Lake Conasauga

On the day we planned to go kayaking on the Coosa River, the weather did not cooperate. Weird as it sounds, kayaking in the rain is not fun. So we ended up not doing that.

Instead, we turned the truck toward Ellijay in Gilmer County. I lived in Gilmer County all of my high school years. It was a weird and wonderful place. It is also the setting and inspiration for James Dickey's novel DELIVERANCE. For good reason. In those days it was full of inbred, violence prone, ignorant, hateful monsters. Much like the USA, only cubed. But I've covered that angle here before, and I may do so again in the future, but not now.

It had been more than forty years since I had seen Ellijay. It is indeed a changed place. Today, it's a huge tourist destination for people who hail from points south in Georgia. Most of those drive up from Atlanta, I suspect. The old stores that were there when I was a teenager are gone, replaced by antique malls and art shops and ice cream joints and restaurants and boutiques of various types. And the people are not the ones I recall. The inbred monsters have been replaced by entrepreneurs and their non-inbred families. Hispanic people live there now, and even black people! The old Klan creeps who dominated the Ellijay of my youth must have shriveled in horror (the county was 100% white when we lived there).

But we were not there to see the shops and tourist boutiques. We were just passing through, on our way to visit Lake Conasauga high in the Cohutta Mountains north of Ellijay. We made it through the busy downtown crawling with curious Atlantans up for the weekend and headed north to the Forest Service roads that would take us to the high country and to Lake Conasauga.

Again, it had been forty or more years since I had seen the Cohutta Mountains. The last time I'd visited I wasn't yet twenty years old and so homesick for the north Georgia mountains that every curve in the gravel roads that took me to the ridge tops brought tears to my eyes. My heart was aching and I hardly knew what to do with myself. Then, I had only a couple of days to revisit the beauty of the mountains of my childhood and then I knew that points south and flat were calling to me of responsibility. It was sweet and it was horrible.

The drive to Conasauga was fourteen miles of rough, rocky Forest Service roadways. We climbed from roughly 1,000 feet above sea level to 3,300 feet above sea level, passing through forests of hardwoods and pines and dying hemlocks. At about 2,500 feet the mountains met the clouds and we were socked in by flowing mists and the temperature plunged from the low 80s in town to the 50s on the ridges. Carole had not brought a jacket and I had to give her mine.

Our secondary plan had been to unload the kayaks at the lake and paddle around there and enjoy the peace. But it was too cold and wet up there and you literally could not see more than ten feet in any direction, so we decided just to sit on the shore of the misty lake and have lunch and listen to the silence that was multiplied by the cloaking mists.

Spider web capturing the droplets of mist and rain.

Bear country. There are lots more bears there now than when I was a kid.

One of the nice picnic shelters that they've constructed at the lake.

Everything muffled by the pea-soup mists.

There was no view of the lake, at all.

Lake Conasauga is the highest lake in Georgia. About 3,300 feet above sea level, as I recall.

Part of the trail around the lake.

Ferns.

I had to use a towel around my shoulders to keep warm. It was really chilly. We had a good time eating lunch by the shore of the lake.

Perfect Attendance

When I was a kid, my parents moved their dwindling family to the mountains of northern Georgia. Despite the fact that we were in the northern fourth of the state, and that we were near some of the highest country in Georgia, it never snowed where we lived. Well, almost never. We got one good snowfall during the four years we lived there.

However, when we’d drive to the end of the road, we could look toward the Tennessee border and see the really big mountains that loomed not too many miles away. Peaks like Rich Mountain, Grassy Mountain, and Big Frog Mountain, all of which were right at, or over 4,000 feet above sea level. When the weather was moist and cool around our house, those mountains would get a good snowfall. Every couple of weeks in the fall and winter we’d come to a particularly good view and those high peaks would be solid white with ice and snow. “Look”, my dad would say. “Grassy’s frozen again.” Often, I’d sit there with him and we’d gaze up at those glistening ridges reaching high into the cold gray sky or scraping the blue horizon.

“We should drive up there,” one of us would say. “We should drive up there and play in the snow.” Natives of the low country near the Florida border, neither of us had seen many snowfalls. Not me as a teen, nor my dad as a fifty-six year old man.

“Let’s go,” I’d say.

But my dad would think about it a minute, and always reply that I’d have to miss school and he didn’t want me to miss my classes. I think he was telling the truth. I was a smart kid and my parents thought that I’d end up in a decent college and become something other than a plumber or a bookseller. They figured I’d be a chemist or a biologist or an engineer or a zoologist or an English professor. Something for which I’d need the education I was getting in the public schools.

As it was, I ended up being a mailman. It didn’t matter at all if I’d missed a day or two of school now and again to drive up into the high country with my dad to play in snow that was rare and beautiful to us low country Southern boys. It wouldn’t have mattered at all, and I’d have a few more memories of time spent with my dad, other than seeing him gripping the steering wheel of his Chevy pickup truck, his eyes squinting at those white, gleaming ramparts rising high into the sky, dominating the blue to the north.

I’d have liked that.