we’re in the
middle of nowhere
(and we feel fine)

a road to the middle of nowhere

Editor’s Note: Funny where you wind up, ain’t it? Marlow and W continue an exploration of their Coastal Empire this morning…

– Vic

Author’s note: In some ways my recollections of W’s and my back country Georgia road trips are resigned yet joyful life affirming looks at doom, death, apocalypse (always looming, gentle readers, or so we are told) but mostly about the essential life source that is the natural world’s beauty. I feel we are succeeding.

We’re on a road to nowhere
Come on inside
Takin’ that ride to nowhere
We’ll take that ride

This Talking Heads lyric in their song Road to Nowhere about how there’s no order, plan, nor scheme to life and death, and that it doesn’t mean anything, has always seemed alright to me.

“Out there, time is on our side
It’s not very far away
And it’s growing day by day

You’d love coming along
And you’d find yourselves singing your song

They can’t tell us what to do
So, they can’t make fools of me and you…”

-Marlow

——–

The Empire’s morning skies were bright, chilled, but cloudless and its roads thinned out from Friday-night’s rush. Cars that drove along with us were filled with the slower people who drive out of town south or west or north on Saturday mornings. We were pedal-to-the-metaling it. No matter how many times they tell you that leaving the city makes you feel emptier, we never believe it because the countryside is so technicolor.

After we turned due west on state route 25 (we don’t let each other take the freeways on our weekend drive-abouts — they are too ugly for words, even if you are going to wind up at the meat store by the Ogeechee) we slowed our roll. Mental cobwebby layers of distraction are swept away by these rides like furniture being window launched during a house eviction. Our next act was the strange little private intersection called Ebenezer.

“Ebenezer . . .” I said when W suggested we go. “How biblical and mildly superstitious.”

“How’s what?” she laughed.

“You can’t go naming places Ebenezer and expect to get away with it. Some carpet-bagging Philistines or their gods’ll come out of the swamp, attack us, and poison the food supply.”

“Fortunately, we didn’t bring our arks along with us this time, so there’ll be no ripping them off from us.”

And what are W and I doing away from our comfy Hostess City habitat where we know people from everywhere and of every description, but of whom we prefer those sympathetic to the idea of parties and good eating?

Who knows even now after all these trips to the middle of nowhere?

We’re not fortune-hunting royalty — strong and wise — worth every penny we might spend on each other even if it is only for how we travel.

We are different if not a bit odd, whose feral cats, it is rumored, never bite hard; we live on a street in the middle of downtown with an abundance of northern trees and a treasured key line tree whose abundance keeps us in gin and tonic garnishes, key lime pie and cookie juice and zest, and always looking to alternately smooth things over and rumple them up.

We know how this will end . . . at rock bottom — death, but much more likely and earlier — the loss of our driving privileges by Georgia state DMV intervention. (Note to self: be ever so good to our neighbors, so they don’t rat us out.)

We look anxiously around Ebenezer actually little more than an intersection; people milling nearby in the gas station staring hard at their purchases as their ears turn red from chilled winds.

Outside of its oldest-in-the-state continuously operating church congregation this ghost town’s mainprimary tourist attraction is its nature conservancy black water marshland trails that people canoe through.

W and I depart and pass through nearby Springfield — the successor to Ebenezer as the county seat of Effingham. Our middle-aged GMC Terrain SUV has all the comforts of home, driving and glove compartment lights, map screen, and cell phone charger connections that work, so it is steady as she goes, smooth sailing.

The enormous parts of us that were formed before we came to the Coastal Empire, that midwestern childhood, make it impossible for us to have a road trip car that isn’t as American as lemonade. Our profiles are silhouetted against the soft golden sunlight and light green leafed plants that grow in neat rows beside these backward farm-to-table roads. Hallucinatory special effects like these are present — even out here in Georgia’s back country.

Our next turnoff comes half an hour later, and we slow down to take a very old two-lane road, towards some overgrown cottages and outbuildings we previously spied on a previous wandering.

In spite of their deterioration, these locales are simply irresistible — potholed, rutted and dusty road surfaces to there or not. No tourist trap art galleries for us. Along these ways, there are flowery hills and horses and cows.

Never are we entirely certain when we head to places like these, are we entering from the back or the front, since they never seem to fall open in front of us. Out here it isn’t until you’re almost on top of them that you see your fuzzy quarry. These places seem to have perfected a natural defense from being seen, trampled, photographed, and exposed.

We slow down so much that at times it’s as if we’re swimming under water. It’s a sublime peacefulness that most of us rarely experience.

Houses and landscapes out there are not ostentatious — mostly little solitary cottages that look quite modest if not bashful. Not like those southern French rural manicured ones from Hollywood movies, clustered cleanly atop some mountain. Everything, all the leaves on the trees and ivy, out there are unkempt and natural. No polish or fine shine; every repair ever made, even the scar tissue, can be seen. We keep on driving up these winding roads, slowly, not because of speed bumps, but afraid we’ll miss something . . . untended wildflowers growing around a no longer used roadside mailbox.

We sometimes wonder on our way home from these pilgrimages who’re the wildlife sculptor and caretakers for all of this, sticking to his or her guns in spite these places of being in the middle of nowhere.

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