The Future Doesn’t Come This Way

I like to think that everyone has a fixed quota of days like this.  Days with just an assortment of high fluffy clouds and lots of sun and a light breeze to so that you just break a sweat while working hard and then quickly cool off to comfortable when you stop are rare and perfect. Packing the trailer to leave was quick and easy — we may be getting good at this already.   The dogs let us sleep late, even accounting for daylight savings time but not so late that we were rushed with breakfast and breaking camp.

We were on the road by 10:30 on a short trip this time to Statesboro, Georgia  The easy way would have been to run down the interstate and then back northwest into Georgia.  But the alternative route was one Lorraine and I took with the boys 26 years ago on our first run down to Naples.  Highway 301 runs roughly parallel to the I-95 almost all the way through the south; from Santee into Georgia it is almost all 4 lanes of divided highway through the middle of absolute nowhere with almost no traffic.  When we took this route in 1992 the highway was new and immaculate — an obvious product of some congressional porkbarreling as it runs too and from nowhere and receives no traffic.  I’m not sure if it had enough business to support hotels in the days before I-95 was built and 301 was the way south or if the hotels were attracted here when the four lanes were built in the middle of nowhere in the late 80’s.  Either way the route is lined with rotting abandoned motels and decrepit empty villages.

The first part of the route from Santee to Orangeburg still has beautiful plantation homes amidst the wreckage of time and neglect. They escaped Sherman’s depredations during the war and still front beautiful operating farms to this day. But the closer you get to Georgia the more abandoned and post-apocalyptic things become.  But the highway is empty and the driving was easy.  The spring day nice as the weather hit 28c and the trees and flowers grew richer with each mile south.
I was called to mind as we drove of a remarkable discussion I had with Grandson Max a few weeks ago. He’ll be Five on Friday and is rather precocious.  We were driving back from an RV show in Ottawa.
“I want to be a fireman when I grow up”, says Max.
“That’s cool, I wanted to be a fireman when I was five too”.
“Or a Bus Driver. I’d like to be a Bus Driver”, he continued.
“Hmm.”, I responded carefully, “Driving a bus would be cool. But by the time you’re a grown up computers will do all the jobs that just require driving like taxis and buses and trucks. Maybe you should think of being an engineer and designing buses.”
“Grandpa!”, he replied in a tone of voice indicating that he was unsure if I was an idiot or just silly, “Computers don’t drive cars.”
“True. Not today,”, I continued nonplussed, “But in the future, when you’re grown up all the driving will be down by computers.”
“Oh”, pausing for thought, “— the future doesn’t come this way.”
At that point I lost my shit and the conversation veered off in other directions as soon as I’d stopped laughing.

Like Renfrew County the future doesn’t seem to come to this part of the south either.  The woods we pass could easily still be occupied not by Civil War soldiers but red-coats and the swamp-fox Marion himself.  It was a bizarre and interesting drive.  Allendale, SC is a mixed town of spit and polish university buildings and everything else that is moss covered and collapsing.  Beyond that is the wide swamp that is the Savannah River and Georgia.

The Welcome Center at the Georgia Stateline was closed on Sundays. We were the only vehicle in the parking lot when we stopped to walk the dogs.  But it was lovely with azalea gardens and concrete picnic benches. The only building in sight on an almost empty highway. No wonder the Walking Dead was set in Georgia — you expected Zombies to pop up at any moment. And then Lorraine spotted something even more unusual — there next to the concrete outline of Georgia and the flagpole in the middle of the lawn was a mid 20th century Bombardier Olympique Snowmobile. Or at least the shell of one.  Did some Quebecer in the 70’s flee from the snow and only make it this far before the machine packed it in?  We’ll never know and the locals must have only seen one on television.  Very odd.

From there it’s not a long drive and much more normal to get to Statesboro. We were unpacked by 2:00 and sitting at “Gnat’s Landing” having Margherita’s and BBQ by 2:30 for lunch ( and dinner as it turns out we were too full to cook again!).  We met our lovely neighbours and their dogs - but more on them tomorrow!