April 24, 2007 – So that when you tire of one side, the other serves you best.

Today was a day of walking.

And walking.

And, just to be different….more walking.

Of course, I started in Athens. I drove around downtown a little bit more just because it was so damn cool. No pictures because I couldn’t find parking that wasn’t going to charge me for 10 minutes.

Oh well. The only really interesting thing downtown that I didn’t get a picture of the day before was the original 40 Watt Club, and since I ate there, I’m good.

Of course, that is where a lot of awesome band played some of their first gigs. REM, Pylon, The B-52s…SHIT! Why didn’t I take a picture?!

Sorry. Sometimes I turn into an idiot.

The first place that I actually stopped was just on the other side of Broad Street just a few blocks away from my hotel. Just up Finley Street is another oddity of Athens: The Tree That Owns Itself.

Back in the 1820′s, William Henry Jackson died…but not before willing his favorite tree to itself. He had so much fun as a child climbing its branches that he couldn’t bear to think of it being uprooted, so the deed to the tree and the land within eight feet of its roots was buried in the soil so that the tree would forever own itself.

At least, that’s the legend. There are those who refute that saying that this man grew up elsewhere, so how could he have climbed this tree as a kid? And there is, of course, no legal precedent for a tree owning itself, so the deed really doesn’t mean much. But the city recognizes it, so that’s all that matters.

In fact, when the original tree got sick and died in the 40s, they put out an APB on saplings that had grown from its acorns. They found the one that they thought would live the longest and it is now The Son Of The Tree That Owned Itself. It’s in the same place as the original tree and is, as you can see, pretty damn big. This one is only about 60 years old or so. There was no way to tell how old the original was, but they estimated anywhere from 150 to 400 years old. Too bad.

The plaque, by the way, says:

FOR AND IN CONSIDERATION
OF THE GREAT LOVE I BEAR
THIS TREE AND THE GREAT DESIRE
I HAVE FOR ITS PROTECTION
FOR ALL TIME, I CONVEY ENTIRE
POSSESSION OF ITSELF AND
ALL LAND WITHIN EIGHT FEET
OF THE TREE ON ALL SIDES
WILLIAM H. JACKSON
After that little bit of Athens history, I drove back out to where Weaver D’s is and still couldn’t figure out how the hell you park there. That was a big problem the night before when I tried to take a picture: there was nowhere to park! How do people eat there?

So I ended up parking at Dudley Park (which, most of the parking there is for UGA students…you have to go WAY back in the lot to find good parking) and walking around the block to find….CLOSED!!!!

Weaver D’s is closed!

(Not so automatice for this person!)

No, not permanently. At least, I hope not. I thought it was supposed to be open from 6:30am-6pm, but apparently it closes for lunch? Or something? I dunno. But I had to leave Athens without having it Automatic For Me.

Ok. I’ll live. But there is one more thing that I must see. I cannot leave Athens, Georgia without seeing it.

I was pretty sure that I knew where it was, but it was going to take some searching. I had searched a little the day before, but I didn’t really think that I would find it where I was looking.

So I took a little hike. I HAD to be in the park somewhere because the picture that a lot of us have seen of it, it’s surrounded by trees, not streets.

I was about a quarter of a mile into the hike (all trailed, by the way…no off-roading yet) when I came to a fork in the road. SHIT! Which way? If I go one way and it’s the other, I’m screwed!

No, that way has all stonework it looks like. This way. This way or nothing.

Just about 300 feet further and there it was…standing before me like the Monolith in 2001 and having just about as much power for me.

That’s right, boys and girls: It’s the Murmur Trestle. I found the fucker! And with no help from any locals. (Although, I’m sure the people jogging around there knew exactly what I was looking for. Who else would be hiking around a park in khakis?)

I took more pictures of this thing than I have taken of anything else. Every angle, I got.

I walked around the whole thing as far as I could. (I wasn’t going to hike into the creek.) I almost cried when I found it. (Ok. Maybe I didn’t cry. But I was a bit….moist?) I’m the biggest dork in the world.

Just to show you what a huge dork I am, this is my interpretation of both sides of Murmur:

Ok, so it’s not the same kudzu pile as the front cover. Nobody really knows where that is. I think even the guys in the band have forgotten. (Too much of that damn stuff around here.) And the angle’s not quite right on the Trestle, but, as I said, I couldn’t get down into the creek where the original was obviously taken.

If I get like this in Athens over REM, imagine if I ever make it to Liverpool. I’ll be a blubbering mess, taking 400 pictures of Penny Lane street signs and trees in Strawberry Fields.

It was time to go. I had achieved the my goal for Athens.

If anyone wants to go to Athens and look for this thing…you’re on your own. It’s more fun that way. Although, I sort of gave away its location, so it’ll be much easier for you.

Off to Savannah!

The drive to Savannah from Athens is kind of weird. It’s ALL rural roads until you finally get to I-16. There were times that I wasn’t sure that Gawd was leading me right. In fact, there was a point where she decided that I was somewhere that I wasn’t.

Damn GPS. Gettin’ all off track. It was a few miles before it finally picked me up again. I was lost in the white part of the map with no hope of finding a road again. Of course, I was on the right road, but Gawd didn’t know it.

Didn’t know I could escape the eyes of Gawd, huh?

I finally made it to my hotel near Savannah. Yes, another hotel. I’m gonna run out of money any month now. But I do like to be clean for my treks into cities. In Yellowstone, I don’t care if I stink. In Savannah, not so much.

I only hung out in the hotel long enough to find out how to get to the city and see if I could figure out how I would find my way around without Gawd to help me.

Turns out, it was pretty damn easy. The hotel had a free map with points of interest…um…pointed out. And I wrote down directions from Gawd and everything was ok…I hoped.

It was. Found downtown with no problem and took my own walking tour of the historic district.

Here’s a little info about Savannah: It was the first planned city in Georgia in 1733. James Oglethorpe (whose name you will see ALL OVER the fucking place) planned a grided city with squares every few blocks. He wanted it to be a free society: no slaves. Of course, plantations started to pop up and that went out he window pretty quickly. (He also didn’t want any Catholics. But the problem with Savannah…is that it is full of Scots!)

When Sherman finished up his March, he ended in Savannah. Some say that he spared it at Lincoln’s request. Others say that he had a girl there. Who knows? Either way, the most beautiful city in Georgia didn’t get burned.

Savannah became a pretty rich society before the Civil War because it was only 17 miles from the Atlantic and the Savannah River was a great place for a port. After slavery was abolished, though, the bottom kind of fell out of the plantation system and Savannah suffered. Things started to go to shit.

Then in the 60s the residents started to take an interest. They organized their own Re-Reconstruction. It had already been called the most well-integrated city in the South by Martin Luther King, Jr, but now it was going to be the most beautiful city again.

And, I tell you what, they’ve done and amazing job.

River Street (which, of course, is right on the River) is the tourist trap area. The entire street is still made of the same brick that formed the roads in the 18^th Century. The sidewalk is made of some kind of concrete and shell conglomeration that has a name, but it escapes me at the moment (and I have no internet to tell me, dammit!). The stores down here are mainly made for tourists. There are no less than three candy shops hawking salt water taffy by the metric ton. (Not a big fan of it, so I passed.) There are gift shops and overpriced restaurants by the score. It was fun to walk down, but I don’t think it’s particularly interesting enough to buy anything there. (Although, I did buy a mocha. Got to.)

To get to River Street, you have to walk down creepy alleyways with steep steps or walk down cobblestone roadways that are just as dangerous because a) cars can’t see you coming and b) they can be pretty slippery. I like the alleyways, personally.

(This is actually a parking lot just above River St and below the rest of the city.)

River Street is cool, but the rest of the historic district is the real Jewel Of The South. With moss dripping from all of the trees and ivy crawling up all of the old Colonial houses, this is an amazing city.

Remember what I said about Athens being everything we wanted Austin to be? Well, Savannah is what we could have made Austin about 15-20 years ago. It’s probably about the same size (maybe a bit smaller) and full of old haunted warehouses and beautiful buildings. If we had just restored those buildings instead of tearing them all down, we could have had something approaching the brilliance of Savannah. Instead, Austin is turning into a suburb of LA with strip malls and generic condos going up everywhere.

Keep Austin Weird, huh? More like Keep Austin Commercial.

But even at its peak, Austin could never have been as beautiful as Savannah. I’ll just let the pictures speak for themselves…with a little help from my captions.

(Savannah is still a big port city. Here’s the Savannah River.)

(Florence Martus stood on the dock of the River for 44 years, greeting the ships as they came in. Some say she was waiting for a sailor that she fell in love with. Others say it was because she got gifts from the sailors. Either way, this is her statue.)

(The Washington Guns – captured at Yorktown and given to Savannah by the First President himself in 1791)

(The Mason’s Hall)

(City Hall behind a tree)

(Vietnam Memorial)

(Bay Street – the one just above River Street)

(They had so many theatres in Savannah that this one got turned into an Asian restaurant. Oh, and the Marshall House is next to it. I’m sure there’s some significance there, but I can’t find it. It just looks cool.)

(Chippewa Square – It was from this Square that the great philosopher Forrest Gump shared his wisdom with whoever would listen to him. Note the complete lack of a park bench. That’s because one was put there by movie magic for Tom to sit on.)

(Some shots of the Colonial Park Cemetery. The last one is the entrance, not a huge gravestone.)

(St. John Babtist Cathedral. It’s effing HUGE!!!)

(This is the oldest working theatre in America. It was built in 1818 and remodeled in the late 1940s.)

(The Independent Prespbyterian Church – It’s 250 years old.)

(The Justice Bldg…this is the only way I could get the steeple in.)

(You can’t really see how pretty this building is. At first I thought it was a mosque or a synagogue. Then I noticed the security guard…and the pool tables….and the students at computers. It may have been a synagogue at one time, but now it’s the SCAD (Savannah College for Arts and Design) Student Center.)

(This is, I think, the most beautiful street in Savannah. It’s Oglethorpe Avenue.)

(The Owens-Thomas House. It as designed by William Jay, one of the first architects in America. He was 20 when he finished the design. Bastard.)

(Just another theatre. This is a young whipersnapper. Built in 1921.)

(Just to show that there are indeed newer buildings in Savannah. They don’t like ‘em too much, though.)

I walked around this town for over three hours and never once felt lost. That’s gotta be a record for me. I got lost in fucking Athens! But Savannah totally worked for me.

As I was driving away from the city, I was thinking, ‘Someone tell me what’s wrong with this town. There has to be SOMETHING!’

That’s when I saw the Hurricane Evacuation Route sign.

There it is. The thing everyone forgets about when you’re living in a city like Savannah. Eventually, you’ll have to leave because of weather.

Oh well. Nowhere is perfect.

Tomorrow, I’m off to Charleston, South Carolina. They were semi-rivals off Savannah for a while. We’ll just see about that. I don’t think any city can match the near-perfectness of Savannah.

(Some of you may wonder why I quoted an REM song that’s NOT on Murmur since I made such a big deal out of the Trestle. Well, that’s because Fables Of The Reconstruction is their most Athens-centric album. ‘Life And How To Live It’ is about a guy who put a wall in the middle of his apartment. When he got tired of one side, he took off all of his clothes, walked to the other side, put on new clothes and lived there for a while. When he died, they went into the apartment and found a closet full of a book that he had written and published called Life And How To Live It. I love that album.)