We’re Here

Lilah and Olivia are young enough that pretty much everywhere is called “here”. This greatly simplifies the whole “are we there yet” dilemma of driving with children. That’s not the question. On the drive down here to St. George Island they would ask little Buddhists, “are we here yet?” To which Corrinne and I would answer, “yes, we are here.” They’re young enough that they let us get away with that.

And we are here.

What the girls won’t let us get away with is car seats. A car seat would make even Paul Theroux want to get off the train. So we were looking for a place to stop and feed the baby, change a few diapers and let the girls get out of their car seats and stretch their legs, which is how we found ourselves in downtown Thomasville, GA. Are we here? Yes we are.

If you’re planning an American road trip here’s my best suggestion: avoid the bypass. Go straight on through. Downtown.

The bypass will just give you gas stations and the same 30 stores arrayed in stucco boxes that you saw 30 minutes ago in the last town. Go straight through. Go downtown. Unless it’s Tallahassee, screw that place, take the bypass. The smaller towns though, straight on through is like time travel, straight back to the last moment in time before everything in urban planning went to shit. Or maybe just the last moment there was any urban planning. It feels a bit like going back to the last moment that people actually liked each other, though I know that’s an illusion too.

The best thing about small towns is the strange little moments you discover. If time is, as the Greeks would have it, a river, it’s possible to find the strangest things whirling around in the little eddies of small town centers. Once, somewhere in Indiana or so, in the middle of the night, I went straight through and stumbled on a giant statue of superman in the middle of a downtown square. In Thomasville we went straight on through and stumbled on The Big Oak.

Look, we’re here.

The only reason I know the name of Thomasville is that it’s home to Sweetgrass dairies, which makes a pretty good chevre. There wasn’t much in the way of parks though. Damn you urban planners of 1930. But I did see a little tiny tiny plaque out of the corner of my eye that said ‘Big Oak’ and had an arrow to the right. I turned. There were no further signs. I just kept driving until at one point I actually said, hey, that’s a big oak tree, and sure enough there was sign that also said that.

And both of us were right, it’s a really big oak. The trunk is almost 27 feet in diameter and I have no idea how they purport to know, but the sign claims the tree has been around since 1680. These days it takes a mess of cables and wired and posts to prop it up, but it’s still growing. It’s still here.

It’s even got its own camera or something like that. If you stand by the oak and look up at something your picture gets posted on the internet I believe. We skipped that and had races across the grass to the gazebo instead.

Later we counted boats along the coast. There’s a boat. There’s a boat. There’s a boat. I want to see another boat. There’s a boat. There’s a boat. Never boring, always here. And then you arrive. Here again.

Later at night, the sound of the sea. The waves and wind dying down. The fishing boats lit up on the horizon. The salt in the air. The cloud of the Milky Way. We are right here.