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+I have a handful of habits that carryover from growing up in the west. One of them is *going for a drive*. Not a drive to get anywhere, just a drive to drive. People don't seem to do that as much back here. Aimless driving is not the most ecologically sustainable thing you can do, but I miss it sometimes. 
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+Driving is a kind of meditation, especially in the wide open empty spaces of the southwest where I grew up going for drives, where there's nothing but clouds and sky and road.
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+<img src="images/2021/comanche_grasslands_Jul1610_34_01.jpg" id="image-2560" class="picwide" />
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+Where we are in South Carolina I have tree-lined country roads overgrown with huge, heavy old oaks. Their bare, twiggy arms stretch toward the winter sky. The dappled light of afternoon sun flickers like a strobe light across the windshield at 50 miles an hour.
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+I drifted aimlessly, taking random left turns but trying to keep the sun on my right, so I knew I was heading south. I wound up in a town called Abbeville, which has the slogan "pretty near perfect." You have to be careful with overly-optimistic slogans, lest they become ironic.
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+<img src="images/2021/2020-12-19_122121_abbeville.jpg" id="image-2561" class="picwide" />
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+I have no idea what life is like in Abbeville, but if the old broken windows theory is correct, things are probably headed in a direction that you might charitably call, not good. I know that's the case in Iva, the closest town to our woods. It's not a social problem. It's an economic problem. The jobs left when the mill shut down. 
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+That sentence applies to any number of a hundred small towns we've driven through in the course of our travels around America. Whatever social problems may exist in this country, they pale next to the economic reality that most of us live with. 
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+There's a town named Due West
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+The bare twiggy oak trees
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+I didn't have a direction in mind, I just kept turning left. Eventually I saw a sign of Abbeville and thought, I wonder what's there. Eventually I made it to the old downtown and parked. I walked around 
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+By strange coincidence I was shooting with the same camera as last year, not mine. 
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+I stumbled across 
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+On the way out of town I saw a road marked Heritage trail.
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+The gulla gulla gas station, a reminder that you're in SC.
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+a junction for level land in one direction, due west in the other
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+There were so many barns I would have loved to photograph, but somehow knocking on someone's door in a pandemic to ask if you can photograph their crumbling barn doesn't seem like the right move.
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