Day 36: Savannah, Georgia, to Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina

Forsyth Park fountain - that's at least baroque, right?

Monday 28 October – The Forsyth Park Inn is, in fact, right on the western edge of Forsyth Park, a decent-sized chunk of real estate with some baroque fountains that would fit seamlessly into Vienna (the Austrian one) and several rules about where and how fast and in which direction one may bicycle, walk, run and rollerskate.  I started my penultimate road-trip day by circumnavigating the park a couple of times.  Lots of others were out with me, and we smiled politely as we passed each other the second and third times.  No one seemed especially eccentric, à la Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.  The air felt clean and the whole scene rather small-town, or at least exclusive-neighborhood-in-a-small-city.

The Forsyth Park Inn, as seen from Forsyth Park

The hotel offered an excellent hot breakfast; a single entrée that they described the night before, so guests could make minor amendments (“No sausage, thanks.”).  There were also the usual cold buffet options, but I was quite content with my quiche-in-a-biscuit-y thing.  The waitresses were quiet and friendly, black Southern women, and I thought the second-swankiest hotel of the trip was well worth the credit-card points.  Most of what I knew of Savannah, before visiting, came from the movie cited above, and I felt like an Econolodge would be the wrong choice for this city.  So I got a lush courtyard and a big tub with whirlpool jets and a plethora of antiques (or at least second-hand furniture) in a basement – excuse me, garden-level – room.  The Inn also offered evening hors d’oeuvres, afternoon tea and all-day cookies or something, all available for imbibing on their very ante-bellum open porch overlooking the park.

I took another big walk through the downtown area, mostly to look at the architecture and landscape.  I’ve read a lot about the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD to its graphic-designer friends), and the forward-thinking and flair it provides the city, but didn’t see the typical signs of art-school influence.  There was a lot more evidence of Juliette Low’s and John Wesley’s contributions to the world, in fact, than facial piercings and sculpture apps.  For me, this was a very beautiful place I’m delighted to have seen, but not one I’m eager to visit again soon.  The energy level was low (this may reflect my feelings about coming to the end of my journey), and the place was just a bit precious.  They issue Certificates of Appropriateness, for heaven’s sake.  Maybe they mean it as a joke, but what if they don’t?

Beautiful Savannah - the pretty part, with a
mildly eccentric vine.

Away I went.  The deep blue sky of morning had turned the palest blue it could be and not be off-white as I drove away.  Back through the less-desirable part of town, and onto the interstate, and there’s someone transporting a fair-sized plywood structure, about one-and-a-half highway lanes wide, on a long, low flatbed truck.  It was decked with red flags, amber lights, and police blues, and accompanied by two Georgia State Patrol cars (“The Georgia patrol/was makin’ the rounds”) with their lights flashing, pluse three ‘certified safety vehicles.’  Those last were small pick-up trucks loaded with lights and unidentifiable but very important-looking cargo.  Two of them had long poles rising vertically from just behind their cabs – much longer than the old whip antennas that used to give away unmarked police cars.  They looked like they might be useful for fishing keys out of storm drains, but that seems unlikely to be their primary purpose.

I left them behind me in Georgia, though, and crossed into South Carolina past a welcome sign with flowing script, bordered by the kind of brick walls one sees at high-end horse farms, with flowing lines, that ought to be flanking ornate gates.  Glancing back, I saw the same flowing script thanking south-bound motorists for having visited.  I suppose a gated interstate, no matter how architecturally-appropriate the actual gates, would be impractical.

There are shotgun shacks by this highway, right up close to three- and four-lane Route 95.  They have no noise-reducing walls; first-world problems, sure, but not one with which the residents of the high-income suburbs of Washington, DC, grapple.  You want to live near the capital beltway, you get a massive noise-reducing wall.  I bet around here, the shacks came first, and didn’t get a lot of consideration in the transportation infrastructure-planning process.  But, you know, I could be absolutely wrong.

Fifty miles into South Carolina it was starting to get chilly, and a very light rain started to fall.  How light was it?  So light, I drove about fifteen miles before I needed to close the sunroof.  And not long after that, I needed a nap.  Too much fresh air and exercise in Savannah, plus staying up late to read in the whirlpool-be-jetted bathtub.  So I pulled into a rest area, dropped my seat back, and fell asleep.

I awoke to the sound of the beeping noise my car makes when the headlights, turned on for the rain and forgotten, have successfully drained the battery.  Rude awakening indeed.  AAA sympathized, and their partner service provider was by my side in less than 15 minutes.  His name was Jonny, and he joked several times that he was “sorry it took me so long.”  He’d been right nearby, at something called Santee Plantation, which he characterized as a rich-people’s resort.  When I thanked him with a chocolate bar, which he said he wouldn’t share with anyone except maybe his woman at home, he showed me the mini flashlight his Plantation customer had given him.  Then he offered it to me, as he has a real flashlight.  He got it out and showed it off to me; it’s very large and magnetized, so he can stick it to things and work hands-free.

Back on the road, I kept thinking I heard distant, low rumbles of thunder.  Eventually I realized it was noise from the Walter Harris CD I bought the night before.  Someone just recorded him, live, playing outdoors by the Savannah River.  So there are all kinds of background noises on the songs, including the sounds of his hands on the guitar and the strings hitting against the wood.  Musical people I knew in my 20s used to wrestle with those problems.  Now everyone I know just wrestles with 401(k) choices and vacation plans.

The burial mound, turned into a fort by the Brits
and captured by the Americans.

By the time I’d figured out that there wasn’t a storm brewing, the roadside signs were offering to show me the Santee Wildlife Refuge, which offer I decided to accept.  I’ve put all the photos in an album, so you may look at those if you like.  SWR is by a constructed lake, Lake Marion.  The human-made part surprised me, as the area seems extremely wet.  Why build a lake in a swamp?  There was also a burial mound used by the Santee Indians for burials, and by British and American forces as a fort in the Revolution.  We won that battle, by the way.

Spooky/beautiful

Staircase to, after all, somewhere.

I took a short circular trail through the reserve, and looked at spooky swamp trees.  I did not see any snakes or gators, praise be.   I have no desire to see snakes or gators (though a few weeks later I did see a black mamba, in Namibia, and oh my were the interns jealous).  I did not see anything especially exciting, actually, though at one point I rounded a corner and saw a staircase, in the middle of the woods, leading up toward the sky.  It rather prosaically supported a viewing platform, but the first sight of it was surreal enough to be memorable.  The platform actually had stairs on each side, but one set was blocked by an enormous spider’s web, so I went back down the way I’d come up.

I got back to the ranger station and welcome center thinking a bathroom would be nice to see, but the place closed at 4:00, and it was now 4:15.    I poked around outdoors a bit – no port-a-potty, but a collection of shells and skulls curiously displayed on utility cases.  When a ranger drove up, I asked about them, and she told me staff had found them and they were the remains of animals killed in the refuge, probably by poachers.  We bemoaned poachers (me thinking, “though if they’re killing alligators...”  Joke.  Alligators, important part of biosphere or something.  Got it.) and she let me use the bathroom though after hours.  Love the lovely ranger.  I paper-towelled off as well as I could; this SWR provided the kind of humidity that makes a person glad she didn’t figure out how to route herself through Louisiana, where the serious swamps are.
closed at 4:00, and it was now 4:15.

I powered through the gloaming, and on into the night.  The highway was, for some miles, bordered by cotton fields, looking mostly harvested.  Were they that much farther along than Lubbock’s cotton, or were Texans busy harvesting now, too, eight days after I left there?  Cotton fields, shacks, and yet I feel like I’m in a very different place than I was a week ago.  I think that’s telling.  There are certainly many fewer cultivated fields in this part of South Carolina than there were in the parts of Texas, Iowa, Illinois that I traveled.  I suppose, too, that I was actually looking around me with different eyes.

Those eyes seemed useless and absurd as the signs for South of the Border began their assault.  I’m not certain what South of the Border is, even now, but I can tell you a few things about it.  It owns or rents a ridiculous number of billboards.  It offers:  36 holes of miniature golf, a reptile lagoon, RV hookups, ice cream, fireworks, pools, WiFi, Virginia sturgeon, super suites, around-the-world imports, burgers, gas and more, more, more.  And it tells travelers all of this in about a 70-mile stretch of highway.  Even with all the attractions to highlight on these signs, many of them simply show silly, colorful cartoons with the announcement that SotB is coming in 43 miles, 34 miles, 27 miles...  One of the billboards had a car – an actual car, a dented sedan – affixed to it, with the legend, “Smash Hit.”

In between SotB signs there were small clusters of homes and gas stations, getting smaller and farther apart as I moved north.  There was a white church on the western edge of a big cornfield, with three ornate steeples rising from a red-shingled roof, and it was beautiful and interesting and distinctive and probably, for someone who knows the key, meaningful.  And in the rearview mirror I could see layered shades of rose and gentle, pastel orange stacking around the fireball of the setting sun.  My attention drawn again to the sky, I noted that it really is not as big here as it is in the west.  Montana has plenty of trees, like the Carolinas, so it’s not the trees that bind the horizons tighter.

I haven’t seen a deer-warning sign for ages.

Country; it seems to me there are much worse things
to sound like.

I was close, by the close of this day 36 on the road, to something like home turf.  In Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina – never been before – there was a Quality Inn.  The desk clerk sounded beautiful, and I complimented her on her voice.  “Does it sound country?” she asked, sounding worried.  I told her no; I didn’t tell her it sounds welcoming and comforting, like a warm kitchen on a rainy night, with something good, something with honey in it, baking.  Maybe that’s what ‘country’ means.