of those harsh times.

There are many places in the state that I never tire of visiting. Conversely, there are some locales that are not worth the effort, such as Atlanta, where most of its history can be found buried under feet of concrete and asphalt and where you can drive ninety miles per hour on the interstates and still be passed like you’re standing still. No thanks! It’s too bad that people think Georgia is Atlanta and Atlanta is Georgia, because as cities go, the ATL is a POS. There are plenty of much nicer places to see than metro Atlanta. For example, most of the coast of Georgia is worth traveling to, especially the barrier islands.

One of my first trips to the coast was to Jekyll Island, and I fell in love with the place the instant I arrived. It was really the first time I had experienced the jungle-like landscape you find on the island. Jekyll is also one large state park, and Georgia, much to its credit, has limited development to a total of one-third of the island. Worth seeing are the buildings that comprise the Jekyll Island Club, established in the 1880s by wealthy northern industrialists and bankers as a haven to escape the harsh northern winters. For nearly sixty years people such as the Carnegies and Rockefellers vacationed (and cut business deals) on Jekyll until World War II brought an end to the club. Many of the cottages they built (which are more accurately described as mansions) are still standing; the clubhouse itself is in operation as a hotel which I would love to stay at but it’s just too damned expensive. The Holiday Inn on the southern part of the island is nice, being built in amongst the palm trees and other native flora; it lends a nice native touch to the place.

Cumberland Island, down near the Georgia-Florida border, is a federally protected national seashore. With there being only minimal development on the island, you can get a very good idea of how it looked when the earliest settlers arrived in the area many centuries ago. Following my first trip to Jekyll I returned home and searched out books on other locations along the coast that I could explore. It was eleven years from the time I put Cumberland on my “to-do” list until the time I finally set foot on the island, and it was worth every moment of waiting. Huge oak trees draped in Spanish moss (which is not really a moss), wild horses, a thick undergrowth of plants and flora just a few feet off the park service roads…the whole place is absolutely beautiful. When my wife and I were there a few years ago, we hiked most of the day and only saw a handful of people during our time on the island. They only allow a limited number of people on the island per day, so it’s best to make reservations with the National Park Service beforehand. Now that I’ve seen Cumberland, Sapelo Island is now on my “to-do” list. And I can guarantee you that it won’t be eleven more years before I go back to Cumberland.

Savannah is Georgia’s oldest and perhaps most beautiful city, and was the first planned city in America. The square & tything layout used by James Oglethorpe in 1733 is still very much present in the downtown area and is said to have been the model upon which Washington, D.C. was based. Though many of the structures in the downtown area date from the nineteenth century there are some that date back to the eighteenth century, though fire and time have caused those to dwindle in number. There are a number of squares throughout the downtown area and they are a sight to behold. Large oak trees draped in Spanish moss are wonderful to experience, and the benches that can be found in most of the squares allow folks to sit and stay for a while. Perhaps two of the more “famous” squares are Chippewa and Monterey Squares. Chippewa was the location in the movie “Forrest Gump” where Tom Hanks sits on the bench and tells his story for most of the movie. There are no benches located on the outside of the squares, as depicted in the movie; rather, the bench he’s sitting on was fiberglass and installed by the movie crew. The bench itself can be found in the Savannah History Museum. Monterey Square is the location of the Mercer House, made famous by the murder that occurred there and the subject of John Berendt’s book “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” I knew the Mercer House had been a private residence, but I was surprised to find that the house is now open to the public. That’s certainly on my agenda the next time I visit the city. The bird girl statue featured on the cover of “the book” was moved about a decade ago from its original home in Bonaventure Cemetery (another beautiful locale worth setting aside a few hours to explore) to the Telfair Museum of Art.

There are plenty of other places in Georgia worth seeing. The city of Madison, with its main street lined with stately, nineteenth century homes, is someplace I almost always make sure I detour through on my way to south or central Georgia if I can. The story goes that during his march through the state, Union General William T. Sherman spared the town from the torch because it was so pretty. And I would like to thank him for his wise decision. The mountains of North Georgia are always worth traveling to, especially during the spring and fall. There are an abundance of hiking trails to be found, and by estimate I’ve only hiked a third of them. It's a little depressing to think of how many hours and miles I've hiked in the mountains and to find out I've only covered a third of them! Oh well, that means there are two-thirds of the trails left for me to explore. The Raven Cliff Falls trail is one of my favorites; the 2.5 mile trail is a popular day hike destination, and I usually try to get there about ten o’clock in the morning, hike the trail to the end, make the short climb up the side of the cliff’s rock face, eat lunch on top of the falls, and then hike back out. So what am I doing here?!?! Thinking about all these interesting places to visit makes me want to call in to the office as being too well to work!