The Hostess City and her surrounding Empire are not hard to take going 25 mph on Bull Street or the Coastal Highway at 45 Mph with the architectures, hills, rivers, marshes, old trees, fields, wild and garden flowers, and empty-lot BBQ drum places where guys are shooting the breeze as entire pigs and quarter cows are being slow cooked for lunch and dinner, ladies in jeans on their way to the laundromat, and college art students sitting on benches sketching the small intimate scenes of shoulder to shoulder houses standing in morning’s delicate lushness. There is no one here on these roads in a Tesla or BMW looking wasted, and there’s none of that empty hearted shakiness that comes over you like when you go on I-16 or I-95. The convenient soulless interstate. It’s for when you don’t want to know about anything, you just want to get somewhere else. Maybe you should stay in your house and drink heavily and get there once and for all.

So, if one wants to visit the area’s sole remaining local butcher shop south of the Ogeechee River, screw the freeway. Take the city’s back streets, then hop on the Coastal Highway, old US 17, north of the Truman Freeway and glide past all the trailer parks, the old timey car part shops, the locally made back yard shed stand, the last true garden nurseries, the shells of dilapidated ice cream stores, the flea markets big and small, and the friendly greasy spoon diners until you reach that distant meat and fish nirvana. Try the veal, duck, and home smoked pork products — not just the unequalled local beef, fish, and shellfish.

Then, when you drive your car out of the graveled parking lot and head north on the Coastal, your cravings defused and your life a place of complete grace with the additional prize of knowing what meals await and that what had been lengthened by fifteen or less miles had now improved and shone brightly on you.

PS: Just 100 yards up north from the butcher shop, pull into the Mexican grocery store for a made-to-order taquito or three to hold you until that night’s feast. A Junior High wonderful solution for life’s hunger.

-Marlow

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