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From Edisto we took a few back roads through the low country, headed south and west. The winds left over from the storm made it a less than fully relaxed drive, which is to say I had both feet on the floor and both hands on the wheel. As always with wind my greatest fear wasn't the wind, but my own accidental over-compensation for the wind.
It was all fine in the end, except for the part of the drive we decided to do on the interstate -- passing through Savannah. What a boring thing driving on interstates. And American drivers these days... curious bunch, I'm somewhat surprised they all live doing what they do every day. Maybe I'm just old, but I swear hardly anyone knows how to drive these days. Truckers are the only one who understand how things larger than a car move.
There's actually a whole hidden communication system among truckers that I haven't fully deciphered yet, but I recognize it now. A headlight flash here, a brake there. Nods and hat tips. I don't pretend to know what it all means but it's out there, happening all around you, unseen because you're too low on the road. I get to see it, but I'm not sure I get to participate. The bus is big, but not that big. I'm twelve wheel short of that club.
We were headed for the middle of nowhere, but it was further than we wanted to go in a day. We've thus far kept our max driving under 200 miles a day. And frankly anything over two hours feels long. Just because we're living in an RV doesn't mean we want to spend all our time driving it. There's no hurry to get anywhere after all.
In fact our destination in the middle of nowhere was mainly to pass some time. We're not really reservations type of people, but sometimes you have to. And for Edisto we had to book way in advance. We also had to reserve the beach house we often rent in Florida ahead of time. The problem is that it worked out such that there were four days in between those two reservations.
The problem is that, well, there just isn't much in the South Georgia/North Florida region. In a casual conversation about this a while back we discovered that some friends of friends had a "cabin" down just west of the Okefenokee Swamp and said we were welcome to stay as long as we wanted. Sold.
We spent an interim night in one of those parking lot style RV parks at the end of the Altamaha River, an experience I am not going to comment on, save to say that everyone we talked to was very nice. The kids quickly made friends and had fun anyway.
We left early the next morning and drive north around the Okefenokee and down the west side. It was one of those drives where there wasn't much traffic to begin with and then there was less and finally we drove at least 30 miles without seeing another car. Then we turned off that road onto a private dirt road where the only other allowed traffic was logging trucks. Several miles down that road we turned on an even smaller road, just two tire tracks really, and finally arrived at the cabin.
The middle of nowhere. Or the edge of the Okefenokee. Same thing really.
The cabin sat in the middle of Pine farm, backed up against a pond that was about a mile long and half a mile wide. I killed the engine and opened the door and it was... totally and completely silent in a way I haven't heard since I went snowshoeing in the Sierra Nevada in the dead of winter -- so quiet the silence really is deafening. Your ears sound like they're ringing even when they're not.
Once your ears adjust it's not quite so quiet, there were the occasional calls of birds, a few cicadas chirping and every now and then a pig frog's staccato, almost digital sounding call. But if you've been sitting atop a 1969 Dodge 318 V8 for three hours the silence is overwhelming. And even after four days in the place, there were still moments when you heard absolutely nothing.
It was glorious.
Except for the part where it was in a swamp. I find swamps interesting in the way I find stamp collecting interesting. Which is to say I recognize that some people really enjoy it and I love to hear them talk about it for a while. I love to be a swamp for a while, but by and large, I am not a swamp person. It is in fact the only ecosystem in which I find myself feeling distinctly ill at ease, out of place. Humans don't seem to fit in swamps and, for me, just being there at all feels like violating some fundamental law of nature.
Fortunately the cabin came with a couple of canoes. I never feel quite so much at home as when I'm in a boat -- no matter how small -- and so the two things balanced each other out. I spent a couple hours a day on the water, just paddling the pond with the kids. Trying to sneak up and get a closer look at the alligators or trying to edge ever deeper into the thickets of cypress and water grass in search of herons, egrets, anhingas and the two very elusive wood ducks that would come all the way up to the patio/dock area so long as no one was around, but would feel deep into the inner sanctum of the pond the minute a door opened.
Despite by best efforts and stealthiest paddling we never got anywhere near a gator, but I did manage to grab a feather left behind by one of the wood ducks.
The white tailed deer were the opposite, they came around regularly like they were expecting us. There was a trashcan full of dried corn on the back porch that served as feed for deer, raccoons, squirrels and anything else that wanted it. But the deer especially came around regularly at meal times looking for corn, which we'd fling out for them. They'd hang around eating with us every evening, us watching them while we ate, them watching us while they ate.
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