The Georgia Drought October 2025

 

An October Monday in the Georgia woods. Photo by me, October 2025.

It was a fantastic day in the woods on Monday with my favorite smell of dead leaves filling the air and the sound of the crunching under my feet. Yet, there is a serious problem. In the photo above there is normally a flowing a creek on the left. All there is now are a few puddles between the banks.

A skinny doe with ribs visible emerges from the woods near Suwanee, Ga.. Photo by me, October 2025.

You cannot argue that the weather has not been ideal for outdoor activities for the last several weeks with low humidity, comfortable afternoon highs and cool nights. I took a five a half mile walk on Sunday and six miles on Monday. I have been pruning trees and catching up on maintenance, since the grass is going dormant, that was shelved over the worst of summer. The deer have been foraging in the woods and have been in my front yard at night scrounging for something to eat. It is so very dry here.

The last significant rainfall at my house was on August twenty-first and since then there have only been a couple of days of brief showers and nothing significant. We need rain and lots of it to relieve this severe drought in Georgia. Unfortunately, if the long range models are to be believed, there is one chance of very light rain this coming Sunday and that is it through the rest of October. 

 

A Sunday walk in the woods. Photo by me, October 2025.

The weather reminds me of Southern California with cool nights, warm days and little rain. California weather is nice in California, but the trees, shrubs, flowers and animals in Georgia are accustomed to much more rain. Also, like California, the risk of wildfires is high and increasing every day with the trees shedding dry leaves onto a bone dry landscape.

The persistent trough in the western United States and the ridge in the central and eastern portions of the country are the culprits. Until this pattern breaks there is little chance for rain here. Eventually the weather will balance itself and the pattern will reverse, but it is unknown when and it needs to be sooner instead of later. In the meantime, people need to find some common sense.

A nearby house sets a tree on fire from their carelessness. Photo by me, September 2025.

Last month, a neighbor set a pine tree on fire with sparks from their backyard fire pit. Thanks to the local fire station for a quick response otherwise this could have easily spread. Some people are so disconnected from the natural environment around them that they seem to have no idea how dry it is and how dangerous outdoor fires are now. I heard fireworks in the distance an hour ago as I wrote this. If we had an effective state government that was not beholden to private business all fireworks sales would be suspended until the drought was over, but there has been no meaningful guidance from the state during this drought. The only mention I have been able to find is this AJC article from October 2. Someone from the state needs to step up to the cameras and microphones and tell the citizens to stop being clueless idiots.

Consider and Reconsider

 

A nice piece of reality from a September walk near home. Photo by me, September 2025.

If you read, watch or listen to the news, then you might be convinced that the world is falling apart. This feeling is not something new, but it is amplified more now via the internet, but the world has kind of always been falling apart with global crises, murders and all sorts of calamity and mayhem unfolding in the words of reporters between the advertisements. The world is a chaotic place, though when focusing on the United States, it certainly appears more chaotic than recent decades, at least since the 1960s. Whether that chaos is good or bad or even to what degree probably depends on your political bent, as most everyone online is acting out their performative political obsession, which is now bleeding into reality, from shaking their heads at every perceived slight injustice, from attacking strangers for different opinions, boycotts of retail stores or television networks to the far extreme act of assassination.

Having been born after the sixties in the early seventies, I have no personal experience with that decade. The sixties was a decade I learned about as vivid images and stale words in history books in the eighties. My assumption is that to the average person living in the United States in the suburbs or a small town, it probably seemed like a crazy time to be alive with political assassinations, Vietnam, Kent State, the Manson family murders, the civil rights movement, Woodstock and so on. There was one big difference between then and now: it was much easier to avoid the news and keep it at a healthy distance.

If you did not watch the network evening news or read the newspapers, then you were detached from what was happening in the cities or in far-flung places like California or Vietnam. The news on television was not close to home, outside your door or in your face. The news that mattered most was who was getting married, having their second child or who got a new job down at the plant. There was no internet to digitally bring all of these events to your bedroom as you pulled the covers up to your chin. The internet has brought the chaos up close and personal and the addictive intimacy of the twenty-four-hour news cycle is driving people crazy as they overdose on the news. The human brain, as powerful and adaptable as it is, cannot handle modern technology very well.

Nature is not concerned with the news. Photo by me, September 2025.

Today's world offers a person plenty to think about, consider and reconsider. I read the news and then I go out into the world and enjoy what is in that moment and in my presence, or at least I try. Keeping the news in a proper perspective and at a distance helps me stay sane. I do not make policy or battle criminals and whatever is going to happen is going to happen no matter what I may think. I am an observer of the larger world and a participant in my much, much smaller life. I foster my opinions mostly in private, rarely on social media and share a few on this website or in my books. It would be impossible and unwise to comment on subjects I know little about or do not care to know enough to have a solid opinion.

Here is one solid opinion of mine: the world would be better if people lacking self-control did not rush half-cocked to social media to fire off emotionally inflamed words. Once the haze of the dopamine rush clears, they are left to look like a fool; whether they see it or not, others do and they remember it. It is worth remembering and often forgotten, but the world does not revolve around you; you are only along for a temporary ride through the vast emptiness of space. There is a benefit in stepping back from the keyboard, putting the phone down, going for a walk, reading a book, watching a movie, meditating or doing something better with the time you have.

 

After a few miles I sat and considered the world near home and what mattered the most. Photo by me, September 2025.

Do not lose perspective.

R.E.M. It's The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Secret Falls

 

Somewhere in the Georgia mountains. Photo by me, October 2024.

In typical fashion, the last week of October near Halloween is when I drive up to the mountains of Georgia or North Carolina to see the peak leaf color, go for a hike and buy locally grown Georgia apples and apple cider doughnuts. These are trips I have been making since the 1980s.

One of my destinations in October 2024 was a little known waterfall that I had found in a hiking book from the 1990s. There are many waterfalls in the Georgia mountains and in the fall, the mountain trails are crowded, especially on weekends. I call it the tourist circuit in which metro Atlanta residents drive up to the mountains, fill up the trailheads and huff and puff through the woods for a selfie in front of the water falling over the rocks. The peace I associate with the mountains is nonexistent during fall weekends and the last thing I want to do is listen to people drowning out the sounds of nature.

To help prevent this location from falling victim to the overcrowding of the tourist circuit, I am not going to name this waterfall or its specific location. There is very little information on the internet about this trail and waterfall and I do not want to contribute to it being overrun like most every other place.

The snaky road with sneaky curves. Photo by me, October 2024.

To hunt down this waterfall and lightly traveled trail which I feared might be overgrown, you drive a twisting and narrow two lane state road into the Chattahoochee National Forest. After passing over the tops of ridges for many miles there is another turn onto an even more narrow and curvy road that follows a gap between the ridges. Several miles down this road and following directions from thirty years ago we turned again down a gravel and mud Forest Service road. There were no signs indicating there was a trail or waterfall to be found. The road was in decent shape for an unpaved Forest Service road given that it was only a month since Hurricane Helene had barreled through the mountains and caused so much destruction. Also, you never know what conditions to expect on Forest Service roads as some are more treacherous than others.

Shall we drive this Forest Service road through a creek? Photo by me, October 2024.

The gravel road followed a creek upstream into a mountain cove for some time before we guessed we had located the trailhead by a small pullover as again there were no signs. 

Tempted by the unmarked path. Photo by me, October 2024.

A trail peeked at us through the brush and we decided to take it with no one else around to tell us that we could be making a mistake. Not that I cared, I was happy to be having an adventure in the woods just as I had since I was a boy. Up the cove we walked between the ridge tops that ranged between 3,200 and 3,400 feet in elevation.

A bigfoot. Nah, just me. Photo October 2024.

We walked for some time as the cove began to close in around us. It was around that time and after trudging through a long muddy stretch that I suspected we might be on the wrong trail or that the directions from a thirty year old book were wrong. I sensed that the person I was with began to question our direction and was hesitant about continuing. I assured him that it was not much further and to keep following the swift moving creek upstream, not that I had any real clue. We were going to find something even if it was a bear and we had earlier heard something crashing through the underbrush and leaves on a ridge above us. Though the thousands of wild black bears in Georgia are mostly afraid of human contact and will run away, I hoped not to test it.

It was the sound of the waterfall in the distance that we heard first and with that, our pace quickened. The boundary of two counties went unseen between our legs as we straddled it.

A place with history under the fallen leaves. Photo by me, October 2024.

The ground leveled out and we were standing in the spot of a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp from the 1930s. From looking around, there were signs that on rare occasion people still used the area to tent camp. Those people too were as lucky as us to know about this almost secret place that on this day we had completely to ourselves.

Some of the old mill ruins from over a hundred years ago. Photo by me, October 2024.

Prior to it becoming a C.C.C. camp almost a hundred years ago, there had been a family mill located just below the falls. A few ruins of the mill were scattered around.

The rooted and rocky trail to the ledge. Photo by me, October 2024.

The waterfall crashed through the foliage and remained hidden from view from the banks of the creek. There were two options to be able to view the falls: wade into the cold October mountain water on slippery rocks or crawl up a rooted, rocky ledge then on hands and knees inch out to the edge. It if had been July or August I would have stripped down and chosen the water route. Since it was almost November and from experience I know how cold mountain streams can be even at the height of summer, I forced my too-old-to-be-doing-this-self up onto the ledge.

Between the mountain laurel the secret waterfall runs. Photo by me, October 2024.

 The view was worth it and was made even more beautiful since we had it to ourselves with no other humans around for miles. There was no line of selfie takers, chatter about lives lived by the glow of a cell phone aimed at the face and no alerts or noise masquerading as music blaring from cheap speakers. This was not an experience to be checked off from a list and forgotten. There was nature as it should be enjoyed with a present mind and a satisfaction of finding its beautiful secrets that has driven me since I was a young boy in the 1970s.

The moon of the mountains nearing Halloween. Photo by me, October 2024.

On the way out of the cove to the gravel road, the weather turned as it does in the mountains like flipping through the pages of an old hiking book. Sunshine became cloudy and would become rain later. Clouds with small cracks between coagulated in the sky with my thoughts, the temperature cooled and the moon signaled from above the limbs that nightfall lurked. Ichabod Crane on a lonely country road entered my thoughts as I looked at the trees leaning over the road. The stories of The Headless Horseman and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow inflamed my imagination as a kid and still I remember the eeriness of that dirt road behind my childhood home as something sinister decades later. Not all of my childhood Halloweens were spent running with untied shoe laces from spooks and birds or hearing my grandmother relay news stories of razor blades hidden in the apples. I suppose there is a little of Washington Irving's characters in me, both Ichabod and Rip Van Winkle, and when in the silent woods on October evenings my imagination taps me on the shoulder.

Photo by me, October 2024.

Where the road meets the trail and forks into our imagination if we are lucky. 

 

Losing The Quiet

A crane hunts fish. Photo by me, April 2025.

I have not been writing much on my website this year, but that does not mean I have not been thinking about it. I think about it a couple of times a week, but I have been making notes, researching (often in the field) for my next novel and writing the first draft. Writing a book takes precedence over writing on a blog. 

A warm Georgia Easter Sunday in the 80s. Photo by me, April 2025.

 

The dark spots in the water below are turtles. I spotted at least thirty of them, but there were probably more. Photo by me, April 2025.

I have been taking my long walks in nature too, getting in the miles and enjoying the scenery. This past Sunday I saw a few deer and lots of turtles. I consider myself fortunate to be able to get out near home and enjoy the woods and not have to drive so far as when I lived in the city. The older I get, the more I cherish time away from people and the noise of society. The hubbub, the nightlife and parties stopped ten years ago in my early forties as I aged out of the scene. A person has to know when to get out and I am thankful for being out of it and being no worse for the wear.  I have reverted back to how I lived as a child and that was even more rural than where I now live. My long term introverted desire is returning to the countryside where I see and hear no neighbors. 

Photo by me, April 2025.

There are too many people crowded together into cities and suburbs in this country and you realize that if you ever do cross country travel by car through the wide empty spaces. When I was born in 1973 the U.S. population was 211 million people and now it is 341 million. The population of Georgia was 4.9 million and in 2024 it was 11.1 million which is more than double in fifty odd years. Georgia is the eighth most populous state and it feels like it with the traffic, the sprawl and everything in and around Atlanta being overcrowded. 

The continual plowing under of Georgia for more sprawl. The conversion of GA Highway 316 between I-85 and Athens from an at grade road to a controlled access highway such as GA 400. Photo by me, April 2025.

Most every place I knew as a younger person has become unrecognizable and that is difficult to think of as progress or being okay. I would be pleased if people would find some other state to pave over and sit in traffic as Georgia could use a break. The growth is unlikely to stop, but it is nice to think it could. Not only are we losing the natural landscape and the wildlife, but we are losing the quiet too.

Hidden Mountains

 

Photo by me, March 2024.

 

What can happen in thirteen years? I asked myself that question as I stood in front of the statue of Chief Sawnee in late March of this year for the first time in thirteen years. The simple answer is a lot can happen.

It was in the fifties as I arrived at Sawnee Mountain late in the afternoon and it was a perfect hiking day. It was a day to walk through the past for me as I had been to this mountain once on a warm February Saturday in my younger short sleeved thirties. I was taking a weekend off from writing my novel Shadow's Gravity and had somehow not gained a pound from when I was a younger man. I had gained the weight of more experience, perspective, memories and countless miles on my legs. Thirteen years can do a lot to a person and a person can do a lot in thirteen years. I was writing my fourth book, had moved out of the city for good, renovated a house, nearly died in 2012 and so much more.

Photo by me, March 2024.

Photo by me, March 2024.

I started up Sawnee Mountain through the naked hardwoods that reminded me of where I grew up with a mountain behind my house. My mind wandered from the present at the turn of the trail. I was walking miles of memories as much as I was on the stony trail. The trail curved through the woods as life - to unexpected places, with unexpected experiences and unanticipated questions. Sometimes even in a place and in people we thought we knew there are surprises.

Photo by me, March 2024.

Photo by me, March 2024.

Photo by me, March 2024.

Life and its counterpart death always have a presence in the world underlining our existence in permanent ink and teaching us the seasons of emotion from joy, to regret, patience, shame and pain. One begets the other from the birth announcement to the obituary. Three weeks had passed since someone I was close to as a boy had unexpectedly died. I had spoken at their funeral the following week and they were on my mind. 

 

At the funeral I shared a rambling story of us as boys in the mid 1980s involving him spending the night at my house and us hiking to Elsberry Mountain on a summer Saturday. I talked about how he had to find just the perfect walking stick, how long  that took and how he had to have one because I had one. He was competitive, considered a gifted child like me and in this period of our childhood he kind of looked up to me. Though he is gone, the happy and disappointing memories live on with me and others that knew him. I retraced those memories like a mountain trail which my feet had followed before. 

 

Our lives traveled down very different paths as was the case with so many of the people I knew growing up who became strangers. He and I had not spoken in ten years, but one of our last conversations went for hours through the early morning and past the sunrise. We caught up, we reminisced - we were two boys again who had spent so many years together. I had wanted to include him in one of my novels, I planned it and then thought better of it. It was not that he did not deserve to be in them, he did, but the time was wrong.  He remains a mountain behind my house hidden among the trees unseen at a distance, but breaking the landscape when viewed up close.

The view from the top of Sawnee Mountain looking to the north. Photo by me, March 2024.

The area known as the Indian Seats atop Sawnee Mountain. Photo by me, March 2024.

We took in the view of the mountain before us that summer Saturday so long ago. With sweat in our bangs we gripped our walking sticks unaware then how many mountains we had to climb, how high they would be or how low the valleys between them. I cannot say or understand what he saw that day or in the decades that followed, not long after, he chose one route and I another.

Me atop Sawnee Mountain. March 2024.

Thirteen years or a lifetime, I looked at the horizon with the same pair of eyes which had seen the hidden mountains from faraway and up close. His death hit me harder than I expected, there was a loss of balance at the edge of the rocks and that feeling has stayed with me. He should have seen the view.

 

The clouds moved in, the wind picked up and rain was coming by nightfall. I like storms, without them, nothing grows including people.

Dead Leaves 2024

 

October 2024.

This is my favorite season, Autumn, when the leaves crunch under foot and the scent of dead leaves hangs in the woods. I love that scent more than anything and would love to find an indoor air freshener that recreates it. My office at home could smell like coffee, books and dead leaves and I would doze off before completing another sentence. If there was a fragrance called Dead Leaves I would mist it all over myself until I was delirious and drunk on it.

Some of the scenery I have seen this week.

Photo by me, October 2024.

Photo by me, October 2024.

Photo by me, October 2024.

Photo by me, October 2024.

The water rose four feet covering everything in silt during Hurricane Helene. Photo by me, October 2024.

I noticed this week during a couple of walks in parks near where I live that we are beginning to see hints of color in this part of Georgia at around a thousand feet of elevation. It is typically not peak season here until early November. 

 

Every week, I make miles on the trails somewhere and this was likely the end of shorts season as the second walk of the week was a tad cool at sixty-five degrees with windy conditions. Time now for the sweat pants, long socks and fleece. There have been two mornings with lows in the thirties and there was a frost. The chilly weather is two weeks early and it could not come soon enough as I was ready for the warm weather to end.

Today I finished putting out the pansies for the cold season flowers. I planted much more this year and it took two days to get them planted. Winter here can be rather rainy and gray, which I like, but it is nice to have some color around too.

 

The Wind Down of Summer

 

Photo by me, August 2024.

Sometimes you have to stop when out for a walk and enjoy the view. That was what I did this past Sunday while on a six mile walk as the sweat soaked through my clothes and dripped from my hair. The sun was setting behind the clouds and hills and turning the landscape golden. It was late enough that no one else was around as the breeze cooled me off on an August evening.

It was a slow and gentle moment and there have been few of those this summer. I have spent too much time on the road going from here to there and back again. I love the road, but I love it less than I once did. Charles Kuralt in a Winnebago I am not. The hotel coffee, miles of traffic and the dependency on internet reviews of restaurants to find good food that often turn out to be anything but good wears me down after an extended period of it. I swear some people have questionable taste or low expectations when it comes to what is a decent meal. Years ago on a trip I learned to never eat Thai food in Amarillo and I was recently reminded again in another small city to stay away from Thai food in places where there is not a sizable Thai population.

Homeward bound. Photo by me July 2024.

The road is not done with me this year, I will be back on it soon enough.  I have considered writing a book that is set on the road as I entertain ideas for the next novel. The romance of the road is something I have seem to have lost between the rest areas and the mileposts. Or it could be that I do not enjoy summer travel all that much anymore.

A butterfly bush that I planted this year blooms. Photo by me, August 2024.

 

I am ready for summer to be over, my tan to fade, to put the shorts away for a few months and for the humidity to cease making the outdoors into a sauna. The flowers in my garden have been wonderful this year, but I am ready to do some work in them that requires cooler weather. Outdoor work around here never stops, there is always something to plant, trim, mulch or redesign. I am as an attentive gardener here as I was growing up at my childhood home in the country. I will miss the adorable hummingbirds that have been here all summer enjoying the lavender, zinnias, roses and other plants.

Terrible news out of New York as the legendary WCBS 880 is being flipped to sports talk. As if the world needs another place for mostly men to call in and bloviate about sports and worship overpaid sports stars. Of all my work in broadcasting I was never more proud of the work I did in the early 2000s on-air at WCBS 880. It was reaching the pinnacle in the industry to have been associated with that station. I thought the writing may have been on the wall for WCBS when recently there was significant breaking news and I tuned in. The station made no mention of the news for some time and in the past they would have been all over it and the anchoring sounded small market and not ready for the big leagues.

Photo by me, August 2024.

A couple of weeks ago I stopped in a "vintage" shop in Athens. It was the kind the of place where the merchandise was twice as old as the staff and the majority of the customers. I have been looking for a barn jacket from the nineties like I wore back then. I found several in this shop in okay, but not great, shape and at outrageous prices. They were charging three times the going price and this was a place where broke college students were the primary customers. Maybe college students are not broke these days or the ones who go to UGA aren't? If only I had kept the barn jacket I had as it would still fit today. I did think the above photo of the guy in a mask with a chain was curious and unexpected, but then again it was Athens so it was not all that weird.

Additional reading worth considering: How The Gay-Rights Movement Lost Its Way in The Atlantic.

Pylon - Danger

The Silent And The Quiet

 

Late spring encroaches on the banks of the Yellow River in Georgia. Photo by me, April 2023.

On a recent walk in the woods it was surprisingly quiet. It was so quiet that it was noticeable like a change in the atmosphere from dry to humid. It is not often that you can find woods that are quiet anymore. Most woods around the northern half of Georgia outside of places deep in the mountains are not far enough away from some form of civilization like a road, a subdivision or other people that you can enjoy the natural sounds of the environment. I grew up in a quiet place, enjoyed it and prefer it today.

Where I walked was in the woods of Yellow River Park near Stone Mountain. I know that it was only quiet on the trails because it was a Monday in late April and it was late afternoon. Another day and another time and it likely would not have been so peaceful. This was a fortunate experience unlikely to be repeated unless maybe I returned to walk in the rain.

 

It was down this stretch of path when I noticed how quiet it was. Photo by me, April 2023.

It is my impression that society and modern life does not value quiet and especially silence. Lives are filled with noisy traffic, chirping car alarms, slamming car doors, leaf blowers, cell phone notifications, loud talking people, music blasting and background television wanting to sell you something. So much space and tolerance is made in life for noise that little is left for quiet.

It is amazing how much can be learned about people because they do not care to remember that voices have a volume control and that we have feet to bring two people closer in conversation instead of shouting from a distance. I find myself judging people's manners by how loud they speak in public and not always by what they say. It is not always about what is said, but how it is said. I would prefer to know less about strangers, but they do not care so shout it to the world they think – or in fact they do not think.

 

I passed through a thicket of blooming mountain laurel and it was a surprise. Photo by me, April 2023.

Photo by me, April 2023.

Photo by me, April 2023.

 

The same goes for music. I wait for the moment that I hear a car loudly playing something by Bach, Chopin, Mahler or Mozart or anything remotely classical out the car windows as it drives by. Something tells me I will be waiting for the rest of life and never hear that. I will concede that if I heard that often enough too that I might say, “damn those Bach lovers and their incessant need to pollute the world with that noise.”

I kind of doubt I would have that reaction, but I would like to be tested.

 

The twists and turns through the woods. Photo by me, April 2023.

Photo by me, April 2023.

Photo by me, April 2023.

The frequency in which people slam car doors now is something that truly surprises me. The slammed car door is like an act of violence to my ears. I was raised to never slam a car door and learned that I was going to be scolded if I did. Do parents scold children these days? I suspect they do not. Children and adults are zombies to cell phone screens and cannot seem to walk without one in their hand, clutching them like security blankets.

Modern life has been degraded in so many aspects that people either do not notice or care like the trash out the window and into the ditch. Loud people and devices and their behaviors are polluters dragging down the quality of life for everybody else.

 

Photo by me, April 2023.

Photo by me, April 2023.

Photo by me, April 2023.

Some people are afraid of silence and it must be because it is so unfamiliar to them. People have a tendency to feel uncomfortable in the presence of the different, the other and often that other is quiet. Or maybe and this is a more scary proposition; they are afraid to be alone with the thoughts inside their own head. A couple of years ago, I said to someone when I was writing some of the stories in Terminal Wake that the book was as much about silence as it was anything else.

 

I emerged from the tree canopy into a field. Photo by me, April 2023.

As for someone like me, that is highly sensitive to sound, I notice and appreciate when sound is absent in public. I do not expect the world to accommodate me, but maybe they could consider being quiet and modest for themselves sometimes.