Traveling again. Left home early on Thursday morning to head south. It's a pretty drive, through farmland in southwest GA, parallel to the Chattahoochee River, but sadly, not close enough to actually see it. That would be an amazing view. I often think, as I take that route to N. FL how interesting it would be to start down that highway, and spend the day, taking every road that turned off to the west/state line/river, just to see where it goes, and how close you could actually get to the big, wide, slow, muddy water. Maybe next time...???
Much of state route 27 has been four-laned to make the drive quicker, and avoids many of small rural communities with by-passes that swing wide of commercial areas. As you can imagine, that means many of those once thriving communities with retail stores so dependent on the business of farmers, who are often at the mercy of the weather, are slowly drying up. I'm sure this is true in other areas, across the U.S., where farmers have had to give up life-long work, being physically exhausted themselves, and tired of trying to provide for families with rising costs on exhausted fields - getting deeper and deeper in the hole with each growing season. Then the government builds a big wide highway that diverts traffic around local businesses: and poof! Another one bites the dust.
It was a pleasant drive, uneventful. Though I made several detours through those struggling little burgs, looking for a newspaper. I found lots of weeklies, published to cover county events, and news that was so old by the time it got to press, it wasn't news any longer. I doubt they serve any purpose other than the requisite legal advertising for probate, and foreclosures. The loss of the daily printed word is another sad story, for another day...
Got to Chattahoochee about 10:30, and had a nice visit with dear friends. We had plenty of time to solve all the problems of the world: but since papers with world news are such a scarcity in that part of the world, we didn't know which ones needed our attention the most. (Yeah, I know: there is always TV, but you know how I feel about that!) We crossed the river to have lunch, and had a little tour of local park, then drove out to inspect the dam that creates the lake on the AL/GA/FL line. Below the lake, the river is the Apalachicola instead of Chattahoochee, as this is where the Flint River joins in.
I've recently noticed in our newspaper that the Corps of Engineers,as the party responsible for maintaining the dam and locks, has decided to permanently close locks farther north: creating a media up-roar (you know how they can choose their topics and generate howling protests over a chicken-plucking?). Columbus will now be 'land-locked!' What? No big deal: the state of FL will not allow dredging of the silt in the channel below the dam, so commercial vessels cannot use the river anyway. There has been no commercial/barge/tug traffic as far north as middle GA for years, due to shallow navigation channel. So no need to man/maintain locks that are not used.
We mostly all fly anyway: either driving too fast, or actually in the air. No one wants to take a leisurely trip up or down the river at the speed of water travel. We're all in such a hurry to get someplace, so we can stop, get out, look around, take a whiz, and jump back in for more high-speed travel. Good-bye to the Mark Twain era: so long steamboats, river traffic. We've talked over the years about going to take a river cruise on one of those big luxe boats that ply the Mississippi River - but find that they are outrageously expensive - like taking an actual cruise. Kinda like the gov't wants to promote train travel as a form of mass transit, but it is so high-priced, everyone thinks: I can drive there for a whole lot less, and not have to rent a vehicle on arrival.
No comments:
Post a Comment