French, Flowers, and Fuckery
I love Atlanta. The whole city is smiling and laughing today. A girl broke out into dance in the parking lot of a Kroger when an SUV with a bumping system passed by. It’s a black neighborhood I’m staying in, and it’s got it’s own distinct sense of culture from a few miles over where it’s white. I haven’t seen this type of racial segregation along the coast yet, and it reminds me of the Indian villages in Alaska or the reservations of the Lower 48. There are two competing theories on how our species will evolve (assuming we don’t blow up the planet first). One is that we’ll continue to be separate, the other is that we’ll all be one race. Maybe the outlying communities are evidence for the former, the melting pot of downtown evidence for the latter.
It was downtown at the art museum that I encountered one I hadn’t expect to see. A girl, entirely French, with brown eyes. I think she was following me. I’d seen her for hours, and she was memorable because I’d never seen another move so slowly through an art museum. I’m so obsessed with details (in photography as much as viewing paintings) that I’ve spent hours in a patch of mushrooms before, photographing them as the light changed and lit up different parts of their gills. And in this museum like others I’d spent five, ten, fifteen minutes looking at a single painting, studying the artist’s composition, thinking on the historical context, tracing their brush stokes and colors while others stream by. But she did the same, and after spending minutes on one wall of a room, we’d trade and switch positions in our cultural tango. We closed the museum down, and as we walked down the to the first floor I asked her what her favorite was, and that’s when I learned she was French from her voice. I asked if there’s any Americans in French museums, like how Monet and other French impressionists are here, she said only at the smaller, less popular ones. Hah, damn. I liked her. But she was quiet like me, and I sensed an awkward moment when we were outside. To dispatch the awkward moment I wished her luck on her travels and took my leave. She was too much like me.
But thoughts of her stayed with me for the rest of the night as the sun grew heavy in the sky and the earth turned shyly from the star, and her silhouette of sunset and sunrise flows across her curves. I’ll never hear the sound of her accent again, or see her reflective self stand in solitude as the mindless hoards pass by. I had sensed a kindred spirit in her, and let her go out into the world alone. Blink, and in that moment the light has changed, and your cards have changed. Like any experience out in the woods, this life is a constant allocation of resources amid changing circumstances. It is not a zero-sum experience. Everything has a cost, and nothing is immutable in this life. In a little pocket of civilization I found her, but now she’s gone forever.
But not all is lost!
As surely as the sun sets it will rise, and soon another hand is dealt. I’m behind the handlebars again and exploring a nearby state park, an experience which shocks my little heart out of its stupor/cardiac arrest and makes it beat once more. I find myself riding down Robert E Lee Boulevard and past Stonewall Jackson road as the road curves around Stone Mountain. Yeah, it’s the south, but I’m more interested in the terrain and the creatures of the forest that croak and chirp and sing than what the roads are named after.
Stone Mountain is an igneous rock formations called a pluton that extends high above the surrounding forest, where the soils were eroded away and exposed the formation. The landscape is dotted with these geologic anomalies that seem entirely out of place. After thousands of miles of photography this world continues to surprise as much as it has on that very first day in the field, which feels like a hundred centuries ago. Amid the forest the tulip poplar lives, one of the tallest trees the east produces and reaching over 100 feet tall. They’re more closely related to magnolias than to true poplars, and they’re named for the flowering tulips they produce. And there’s another interesting one here that I wish would show me itself - the elusive grey fox. It’s a cousin of the red fox and looks similar except it has a sooty coat. It’s the only member of the dog family that can climb a tree.
After sunset I rode to the north side of the park to peek at what I had missed along the river as I left. I had intentionally avoided this part of the park because there’s another stone carving here by the same guy that desecrated the Six Grandfathers in South Dakota, someone of which I hesitantly but grudgingly acknowledge the existence of, like when pulling up a map of sexual predators in your neighborhood. Stone Mountain is a spiritual predecessor to Mount fucking Rushmore in that it’s a Confederate memorial funded by the KKK with enormous carvings of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It’s suitable that their likenesses stay in the shade most of the day, like a dark stain on the land. But there’s a light show with lasers projecting something over the trees, so I pulled the bike over to take a look and found the most interesting absolute fuckery I’ve seen in a long time. It’s quite an achievement, really.
The light show is projected directly on to their portraits. In a show tailored to other millennials with short attention spans no doubt, the viewer is subjected to a barrage of 5-second sound bits of popular songs is accompanied by pop culture images until the show finally concludes with a recorded bit of the Star Spangled Banner and the US flag projected on the face of the Confederate general himself. Beautiful. I half-expected an audience of neo-Confederate white supremacists here, but they’ve outdone themselves here. They shit on everyone equally. I was actually astounded by its egalitarian insulting. I left after a few minutes, thoroughly confused by what I had just witnessed until my bike started to act up. Uh oh.
It turns out that I’ve been quite the naughty boy and neglected some routine maintenance that happens to be of the upmost importance. My front tire was at half the recommended pressure while the rear tire was… well… I should be ashamed for what it was at. But the great thing about this life is that even if you’re stupid or ignorant, there’s a chance you can still make it by being nice to smart people and people of means. I was lucky to have a good friend in this city that rides too and knows all about bikes. Despite being in his final month of law school, he took the time to meet me on the top floor of a parking garage where he essentially performed surgery on my iron horse. He tore apart the back end and put it back together by the time the sun set over the city. I was back in business.
The igneous rock plutons are probably one of the best bets in my area for a landscape photographer, so I ended my time here with an excursion to Arabia Mountain. It’s not as big as the Confederate memorial and I don’t feel like a fat sack of shit hiking to the top of it, but it’s still delightful with it’s wonderful color palette and mozaic patterns where nature crept in between cracks in the stone. Shallow rock pools are occupied with red-bodied little plants tipped with white flowers, green moss and sedge grows in the cracks, and isolated pastures of yellow grass stand where enough debris had collected that their roots could grab a hold of something. And all around, the rocks are streaked with brown, grey, and tan where the draining rain stained it.
This place is amazing. After 8,000 generations of building knowledge, this is more enchanting than anything we could ever build. As the sun set, I chased its light around the summit, skittering up and down the rocks like a crazed grasshopper. It's amazing what can be accomplished if we only leave things alone.
