Atlanta to Plains, Georgia

Fred had agreed to wait a little longer at the Cruise America pick up site in Palmetto, a bungalow suburb south of Atlanta. As it happened, all our flights from Halifax went well and our taxi didn’t get lost and so he only lost an hour of his day. Most of that hour he spent complaining about how Cruise America wouldn’t pay him to upgrade their RVs with a few simple innovations.

"See that table top there. I do custom coach work. If I could put just a couple of cupholder dents in those tables, y’all would save so much money on cleaning those seats. But no. Cruise America won’t listen. They been in business for forty years now, and they know best."

He took us on a leisurely tour of our new home. Y’all bells and whistles.

Did we watch the video?

Yes, we did.

He handed us the keys and disappeared round the side of a building and suddenly we were alone.

Alrighty then.

We cruised down the I85 towards Columbus. Swung around the city and crossed the Alabama border and pulled into a Walmart in Phenix City to buy camp chairs and some supplies.

A guy strolled over to us in the parking lot. Admired our RV. Asked us where we were going.

"Florence Marina State Park tonight."

"It’s nice there. Good fishing. They have alligators now though. Never had them before. It’s a shame."

I didn’t dare look at Himself. I could feel the change in blood pressure. He has the 'gator fear. Too many episodes of Swamp Critters.

The Walmart had everything we needed to provision for our trip. Everything. Including craft beer. And Columbia Valley merlot.

We continued down through Alabama before swinging back into Georgia and our site. Farming country, mostly, interspersed with tiny communities.  They were closed up or for sale mostly, except for pawn shops and CHEAP CIGS BEER stores and the odd gas station.

Our first campsite was in among stately pines draped in Spanish moss. Which is neither Spanish nor moss, and is the home of the original bed bug. Early English settlers used Spanish moss to fill their mattresses, and the ensuing itch is the origin of the ‘Night night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite’ rhyme.

Next morning we meandered over to Providence Canyon. Settlers in the 1800s cleared the land of its pine forest and ground cover, and after a while the spring rains washed away the sandy soil and then kept washing. Long after the settlers had moved on to better opportunities, the soft chalk was eaten down over 100 feet in a wide area, creating remarkable canyons. The colours range from a deep burgundy red through all the pinks to a brilliant white, with striking buttes and a red clay bottom, through which the remains of the creek still meanders.

We wandered through six or seven of the canyons. It was very humid. The ground cover was reasserting itself on the canyon floor.  Pine trees and glorious azaleas and wild berries of some description. But it was silent. No birds. No insects.

We headed east some more. Through farmland mostly. Wide peanut fields that were empty after the harvest. Fields and fields of cotton. The plants died back, cotton clinging to them all, even after harvest. Cotton blew across the road and lined the ditches. I got out and collected some. So soft, but tangled up in every boll are spiky twigs of the plant. They hurt my fingers.

We drove on through miles more of it. Millions of plants. Each needing watering. Hundreds of bolls on each plant. Each needing picking.

I don’t know how a person could ever look across a cotton field under the Georgia sky and not immediately understand the enormity of the evil of slavery.

We fetched up in Plains, home of Jimmy and Roslynn Carter. It was a Sunday so he was teaching Sunday school, but we didn’t attend. There wasn’t much going on in Plains if you weren’t at church. We moped around the dollar store, picked up soap and sunglasses. Asked the clerk about somewhere to eat.

‘Somewhere to eat in Plains, Georgia on a bright Sunday morning? I guess you’re shit out of luck there.’

Kelly wasn’t too happy with her lot in life I don’t think.

We wandered down East Main St. The street comprises the old peanut warehouse built by Carter’s father. Now it’s an upmarket inn, with specialty stores on the ground floor.

Store one was the Bobby Salter’s Plain Peanuts and General Store, which sold the best peanut butter icecream in the world.  It was pretty good alright. In amongst the roasted, ground, baked, sweetened and broiled peanuts, the peanut teeshirts, badges, tote bags, key chains, Christmas decorations, and everything else, we found a can of Creamed Possum with Sweet Potatoes Garnished in Coon Fat Gravy which unfortunately we were not allowed to purchase.

It belonged to my grandma, it’s not going anywhere.

We moved on to Store 2, the Greatest Collection of Political Memorabilia in the South.  My kind of store.  The Donald Trump for President 2016 were just inside the door.  

"They’re outselling everything right now", the owner said. "They come in here with their ideas and no sense of humour and if they buy a Trump button, I tell them my Sarah Palin joke."

I asked if he would tell it to me for a Feel the Bern button.

"Okay then, why did Sarah Palin keep putting quarters in the Coke machine?

Cos she was winning!"

As he laughed himself into a coughing fit I poked around this treasure trove of political memorabilia. Every button, bumper sticker and poster you can think of was there, all the way back to Eisenhower.  

He had a collection of pre-WW2 buttons for sale in a glass case.

Eventually a little knot of liberals self-organised around the Bernie buttons to discuss Trump.

‘We love your new President, Mr. Trudeau, don’t we honey’, said one half of an elderly couple from Minnesota.  ‘Did you vote for him?’

We didn’t bother to explain.

‘If Trump wins, we’re moving to Ireland’ said the other half of the couple. ‘We were there recently, we loved it.’

‘He’s no Jimmy Carter’, I said.

I have a theory. There’s a generation of decent, hardworking, lifelong liberal American voters who got beat down by the inflation and interest rates of the seventies. They had bills to pay. When Reagan came along with his low taxes, they took one chance to vote for their own interests. Buried Jimmy Carter. And unleashed the political force that has found its purest form in Donald Trump. And they are horrified and they blame themselves.

Those busloads of boomers who fetch up in Plains Georgia every Sunday are coming looking for forgiveness.

‘He took my hand and said he was glad I made the trip’, one of them told me.

‘He was too honest to get re-elected’, I offered.

‘He was.’

We fetched up in Little Ocumglee State Park which has been privatised and which I don’t think I liked too much, but there were pine trees and we lit a fire and drank the rest of the craft beer and talked about Cornwallis and the colonies and looked forward to Savannah the next day.