PAYING ATTENTION ON THE BALDWIN GRADE

Passing the big Ingles market I speed through the last intersection in Baldwin, Georgia, and crest the ridge holding up the south end of town, only to find the undulating Piedmont hills laid out before me — visibility at least twenty-seven miles — odd for July, with its shower-curtain humidity, even though white and red oaks do their best sets of push-ups provisioning oxygen, while loblolly and shortleaf pines comp us with chasers of pinene, the real deal, not that fake Christmas tree hanging from your rear-view mirror, and I am gobsmacked by the immensity and continuity of this robust green landscape, distant from the ocean, yet looking like nothing so much as a horizon-long set of large rollers from a mid-Atlantic storm, so many waves of yellow-green, green-green and blue-green, colors ebbing and flooding with the breeze, like some window shade that you pull down but keeps rolling itself up, and I should really pull over and suck it all in like a long toke on a joint — let this immensity fill my lungs and seep into iron-red arterial blood for a lap or two around my body, but this is where the eight-mile stretch of forty-five ends and we’re back up to sixty-five within two-thirds the length of the local high school football field — my wife and daughters are accustomed to my speeding, not too fast mind you, just the six or seven mph of lagniappe the troopers give you, and Georgia 441 takes speed so well, as long as you slow up on the unbanked esses just north of Homer where you have to drop to sixty if there’s traffic, but when no one’s on your right, you can slalom across the lanes, drifting like Mario Andretti at the Grand Prix of Monaco — windows down and chestnut hair flapping — and that dendroid diorama of big mid-oceanic waves stays with me, all the way to Athens as I inhale the citrus flavor of new sourwood flowers, and drop down to sixty-two at the Clarke County speed limit sign — while my neurons write this second, this minute, this hour, in my every grinning cell.

Salvation South, Mar 9, 2023