Hanging Around Town

Having a sit and think in good old Athens Georgia

Athens, Georgia, U.S.

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+ September 12, 2019 + +

Athens has always been a good town to come back to. It’s something of a joke among those of us who’ve been coming and going for decades now. Most of my friends in Athens have left for somewhere else at least once, many have left more than that, but most seem to find their way back here again too.

I thought about this a good bit as we walked around town, exploring what’s left of the Athens I once enjoyed.

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taking a picture of child taking picture photographed by luxagraf

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Walking the streets of Athens photographed by luxagraf

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It’s always interesting to take the kids to places I’ve been and see how they react, how they like it. They don’t have any history to get in the way of enjoying it as it is now, which helps me figure out if a place really has started to suck, or if it’s just me.

The kids don’t remember downtown Athens before it was all chain restaurants and banal, new-construction high rises. They love walking around downtown Athens the same way they love walking around downtown San Miguel de Allende, downtown San Francisco, or downtown New Orleans. I don’t anymore though, try as I might to see it through their eyes.

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running on the grass, downtown athens, UGA photographed by luxagraf

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running on UGA lawn, downtown Athens, GA photographed by luxagraf

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I came to Athens for the first time in 1996 and moved here for good in 1999. I left for a few years in 2002. Came back in the 2005. Left for a couple more. Came back in 2007. Stayed a decade that time, which is as long as I’ve lived anywhere since I moved out of my childhood home.

In that decade things changed in Athens. Things are always changing, but this time things changed more than usual. California came to Athens.

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Automatic Pizza, Normaltown, Athens, GA photographed by luxagraf

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It’s the same story everywhere, a handful of greedy people sell out their town to highest bidder, which is inevitably wealthy refugees from California¹. In Athens it was, as far as I can tell, a semi-senile mayor and a handful of real estate developers who did the damage². Whatever the case it’s done. It’ll be decades before the pendulum of wealth swings back the other way, and then decades more before it gets back near the balanced center, where it was when I first arrived in 1996.

When we left in back 2017 I didn’t figure we’d ever come back. Visit sure, but hang around for any length of time? Probably not. It’ll be years before the housing market crashes back down to sane levels. House prices are currently well out of the price range of staff writers. Houses in our old neighborhood sell for well over half a million dollars (do I wish I still had ours? Not even a little bit).

Still, an opportunity came up for us to spend a few months around here and, after talking it over for ten minutes, we took it. So we’re going to hang around our old home town for Autumn, maybe Winter too.

The key to living on the road is learning to deal with the uncertainty. You never knowing where you’ll be in two weeks, which is both freeing and stressful. To cope with it you need to act slowly, and be able to turn midstream as it were because things will very rarely turn out as you plan.

In some ways I think much of my travel strategy is something I read once in poker book: be selective, but be aggressive. That is, do not play many hands in poker, but when you do, play them aggressively. In travel terms that means spend a lot of time making plans. Not plans you act on, just possibilities. Think things over, explore possibilities in your imagination. And I mean that literally. Sit in a chair, back straight, hands on your knees, breathe slow to relax, clothes your eyes and bring some ide a to mind and follow it out.

Part of the beauty of living on the road is that you have much more relaxed, quiet time than most people, which means you can think things through much more easily. You can have a lot of sit and thinks as my favorite kids’ show calls it. You can’t be selective if you haven’t considered all the options. So you consider as many as you can.

But then when it is time to act, you must act decisively and without hesitation because you have to commit. Once you jump, you can’t unjump. Sometimes you have to correct your course on the way down, sometimes you go oh shit and start flapping your arms. Sometimes you hit the ground hard. It happens. But this is just a metaphor so you pick yourself up, dust off, and carry on. Usually. And you have to be okay with any and all of the outcomes. Otherwise, this is probably not a lifestyle that’s going to make you happy.

We’ve spent a lot of time in the sit and think stage of late. We’ve been trying to figure out what comes next for us for the better part of year now and we’ve been all over the map. We’ve put significant effort into lots of different imaginary plans, all of which were appealing for a time, but none of which drove us to actually take that decisive step forward and commit.

The ones that stick out range from the obvious, continuing to travel in the bus, to the less obvious, like moving to the Yucatan. We had another plan that would have seen Corrinne running a small school in Costa Rica. We considered living on the coast of Serbia, which then somehow led us to consider living in a remote village in Alaska, and then a small town in Nevada.

Then we thought no, let’s buy a boat, or maybe an Airstream, or maybe a smaller Travco. There were other ideas in there I can’t remember now, and those are just the ones we were semi-serious about. Not that we could actually have made all these things happen. There are all sorts of technical and financial hurdles to overcome in all those plans, but when you’re just having a sit and think you don’t have worry about details, rather you worry about whether or not it feels right.

If it does feel then you move on to practical things. Maybe (probably) it turns out you don’t have the money for a boat. Okay, scratch that off the list. Or you make a longer term plan to get the money you need. And so on.

Like I said, you have to be willing to think things over, consider every possibility. There comes a time to act though. In my experience the universe will present you with an opportunity to move in some direction you’ve been considering. I try not to think of these things as suggestions from the universe. Just because an opportunity comes doesn’t mean you should take it, just that hey here’s something that will help you do X if that’s what you think you should do.

For us, right now that opportunity was to hang around Athens GA for a while. It’s not our whole plan, but it’s a step in the direction we want to go. So you go. One step at a time.

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They’re wealthy by every standard of wealth save those of California. ↩
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And let’s not forget complacent constituents like myself who could have gone to some city council meetings and made an effort to stop said developers and mayor. While it would most likely have been ineffectual it would have been worth a try if Athens were a place worth fighting for to you. For me, I take it, it was not. Because I did not. I prefer to move on rather than resist. ↩
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Fauna and Flora

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Birds
- American Robin
- Blue Jay
- Brown-headed Cowbird
- Brown Thrasher
- Canada Goose
- Carolina Chickadee
- Chipping Sparrow
- Downy Woodpecker
- Eastern Bluebird
- Eastern Towhee
- Gray Catbird
- Great Blue Heron
- Hooded Warbler
- Northern Cardinal
- Northern Mockingbird
- Red-bellied Woodpecker
- Summer Tanager
- Tufted Titmouse
- Wood Duck
- Yellow-rumped Warbler
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Old Growth

Out of the trees, into the forest

Watson Mill State Park, Georgia, U.S.

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+ September 25, 2019 + +

Spread out a map of the United States and trace your finger down the border of North Dakota and Minnesota. Let your finger drift to the west a little as to comes down through South Dakota, across eastern Nebraska, through the middle of Kansas, and down from Wichita Falls, Texas to the border in Laredo. This line you have just drawn separates The East from The West.

There’s no real consensus on this line. You’ll have to give a couple hundred miles of gray area in either direction to make everyone happy, but by and large this is where two things happen as you move west: the humidity drops and the forest stops.

Trinidad, Texas, where we spent the summer, is just to the east of this line, but still mostly out of the great hardwood forests of the east. When we decided to stick around Athens for a bit it had been well over a year since we’d spent any amount of time around trees. Well over a year since we’d had our horizon raised by leaves.

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Sunrise over a lake, Elberton, GA photographed by luxagraf

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I was born out west, and the wide open spaces and skies of the west will always feel more like home to me than the forests of the east, but my people come from forests. I think there are trees in my blood, somewhere back there. I don’t know everything about my ancestors, but what stories I do know are of people who would have lived in the primeval beech forests of the southern Carpathians on one side, and the ancient hemlock and white pine forests of eastern United States on the other. For me, going back into the woods will always be a kind of homecoming.

I feel relaxed in forests. But also sharper. All the leaves require more visual acuity, sharpen the senses. After a few days in the trees I start to feel more what might be called poise, that balance point between relaxation and tension.

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hammock in the woods, watson mill state park, ga photographed by luxagraf

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riding scooters in the woods, watson mill state park, ga photographed by luxagraf

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Maybe it’s the extra oxygen. It would make senses to me that the more trees around, the more oxygen you have and the more oxygen the clearer and sharper you feel. I’m not particularly interested in the science behind it though, just the experience of it. And interestingly, I get the same feeling of clarity, sharpness, and overall well-being walking in the desert, above timberline, and other places without trees, so maybe it’s not that at all.

Perhaps its not strictly trees, but the entirety of the ecosystem around me. The wholeness of it. The way everything is continuous, intertwined, uninterrupted.

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ferns and lichen, watson mill state park, ga photographed by luxagraf

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The words we have for these things somehow fail to capture them well though. Our language is better at separating out and dividing up than it is in joining together or describing connections. We often talk about forests, trees, deserts as though these things were somehow separate. We say “ecosystem,” or more often “nature,” as if this were something other than the world we live in.

It’s not though. We are part of nature, part of the ecosystem, part of the world. We are never separated from anything else on this planet. But I do understand what people mean when they say they want to “get out in nature” as opposed to where they live.

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fall growth, watson mill state park, ga photographed by luxagraf

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I think what we seek when we seek “nature” is part of something where all the connections between all the parts remain intact, where hard edges of modern human ideas do not exist. Where everything flows into everything else. Where the connectedness of life has not been severed to serve human purposes. Where roads and sidewalks to not keep the earth hidden away, the grass divided, the trees encased. Where power lines do not bisect the sky into segments, where hedges are not trimmed, grounds not neatly swept.

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boy walking in the woods, watson mill state park, ga photographed by luxagraf

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We seek places away from the order we have attempted to impose on the world because our imposition fundamentally does not work. Drawing lines between things does not work. The worst part is all the lines we draw around ourselves, as if we were not part of all this.

We are creations of earth. We come from here. We are part of this planet. No more and no less than any other part of it. And like every other species we shape it, it shapes us. We seem to have lost sight of that. We see ourselves on one hand as special snowflakes, exceptions, immune to laws of this planet. We are not. We cannot continue to draw everything out for ourselves without also drawing everything down on ourselves.

On the other hand I think it’s just as naive to think the world, “nature,” needs to be protected from us. The world does not need to be protected from us, it needs respect from us. It needs us to recognize it for what it is, rather than how it’s “useful” to us. It needs us to treat it with dignity and respect, like a brother, sister, mother, father. Like family.

Thanks to science our current perception of the world is more nuanced and detailed than any culture we’re aware of in history. This has opened a million doorways into the how the world works. But it’s also left us cut off from the world in ways that no other culture we’re aware of has ever been. We know so much and understand so little¹.

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mossy rock, watson mill state park, ga photographed by luxagraf

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It seems to me that this has happened because our stories, our ways of understanding the world, have seriously diverged from the way the world actually is. This is the source of our problems: on the one hand self-destruction, and the other self-loathing. Vicious cycles repeat.

I think we are slowly coming to realize that we need different stories. We need stories that better reflect the world as it is, not the world as we think it should be, but it will be a slow walk down a long road to get back from here.

I don’t have a solution. This is a problem with one solution. It is not even a problem we will solve. Not you and I. We will play our parts, whatever they may be. We can show that there are other possibilities by living them. But this is something happening on a grand scale. The stories that shape our world, the processes that got us here, are intertwined with the very language we were born into. These are process that have been in motion for thousands of years and will likely continue along for many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, more to come.

Still, we have our lives here, now. In the trees or out of them. I prefer in.

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forest trail, watson mill state park, ga photographed by luxagraf

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From what I read, the great forests of the east are not what they used to be. They are not “virgin” (always Europeans with their sacrosanct virgins), but to my mind these woods are still a grand thing. A beautiful place to sit quietly in, to play in, to drink this early morning coffee in, to live in.

The afternoons swelter. We go to the cool water of the river. Its slick, algae-covered rock slide is a welcome escape from the heat.

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Natural rock water slide below watson mill bridge photographed by luxagraf

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Summer hasn’t let go yet, but you can feel Autumn lurking at the edges of evening. The breeze stirs, the dead still, stagnant air of summer is broken by wind wandering through the trees. It comes in fits and stutters. Cool puffs of air that find us as the sun sets.

It’s coming though. I watch the chickadees and squirrels, they know it’s coming too. If they are right this winter will be long and cold, even down here in the South.

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This is a choice. And increasingly it looks like a choice many do not like. Unfortunately these days science looks to be going the way of the bathwater. Again, we’re not good at connecting. But really, there is no reason science’s experience of the world must be the only experience of it. So many things that seem either/or can just as easily be and/both. We just have to find the triad hiding behind the binaries. ↩
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Fauna and Flora

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Birds
- American Crow
- American Goldfinch
- Barred Owl
- Black-and-white Warbler
- Black Vulture
- Brown Thrasher
- Carolina Chickadee
- Carolina Wren
- Chipping Sparrow
- Downy Woodpecker
- Eastern Bluebird
- Eastern Phoebe
- Eastern Whip-poor-will
- Great Blue Heron
- Killdeer
- Northern Cardinal
- Northern Mockingbird
- Osprey
- Pileated Woodpecker
- Red-bellied Woodpecker
- Ruby-throated Hummingbird
- Summer Tanager
- Tufted Titmouse
- Turkey Vulture
- Wood Thrush
- Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
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