Notes from Georgia

My 46th state

Ol Georgie has appeared at least three separate times in my fiction, always in the throes of sunset and always to signify some sort of sordid connection with an older and more perfidious world. I flitted on the edges of the Peach State, in a holding pattern on the Tennessee side of the border for eight hours. From the UT Chattanooga library I tutored two students in Brazil for their Saturday SAT, while my eyes kept drifting over the top of the laptop and across the nominal border.

Maybe it’s appeared so much in my writing because I’ve never known it in person. As I crafted fictive worlds, maybe it was easier to launch the lies somewhere which couldn’t hold me back by my awareness of its reality. Maybe what I wrote suffered in that sense— maybe I took liberties because Georgia remained for me unknown, full of what could be rather than what is.

I’ll never not have visited this place again. At the outdoor bar of the Cosmic Dog in Rome, Georgia (romega squad) is a view across the Etowah River, where it meets the Oostanaula to form the Coosa. Paint It Black is playing and the bartendress corrected me that it’s really rather Monday, not Wednesday. I am in the very corner of Georgia. I am dipping a mere toe. By sunrise I hope to be as far away as Birmingham for my next remote shift.

There’s a spotlight on a monument across the river, lighting up the Etowah’s flow from the top of a knob across the way, and I ask, “what’s that?”

“Myrtle cemetery,” she tells me. “Not a bad place to visit.”

“Probably closed, though,” I say at 10:30pm looking wistfully towards a graveyard. Maybe a decent place to crash out the beer.

Two hours earlier in the Chattahoochee Forest I pulled my car over on a windy byway to capture the sunset. In the valley below the Nickajack Gap on Dick Ridge— all real names— a drift of cows was a collection of small black dots. Cars slowed to a near halt when they saw me on the narrow shoulder. It was more or less like I had described it in a short story of mine from a few months ago, Ninnosperononek. I continued along the road, at turns being nudged by tailgaters and slowed to a crawl by creepers. When there were no other cars around I drove at whatever speed was comfortable, and treated speed signs like anthropological curiosities— so that’s how fast the folks ‘round here take these turns? Rome has one road worth mentioning, Broad Street, and as I tuck my backpack into the trunk a group of high schoolers holding cones giggle at my apparently obvious foreignness.

Yesterday I pulled out of West Virginia, trying to remember the same moment ten months earlier when I exited the opposite side, going north to begin grad school. It’s never easy, driving away. I can’t quite place if it’s at least easier. I am out on the road for the fourth or fifth time in my life— trips of at least a few weeks and a couple dozen states. I never know what I’m looking for until I find it, and usually then it is a thing I suppose I could have found in my own bed, in my own state, in my own routine. They are always lonely in a rejuvenating way. Like everything else, they quickly fade into and then out of memory.

I opt for Applebee’s instead of my third McDonald’s visit within 24 hours, and the waitress with dyed red hair who put a comma after every word charges 8 dollars for my meal. I am reading Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps while trying to drown out the Katy Perry knock-off blasting from the speakers above the TVs which air highlights from whatever sports are currently in-season. It’s midnight in Rome, I am pushed out by the mop. There are enough stars to justify sleeping outside, and I start looking for a state park or lightly populated area. I cross Georgia off some mental list and wonder if and when I’ll hit fifty states, and then what. This “see all the states” experiment will be a solid fun-fact for ice breakers. Then another round, maybe. A visit to every county, if things remain so overwhelmingly hard to cope.

I pull into a parking lot off Weiss lake on the other side of the border. The cicadas sound different this year, and an army of frogs squawk ominously in the woods beside my car. A cop pulls in after me and checks my ID. He asks why I have no pants on.

I pull out of the lot and cruise over the bridge with expansive darkness on either side. There’s an eeriness to this part of the south—the Cumberland Plateau at the southernmost tip of Appalachia— which I have a hard time imagining the people here don’t feel. Three miles after leaving the lot I am pulled over by a different cop, curious about my Connecticut license plate. This time I’m wearing pants.

Alabama makes 47.