Thursday, October 24, 1996
Time out: 8:51 AM; 43°.
I started out the morning with an interview with a Robins Air Force Base newspaper reporter at Czar's house on base. Then Czar and I rode through the base and south on Georgia 129 to Kathleen where we turned west on Georgia 127 to Perry. The traffic signs at Perry were as confusing as they have been along US-41, so I let Czar lead the way.
At Perry, Czar headed back to work, so I took his picture.
I also took a picture of Czar's 1972 Sears bicycle (yes the brown areas are rust).
My opinion: if Czar intends to travel cross country as he hopes, he's going to need a new(er) bicycle.
Czar and I parted company at 10:42. I stopped at a Starvin Marvin store to use the restroom and have a cup of coffee, then headed south on US-41 (just west of I-75).
I should note that US-41 is like an old friend to me. I grew up (through high school) a couple of miles from US-41 in Illinois. My mother worked for 25 years at a Marshall Field department store on US-41. My dad is buried in a cemetary on US-41. As a high school senior, I first drove 100+ mph on US-41 in Wisconsin. My parents used to drive to Florida down US-41. I've been by here many times before, albeit about 40 years ago and in a motor vehicle.
This is pecan country. Here is what pecan trees look like.
As I've been riding along for the last few days, I've been noticing mounds of dirt at somewhat regular intervals in the grass along the highway. I thought the mounds were man-made and was trying to figure out why. I wondered if they were the product of street sweepers or some sort of highway department debris, but I couldn't figure out why anybody would be permitted to so mar the landscape. Like many things I saw along the way, I had no personal knowledge base to draw on. I might as well have thought these were baby volcanos. I was way off. Czar set me straight. They're fire ant beds.
In addition to logging trucks, I was being passed frequently by truckloads of cotton. This is cotton season too. There are fluffs of cotton all along the sides of the road. Like the fire ant hills, I'd been wondering all day why there were little pieces of mattress lining all along the road. I thought somebody was hauling an old mattress to the dump and it self-destructed throwing debris all over the road. When I stopped for some Gatorade alongside a cottonfield though, I realized that the fluff wasn't debris, but unprocessed cotton.
There were huge bales--much bigger than the bales of yore; about the size of a semi van--in the cotton fields along the road. The cotton trucks winch them on-board and haul them to a gin.
I tried to get a picture of what cotton looks like growing in the fields, but the detail just isn't there with the Casio QV-30.
This doesn't look like cotton. It looks more like one of those abstracts they sell in malls where you try to find an image in a jumble of nothing recognizeable.
The raw cotton feels just like the stuff you pull out from a Tylenol bottle, but there are bits and pieces of the plant stalk attached to it.
I passed a cotton gin and peanut factory.
I had lunch at Unadilla: Subway for a sandwich & Dairy Queen for a sundae. As I was riding along past a BP gas station, the attendant yelled to me, so I stopped. He asked: "are you the guy I read about in the paper?" It sure feels good to be noticed and appreciated. Fast Food Bob asked how much of my 15 minutes of fame I was using up on this trip.
I passed a long-abandoned gas station south of Unadilla. I am certain in my mind that it is the same one I stopped at with my parents in the early 1950's. I recognized it from a vivid image I retained all these years because on the side of the building, a few feet back from the front of the station was a drinking fountain with a sign saying "coloreds only." The sign and the faucet were gone, but there was a plywood patch where the plumbing would have been.
I grew up in Evanston, Illinois where the school population was then about 25% black. The Unadilla, Georgia gas station "coloreds only" sign was my first experience with blatant racial separatism. The image of the "coloreds only" drinking fountain in this gas station was so vivid that it stayed with me all this time.
Clearly, the era of racial discrimination is long gone in the south I've been traveling through for the past few days. In fact, I think the south is actually more integrated than the north. Down here, there are blacks and whites living side by side in every neighborhood. In Michigan, there are few integrated neighborhoods; the majority of northern communities are predominantly one race or the other. I doubt there are a handful of black families where I live.
I was riding along enjoying the scenery near Vienna (VY-enna)
when I came upon a young lady flagging me down at a crossroad. She told
me she'd passed me in her car and had driven home to get some juice and
fruit to give me. Suzanne is a student at a Baptist nursing college in Atlanta.
I told her about some of the things I photographed, such as the "ant hills." She corrected me. They're "ant beds" she said and if you kick them with your foot, you'll see the ants.
I never cease to be amazed at how wonderful people are to me all across the continent. All day today, MOST drivers waved at me.
I couldn't stop and read it due to traffic, but I passed an historical marker that said I was on the DeSoto trail. I wish I knew more about what that means historically. I just don't have time right now for such detail. Maybe I'll read up on some of the history and beef up this page later. [Note 1/97: Well, it is later, but I never did research the history. I've been too busy. Maybe I'll get it done when I produce the CD-ROM version of this website or my book.]
At Ashburn, I passed a nice old (1888) house called "Sparrow's Nest."
I stopped for the night at Ashburn.
Total mileage today: 80.
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© Ed Noonan 1996, 1997