High in the mountains
By Mikel K (Photos by Just Joan).
There is this kool place to eat in Mableton called Martin’s.
We were in line in the drive through to get some Sunday morning biscuits, and a
woman tried to force her way in line in front of the car in front of us. The
car in front of us did not let the woman in and we decided not to let her in,
either, because we were blocking in a man parked next to us, who had just
gotten his biscuits, and we did not want to honor her obnoxious behavior.
The woman forced her way in behind us and started beeping
her horn at us. I shot her the bird and honked our horn at her. (I need Dave
Sloan to step in here and say that I should have said that I loved her!) The
woman’s look was a cross between Tammy Faye Baker and Paula Deen on Quaaludes and
methamphetamine at the same time. As she honked her horn, she was putting make
up on. Joan joked that the woman was probably late for church; was late in
bringing biscuits to the church.
The stop at Martin’s marked the beginning of our Sunday day
trip to the North Georgia Mountains. We were headed to climb the hills that
lead to Amicalola Mountain to climb up to Amicalola Falls, the tallest falls
east of the Mississippi.
We just drove by a place called Norman Carpets and I thought
how that if you dropped the R from Norman, that you would have No Man Carpets!
I wondered if young kids ever made fun of Norman in that way, or other ways, as
they did me when I was a kid.
We just drove by the Lockheed factory in Marietta. It
borders Dobbins Air Force Base. According to Joan, inside this large facility, they
build BIG planes for the military, the kind that soldiers drive tanks onto. I’m
sitting in this car, on this highway, thinking that if man can figure out how
to fly tanks around the world to kill people, that man ought to be smart enough
to figure out how to achieve world peace.
I am drinking my coffee, on this ride, through a straw for
the first time in my life as Joan and I drive and chat. I am not sure of the
significance of this, other than I am wearing a white t shirt and I don’t want
to show up at the mountain with it covered in brown stains. I often wear black.
Black shirts. Black pants. Black socks. I am not trying to make any statement
with this style of clothing; it is just how I feel comfortable dressing. I have
a bad habit of putting a black shirt on in the morning and then brushing my teeth.
Sometimes, I drool toothpaste and saliva onto my black shirt and have to change
into another black shirt. I am not sure of the significance of this, either:
one thought just seems to lead to another, sometimes.
John Lennon is singing, “I just had to let it go…,” on our
car radio. I think that letting go is a
good thing to do. I should have let the Paula Deen-Tammy Faye Baker lady go in
my mind, if not in line.
I don’t like to let the behavior of others make me behave in
a stupid, or angry, way. To have let her in the line would have been unfair to
the man who was trying to back out of the space next to us, though, and to all
the people behind us who were doing the right thing by waiting their turn in
line. I don’t want to play God. I really don’t.
Some people wash their car a lot. We don’t. I am always
thankful for the new shine that a hard rain brings to our car’s finish. Nature,
sometimes, has a way of saving a person’s back. Joan says that being in nature rejuvenates
her. We are about to be rejuvenated!
We just passed another Waffle House. Back when I weighed
almost 300 pounds, I used to eat at The Waffle House a lot. I love The Waffle
House, but you know what they say about garbage in garbage out. I love them
greasy eggs and smattered, tattered, smothered, and smooth hash browns, but I
just had to let them go.
I just realized that my license is missing from my wallet. I
think that I left it in a pair of jogging shorts that I wear when I walk the
dogs. I do not like to wander about the land of the free without id.
We are, now, on a beautiful winding mountain road that cuts
through some of the greenest and most beautiful trees in America.
We just passed a house that has been built underground. You
see the neatest things in the North Georgia mountains. Joan and I just shared a
drink from the cooler that Joan filled before we left the house. She said that
it has sea algae in it.
“CLG,” I said, thinking it was some kind of exotic and
important nutrient.
“No,” she said, “sea algae,” with a big grin on her face.
We didn’t have too much trouble finding a parking place,
though there were a lot of people who had arrived at the base of the mountain
planning to do the same hike that we were going to embark on. Joan was disappointed
that the Park Rangers had built stairs on top of the old path that she and her
kids used to take to the top of the mountain. We stopped many times on the
stairs for photo opts. The running water and beautiful woods were great
backdrops for beautiful photos, and were wonderful pictures in and of themselves.
I said hello to everyone coming down the stairs, and asked
them if they had made it to the top. Many said yes, but many, also, said that
they had started at the top! We got to a sign that said 175 steps difficulty:
strenuous. Joan is scared of heights. She said that she was never scared on the
old path, but these scares were jamming her transmission.
We made it to the platform where there was a beautiful view
of the falls at about the halfway point in their existence. It was well worth the climb, and the drive, to get to
this point. I wanted to get someone to take Joan and I’s picture. As I was
standing, waiting to ask a fellow who was videotaping the falls if he would
mind snapping a shot or two of us, a young lady, with a big smile on her face,
came up to us and said, “Do you want me to take your picture?” Her name was
Kendra, and she was in a group with her husband, John, his mother, Loretta, and
John and Kendra’s two beautiful kids. Her son came up to us with a big grin on
his face covered in water from the falls. He had taken a plunge into the cold
water.
We wound up taking a group picture with Kendra and her
family. At one point I joked to the group that there were no republicans or
democrats up here, just one people with a goal to scale them thar hills.
Loretta quipped, “I am into the constitution.” I nodded my head in agreement!
After we parted ways with these wonderful people, Joan found
a map on the side of the trail. We had decided to not scale the 400 and
something more steep steps to get to the top of the falls on this outing. On
the map that Joan found was a trail called the orange trail. You got to it by
walking a pleasant trail for wheelchair users that was made out of ground up
automobile tires. The orange trail zigzagged through amazing woods back to the
base of the mountain. An amazing thing about that trail is that Joan and I were
the only ones on it. We had the trees, and the rocks, and the acorns all to
ourselves and were proud to think of ourselves as folk who walked off the
beaten trail.
