Sentimental Journey Down U.S. 221

By Tom Poland

 

Football, Family, & Fighter Jets

We were on our way to explore Georgia’s Carolina bays down near the Florida state line. Valdosta, Georgia, to be precise. Photographer Robert Clark and I were making a six-and-a-half hour drive. Our mission? To work on a book about Carolina bays.

There’s no easy way to get to Valdosta. We had little choice but to take I-20 West to U.S. 221, a road that revived memories. We passed through Harlem, Wrens, and Louisville, places where I played football. My senior year we defeated Louisville, Wadley, and Wrens, so this trek down 221 briefly became a victory tour with memories of fresh-cut grass and Friday night lights.

Driving on what stood out, however, were cotton fields, pecan orchards, architectural masterpieces known as courthouses, and towns laid waste by the years. Somewhere around Kite we drove through a hamlet where collapsed, rotting buildings had gaping holes where roofs once shut out the sun. “Abandoned by the times,” I thought. The community of Norristown, however, was beautiful in its simplicity, a throwback to times when country stores and cotton gins bespoke of boom times.

Nary a deer nor rattler did we see but other things mattered more. I was crossing my late father’s footsteps. When I was in college, Dad gave up his saw shop and became a salesman for Vince Thigpen Distributors of Tifton, Georgia. His sales territory was South Georgia. He spoke often of places like Hahira, Hazlehurst, Soperton, and Baxley. “Hi, I’m John Poland with Poulan chainsaws.” The similar-sounding names didn’t hurt sales. My father made long, difficult drives into South Georgia. He would leave before dawn and drive back late in the night to be home with mom. He was a family man. I don’t know how he did it, for this one trip Robert and I made about killed us. Despite the difficult drive, the trip had highlights. We passed under I-16 a reminder that the city of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil fame was not too far away and we passed over the Altamaha River, a river where bald eagles, swallow-tailed kites, and red-cockaded woodpeckers find sanctuary, one of the “last great places” in the world.

 

Dawn At Banks Lake

 

On the way in we skirted Douglas, Georgia, where Bobby Bowden began his coaching career in 1955 at what was then South Georgia State College. Lots of football memories along this 221 journey, the purpose of which was to explore and photograph Grand Bay, a wilderness areas in Lowndes County. Early Saturday morning we set out for Banks Lake, another Carolina bay near Lakeland, Georgia. It was a beautiful, serene setting. Though colonized by man in the usual ways, it retained its wilderness character, this cypress-filled bay with mists turned pink by the rising sun.

 

Grand Bay Gator

 

That afternoon we drove to Grand Bay, a complex of cypress wetlands edging Moody Air Force Base. That, too, brought back memories of my wildlife filmmaking days and a great-but-unknown writer. We came across a six-to-seven-foot gator that seemed to be waiting on dark to begin hunting. When not watching for gators, I scanned the sky for aircraft. In the 1950s, writer and Korean fighter pilot, James Salter, flew jets at Moody and much later wrote a gorgeous memoir, Burning The Days.

 

 

 

I walked the boardwalk. Toward its end stood the observation tower. Some 66 flights later I stood 54 feet high over Grand Bay. At 5 p.m. sharp, I heard trumpet music from Moody Air Force Base, which sat on the horizon some four miles distant. Sounding retreat for the day as the flag was lowered, the notes came at me clear and surreal. Then the Star Spangled Banner played, ghostly, dreamlike, and wavering over the air. Just as the Star Spangled Banner began, a broad-shouldered hawk cried out and like a jet it skimmed the tops of the cypress below us. The music, of course, played over a public address system. Even so, it was a moment the likes of which will never be repeated. I had hoped to see some A-10C Thunderbolts rocket pass, but the sky was eerily quiet except for that hawk.

 

 

Boardwalk To The Observation Tower; Grand Bay Observation Tower

 

Earlier that day it was freezing at 5:40 when we got up in Valdosta by busy I-75, a drug-trafficker’s freeway it’s said. The morning warmed up and by noon it was in the high 70s. No more cold hands but now we were fighting mosquitoes. “That’s South Georgia,” said a local. We stayed out until dark, around 5:50 p.m., a 12-hour day but a good one, a day that resurrected memories of football, family, and fighter jets.

On the way back, Robert and I decided to seek out a BBQ joint. We found it in Denton, Georgia, at Barnyard BBQ, a shack nestled between pecan trees. We ate like kings on an old cable spool converted into a table as the pitmaster picked up pecans from the tree shading my car. He complained mightily about the dry weather and for some reason said he was glad “He didn’t live in no big city with all that traffic.” Maybe it was because we said we were headed to Augusta, then Columbia.

On to Columbia we motored carrying special cargo: three days, 800 miles roundtrip, about 400 photographs, and one more memory from the road.

 

All photos by Tom Poland

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

 

Tom Poland is the author of twelve books and more than 1,000 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press released his book, Georgialina, A Southland As We Knew It, in November 2015 and his and Robert Clark’s Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II in 2014. The History Press of Charleston published Classic Carolina Road Trips From Columbia in 2014. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture and speaks often to groups across South Carolina and Georgia, “Georgialina.”