We were on the road a little past dawn, headed straight into my past.
I spent the first part of my life in Sowega, and you’d have to be from there to know what it means. Southwest Georgia. So now you’re a native. I also spent a great deal of time working on roads and bridges, so I know places no one else does. Sikes Mill was a quiet place, the Orange Spider Massacre happened there. Wolf Creek was nearby, and I spent a day there once, preparing for an in-house exam.
The turn on County Line Road in Thomas County was where I took to go to a friend’s house, and I’ve never been to Whigham’s main attraction.
I have reached Climax, which is nearby, and sang an Elton John song on Alice Street in Bainbridge.
Heading north from Bainbridge, I saw the house, once a nice house in a nice yard, and now the house is abandoned and the yard a sea of weeds. I met a woman who wanted a ride home so I took her there, we spent some time together, and then none. I remember a lot of weird things in Colquitt, like the man who got a DUI on a riding mower right in front of our paving crew. We had seen him riding past before, and once he turned it over in a ditch so we helped him out. He didn’t spill any of his beer.
A man had a mountain in his yard there, and someone offered to move it and couldn’t.
Steve, a guy I worked with, lost a sheet of paper by the road one day, work related paperwork, and asked me to help him look for it a week later. We went out, stopped, and he walked three feet and found it.
The cypress stump, seven feet across that guarded a well is gone now, the new road ate it.
The guy that lived in a trailer near the road was killed with his brother and three other people in a car wreck in 1980. The trailer is gone now. The hotel I took a woman to in 1982 is still there, and I remember how nervous she was to be in a hotel. She and I were both young, and she had never had sex except in the back of a car or two.
The golf course is a hay field again, and the country club closed, apparently.
New road work done long after I was gone confused the landscape, got rid of a lot of dirt roads, and obliterated landmarks, like the old building where a hamburger place stood. We went there when I was a little kid.
There’s a bypass, and I don’t have to drive through Blakely, where ghosts line up like roadkill on every corner. I don’t have to drive by the house I always thought of as a prison. I don’t have to travel this road but once or twice more in my life, and eventually, I, too, will be forgotten.
Take Care,
Mike