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| Photo by me, January 2019. |
Early yesterday as the sun rose on a frosty winter morning I was on the road. I melted the thick ice off my car windows and began driving from my home in Atlanta to my brother's house in northeastern Alabama. I am writing a book and our monthly meetings are informal interviews in front a fireplace, with cups of coffee and college football going in the background. I need his memories and his confirmations of mine.
I have made this two hour drive so many times in the last fifteen years since he moved there that I could do it in my sleep. Bored by the drive, I sometimes switch the route just to break up the monotony of the landscapes. I go one way and I avoid where I grew up in Paulding County, Georgia by driving around it. Of my choices of roads this is the preferred way.
I dislike the first parts of the drive as it leaves the city through the northwest suburbs of Atlanta and up to Cartersville, Georgia. Interstate 75 is a swollen mess of lanes, always in a hurry to get nowhere drivers and ugly scenery through Cobb County. The only beauty is the crossing of the Chattahoochee River caught in a brief glimpse as a stranger caught from the corner of an eye in a crowd.
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| My route from home to my brother's area. |
After Cobb, the landscape changes from buildings, billboards and sprawl by the time I reach Lake Allatoona and Red Top Mountain in Bartow County to something more pleasing. Allatoona is where I swam, played with my plastic boats and loved the 1970s as a small child.
In Cartersville I exit the interstate and head north on old U.S. Highway 41, the road immortalized in the song Ramblin' Man by the Allman Brothers. Highway 41 was the precursor to Interstate 75 and was decades ago the main north/south route for northerners from the Upper Midwest headed to the sunny beaches of Florida. In my mind there is no other road that I identify more with the old Georgia that I used to know. Today it is a mostly commercial highway through metro Atlanta filled with endless traffic lights, fast food restaurants and shopping centers that could be outside any city in the country. 41 is an ugly scar.
I am on Highway 41 only a few miles before merging onto U.S. Highway 411 north of Cartersville. This is the road that will take me north and to the west close to where I am headed in Alabama. This road is a lonely road of woods on rolling hills, the cold flowing Etowah River and pastures. I hope it stays that way and never changes. Miles onward, it skirts the city of Rome, Georgia in Floyd County and breaks south and west through Cave Spring, Georgia and scurries away into Alabama. The stretch of two lane road from Rome to Cave Spring is the highlight of this drive and the prettiest.
Northwest Georgia is known for its low topped ridges and valleys that are the final tails of North America's oldest mountains, the Appalachians. These are not the big mountains of the chain like those found in north central and northeast Georgia, but are more like grooves in the geological record. Having grown up in Northwest Georgia in what was then a rural area I feel very much at home passing through.
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| Topographical map of Vans Valley. |
Vans Valley along Highway 411 between the community of Six Mile and the town Cave Spring is the most scenic stretch of the drive. It is a wide valley with grazing and crop land on the floor enclosed by two of those low topped ridges.
I have also seen this particular area spelled as "Vann's Valley" which I believe to be the correct spelling. The name is said to come from David Vann who lived here. Vann was a sub-Chief of the Cherokee Nation and was treasurer between 1839 through 1851. Vann was killed by Union supporting Pin Indians during the American Civil War in 1863.
Highway 411 follows the same road through the valley as it did when the Cherokees were forcibly removed from their land during The Trail Of Tears.
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| Photo by me, January 2019. |
The road along the floor of the valley hugs the southeastern side. The area reminds me of the area in Tennessee where my father's family lived and farmed in the mid 1800s up to now. A picturesque world of bottom land and hills that pop up out of everywhere and nowhere.
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| Photo by me, January 2019. |
The eastern side of the valley and the ridges that enclose it.
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| Photo by me, January 2019. |
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| Photo by me, January 2019. |
A large estate can be seen looking to the western side of the valley. There are many nice homes through here and into the town of Cave Spring.
Leaving Vans Valley I enter Cave Spring. It is a town known for a cave, spring water, the Georgia School For The Deaf, antique stores and it is a speed trap if there ever was one. The cops aggressively enforce the ridiculously low speed limits that stretch too far. A person could walk through Cave Spring faster than they could drive through it.
Cave Spring is the last town in Georgia on my drive. U.S. Highway 411 veers due west from here and in a few miles crosses the state of Alabama line in the direction of Centre.
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| Photo by me, January 2019. |
An old barn sits in another valley in Alabama. The scenery on my brother's road is the same as Northwest Georgia a few miles away. The ridges and valleys do not recognize the state line that divides them. Humans can put labels and can draw boundaries but the land does not give a damn.
"Down the way the road's divided
Paint me the places you have seen
Those who know what I don't know
Refer to the yellow, red, and green"
R.E.M. - Maps and Legends
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