Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [74]
We’d spent the last few weeks walking through museums. I was about museumed out. A concrete wall borders most of the river, lit by yellow streetlights that throw odd shadows across the walls. Some portions of the wall are a couple stories high and most every square inch is covered in graffiti. Huge scenes, thirty and forty feet tall and just as wide, cover long stretches. She ducked beneath an overpass and pointed. “Not all art is found in museums.”
The drug culture seems to spur much of the content, as it’s violent and has something to do with sex, somebody shooting somebody or needles and shooting up. It was angry, ripe with pain and reminded me of something I had begun to forget: escape is one of the miracles of art.
Abbie knew intuitively what I needed when I needed it. We had walked the length of it twice.
I STEADIED HER and helped her sit next to a concrete piling where the smell of fresh paint hung in the air. I read her green note. “Yes, I remember.”
I really wanted a hot veggie plate from the Shack by the Track, but prudence kept us hidden beneath the bridge.
With a circling tailwind, we continued past long, winding, bleached beaches, strands of mimosa trees—their purplish-pink blooms tickling the air—dogwoods, green and lush, and scrub oaks that anchored everything.
We passed beneath another railroad trestle that smelled strongly of creosote and diesel fuel, and around self-named places like Catfish Lane, Pond Fork Holler, and UGA Beach. The beaches here were longer, some a hundred yards long and covered in deer tracks and driftwood.
To the east was Conner’s A-Maize-ing Acres—a pick-your-own farm that peddled to city slickers looking for that “farm experience.” They raised pumpkins, watermelon and corn. A submerged sign in the river read “Poultry Fertilizer.”
We passed Harris Creek, Johnson Cemetery and Dunn’s Creek before passing Toledo, which is near the midpoint between St. George and Boulogne.
We passed the signature red clay of Tompkins Landing, where trash bags cluttered the bank and a man in a bathing suit lay sprawled across the sand like a beached whale. Given the number of empty Bud Light bottles strewn around him, the lobster tinge of his skin and the snoring, he’d been there awhile. The river widens here to maybe one hundred feet across. Lily pads have sprouted on the slower moving, sunlit Georgia side. At the landing, want-to-be rappers sucked on ten-cent stogies leaning against the mangled tailgate of a muddy red Toyota pickup. Tattoos, lip piercings, thick gold chains, chrome-sided sunglasses and pants worn below their buttocks seemed to be the local uniform. They paid me little notice and said nothing, so I pulled my hat down over my eyes and paddled quietly through.
I suppose that’s the next generation of river people, but they bear little resemblance to the first.
A red-tailed hawk dropped out of a tree on my right, scooped along the bank and lifted an unsuspecting squirrel out of its hole in the sand. While the squirrel barked at the top of its lungs, the hawk flapped higher, struggled with the acorn-fat, hairy rodent and then lit on a tree limb and sunk its beak into the chest cavity, at which point the screaming stopped.
Trader’s Hill was once a thriving port on the river. British and Portuguese sailors used to come this far inland to fill their casks with fresh water and rest in the cool waters. Later