By Paulo Prada
I come from Middle Georgia. Some folks now want to call it Central Georgia, as if that sounds more urbane, less remote, more connected than the vast, verdant landscape where I grew up.
Central sounds wrong, even pretentious. Middle to me captures it just right, lost as we were between Atlanta and Savannah, each two hours away by car, the only places big enough for most anyone outside Georgia to know. There was Macon, sure, an hour away, but ask any Maconite – they’re in the middle, too, barely grazing the Piedmont. The Blue Ridge Mountains and the Atlantic coast, the first real geographic relief to the north or south, remain faraway, antipodal.
I left my hometown, Dublin, population 15,000, three decades ago. There’s not much going on in Dublin – some factories, some health care, many farms – but it was a fun place to be a kid. My parents, Colombian émigrés who raised my siblings and me as one of the few Latino families in the Middle Georgia of the late 1970s and ‘80s, stayed long after we moved far away.
My mom worked at a bank. My dad, a doctor who retired shortly after we kids left home, spent much of his free time wandering the nearby countryside, indulging a lifelong compulsion to explore.
When we were little, he’d wake us before dawn on weekends and shuffle us into the car. He drove us to see lakes, dams, kaolin mines, native burial mounds, rattlesnake roundups, possum festivals. We never quite knew where he was headed. Sometimes Dad didn’t either, his maps splayed across the dashboard on the roadside as he hunched with a red pencil to figure it out. Those trips were a break from a strict weekday routine, the Cokes and peanut butter crackers from rural filling stations a treat of the sort we never enjoyed at home.
A lot changed in Dublin after I left. There are many more Hispanics around these days, for one. People today often ask me if I ever experienced racism as a kid. But the question, sadly, wouldn’t have made much sense to me back then. Middle Georgia was a binary society: If you weren’t black, you were white.
Another change: Downtown revivalism finally blossomed here, rescuing the streets around courthouse square from the strip malls and big-box blandness that suffocated many small towns late last century. You can even drink an afternoon beer at an outdoor patio, free of the dry laws that ruled when I grew up.
For most of the time since I left, I’ve lived in big cities thousands of miles away: Madrid, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro. Four years ago, I moved to Mexico City. While still distant, it was close enough to fly home quickly and far more cheaply than before. With my parents aging, and my dad increasingly immobile, that was a big deal.
The trips back were largely uneventful. I ran errands for my mom, bought groceries, did chores they couldn’t swing anymore. I cooked dinner at ridiculously early hours to appease Dad, a Latin man who went full-on Puritan when it came to mealtimes later in life.
But one aspect of those visits – a return to long, meandering drives around Middle Georgia – became as alluring to me as the foreign scenes I hungered for when I first left. And crucially, those drives – me behind the wheel now – helped me connect with my father when his mind, once as sharp as the scalpels he held as a young surgeon, dulled with age and dementia.
Despite the changes, Dublin is still pretty small. And it’s still mercifully easy to leave. So we did. There was no better way to engage with Dad than to plop him in the car and head out. By plop I mean plop because I pretty much had to hoist him into the vehicle. What should have been a simple task was laborious, even dangerous. For my father, it was exhausting as well as infuriating. He hated that he couldn’t just sidle into the passenger seat, let alone command the vehicle himself.
His frustration, though, eased quickly as blacktop gave way to county routes, dirt roads, farms, forest. The scenery kindled warm and detailed recollections. “We saw Halley’s Comet here,” he’d say. “Caught bass with Fitzgerald down there.” Near Lake Oconee, a favorite fishing destination, he remembered the exact spot where Oscar, my older brother, at 16, inaugurated his new driver’s license by crashing half the family into the back of a big brown Buick.
Sometimes, Dad’s recall didn’t quite jibe with the facts. Occasionally, he would confuse the rolling pastures of Laurens County with Andean ranches, asking for “carne asada” or “un sancochito,” the steaks and stews he enjoyed as a boy.
But I didn’t care. What mattered was that the views without fail awakened his love for skyscapes and sunsets, pastures and streams, wild turkeys and whitetails. “Qué belleza,” he’d say, the evening light reddening the bristles of woodland on the horizon. “What beauty.”
We’d drive for hours. He rarely got out of the car. But I would stop often. I’d buy him a Coke and crackers, and pause to square the surroundings, their slight changes, with the environs I once knew. I’d stare at an old boat landing or ask a local about a farmhouse no longer there. My Middle Georgia accent – my childhood buddies think I lost it, but my friends elsewhere disagree – returned as powerfully as the old allergies triggered by pine pollen.
And I took pictures. A lot of them.
I don’t call myself a photographer. I have too much respect for real practitioners of the craft – their technical wherewithal and patience – to consider myself anything more than a dilettante when it comes to cameras. But phones now make it easy for someone like me, ignorant of ISOs and f-stops, to focus on content and composition.
Some of what I shot while home was nostalgia. I was looking to revive memories – to repaint fading postcards filed in my brain from those childhood rides when my dad manned the helm. He, the immigrant, stirring my young sense of wanderlust, a search for where the action is.
And part of me liked sharing these snapshots with city and foreign friends. Those who never quite get where I’m from. For them, the photos are glimpses of “That World,” as a close buddy, an admittedly arrogant Yale grad and Beltway bore, calls it.
But another part of me, advancing through middle age, was also looking ahead. As my parents grew older, and our lives unspooled ever away from these shared vistas, I was looking for keepsakes. Pictures of a place that I love and felt, until recently, forever bound to.
On one of our last rides, my parents and I drove to Thompson’s Cove, a pondside catfish joint that one of Dad’s former patients opened decades ago. We always enjoyed the food. But the 40-minute drive there was always part of the treat, the state road stunning as it cut, straight as a string, through the forest that blankets the hills climbing toward Appalachia.
The restaurant is just outside Toomsboro, a 19th century railroad town that today is home to a few hundred people, an old cotton depot, and, annoyingly, a new Dollar General. Thompson’s Cove, I was glad to see, has barely changed. Vats of pickles and sliced onions still sit on a table for communal consumption. Color-coded plastic pitchers help waitresses distinguish sweet tea from unsweet. The back porch, perched over dark water treaded by turtles awaiting scraps of hush puppies, offers one of the best sunsets I’ve seen anywhere.
I walked in to see how busy it was, hopeful we could grab a table in the back room by the porch. The owner, the son of the first Mr. Thompson, recognized me. He offered to ferry my dad in a golf cart from our car, still idling in the gravel parking lot, to the front door. We made it to the back room and all ordered the usual: catfish, grits, coleslaw. Afterwards, Mr. Thompson generously shuttled my dad back to our car and helped me settle him back into the passenger seat. My father said thank you, then added, matter-of-factly, “I won’t be back.”
Dad died last June. Mom moved to Minnesota to live with my sister, finally severing the tie that always brought me back to the South, to Middle Georgia. Maybe “middle” sounds odd to some. Tolkienian, perhaps. Or maybe just too vague, too middling. Not central enough. But that’s what I always cherished about it. Being never really here nor there, Middle Georgia means much more to me as it is.
~~
— Paulo Prada is the Latin America enterprise editor at Reuters. After a quarter century reporting from Europe, the U.S., and South America, he now lives in Mexico and annoys his family, neighbors, and friends with loud guitars and homemade rock songs.