Alapaha When I take HWY 280 across South Georgia to Birmingham, choosing its sometimes lonely asphalt splitting forests of pine or farms flush with crops over the monotony of interstate and Atlanta's spaghetti interchanges, I make time to leave this slower road, buttoned by small towns of Main Streets, motels, and Dairy Queens, turn further south, find the even slower roads in the county of my grandfather's one room schoolhouse where he sat for eleven years and daydreamed of the river and pine woods of quiet deer and turkey calls, sometimes a bear, find the place he liked to go,behind the country church on the, even now, dirt road, down the river bluff in the rural place he was born into. I park at the church where he pulled his pistol on two angry roaming dogs, fired it into a tree, only wanting to scare them he explained, would only kill them if he had to: this lesson in spirits – trees, animals, people, ancestors -- best taught, felt, believed, here wher...
Like the title says.