Every Wednesday I drive to Augusta, Georgia. The city is less interesting than the trip.
It’s just under a two-hour drive from Athens. The trip is a course in southern environmental history.
Athens is the liberal oasis of the south. Sure, corporate mongers tear down historic buildings to build parking decks. The university acts purely in its own interest, which typically bears a mark of bottom-line thinking on our community.
Georgian liberals congregate in the Classic City. Drawn by the bohemian atmosphere created by a state university, artists, activists, and a variety of eclectics call Athens home. History, myth, and music blend to make this town amazing and singular. Its greatness is both tangible and unknowable but embraced by the best of its citizens. It is an anomaly of the south and its epitome. It is progress and tradition forced to stand together.
It never fails. Every time I leave my town I know I head somewhere a little less splendid.
Within minutes, the four lanes of Lexington Highway yield into two. The landfill is the first sign the city is in the rearview. The mountain of trash is not visible from the road. A pile of pine shavings promoting compost sits below the Athens-Clarke County Solid Waste sign. Businesses become rolling, pastoral hills as time winds backward. The macadam rolls and I get a glimpse of a way of life long forgotten, disrespected, and wholly misunderstood by modern southerners: Non-industrial farming.
I see a blend of the modern and the forgotten. Farms are not working. There are fences without cattle. Tiers from the cotton fields of the past blend with four-wheeler tracks. Silos sit stark. Barns fall apart. Towns like Lexington, Washington, and the ghostly Philomath make little money on agriculture, but profit from deforestation. The only dirt roads left are the ones the log trucks use.
Some small towns along this path have speed limits above 55 mph. There are no children at play, no reason to slow down.
Tiered hills carefully sculpted seventy years ago by desperate farmers trying to keep their soil and their livelihood, sit before a vast prospect of mangled land. Unprofitable trees sit in piles, and all pines are gone. Fire towers sit in the middle of former forests. This is not clear-cutting, but almost. Timber trucks take the woods by parcel. They took some sections this past winter, and some in winter’s past. Some still stand on borrowed time. They will all expire. Private property cut from what once was common land.
This process began in the wake of the Great Depression. A time when Piedmont cotton farmers were paid back their own tax dollars to plant invasive pine and kudzu. “To protect the soil,” the bureaucrats told them. “For your country,” they said. Back then moderately sized wooden homes stood on land owned by several generations. Melons, peanuts, beans, corn, and, of course, cotton were grown in these soils. The ground turned red as fertile humus was rotated, worn, and washed into the Savannah River Basin, exposing the clay beneath.
Now the rolling hills are red, speckled with green. The gullies are now covered in kudzu. Trailers, shanties, and decrepit remnants of proud family homes now sit on borrowed land. Pine plantations grow on what once were cotton fields. There are more trees, but they are now crops. They are no different from a stalk of corn or a boll of cotton.
I hate to admit it, but there is a certain beauty to it all. As I head southeast, the sun casts a pale, pink hue on the hills. The light flows through droplets of dew, like gilded birdshot upon the verdant landscape. Tiny bursts of marmalade slither through the fields. Woodland creatures take advantage of the vast space and make homes in temporary forests. It is peaceful, quiet even.
Through my windshield I see a world neither stuck nor moving forward. That it lives at all is what gives me hope.
Anthony Sadler 