Inherited Wandering

When I think about my father I think of him outdoors. It’s not that he spent a lot of time without a roof over his head; it’s just that we spent a lot of father and son time under the open sky. He was prone to jump in his pickup truck (he always had a pickup truck, it seemed to me) and zoom off to one corner of Georgia or another. Sometimes we’d crack the Florida border since his older brother lived there, and sometimes we’d invade the eastern reaches of Alabama if it collided with one of his explorations of western Georgia. Rarely do I recall we entered Tennessee, and never to my memory did we cross into North Carolina. Twice, we went to Charleston, in South Carolina, but that was by design.

And the trips I took with my dad were rarely by design. He’d just pick a highway and go. He’d have a nebulous idea of wanting to head in the general direction of Tifton, say; or maybe towards Cloudland Canyon; or Albany; or to Columbus. Once, I mentioned to him that I’d noticed that there was a mountain where you wouldn’t think a mountain should be—toward the middle of the state. And, my curiosity having piqued his curiosity, we jumped into the truck and drove in that direction, stopping once or twice to ask people if they knew where we could find something called “Dowdell’s Knob”. And, sure enough, find it we did: a mountain where we wouldn’t have imagined a mountain to be.

From the summit of Dowdell Knob, Georgia.

Bush the Moron. I hope the remainder of his stinking life is short and miserable.