Falling Trees: Part of the ‘joy’ of owning a home

Our house was built in 2001 on a heavily wooded old farm near Jefferson, Georgia some 60 miles north of Atlanta. We liked the fact that the developers had kept the old trees. However, we were also aware that they had graded too close to many of them, ensuring that they would die off in less than ten years. Add to that the drought conditions we’ve experienced during many of the years we’ve lived here, and you’ve got a recipe falling trees.

The day after we got back home from the Thanksgiving holidays, one of the trees in the tree island in the front hard toppled over and damaged the roof over the garage. Fortunately, our insurance covered the repairs and allowed a little something for having the tree removed before the home owners association sent us a note saying, “Do you know you have a fallen tree in your yard?” Since this was the third tree to fall in 2011, we didn’t want another snippy note.

On new year’s day, two more trees fell. Fortunately, these missed the house. Unfortunately, the dead one knocked over a live one on the way down. While the tree people were here cleaning up the mess, they cut down four other trees that seemed to be aimed at the house. We hope we don’t have to call them again any time soon.

When I see advertisements for houses on wooded lots, I often think: “Yeah right, the lot is wooded now, but how long will it stay that way?” Growing up in a subdivision in Florida where care was taken with the grading, I got a bit spoiled. We had 40 trees on the lot when we moved in and none of them fell down in the 33 years the family owned the house. Maybe we were lucky: they were all slash pines and several hurricanes came through town. We always had plenty of pine straw!

As a tree city, our town keeps track of its percentage of tree canopy. Looks like the next survey (using aerial photographs) is going to show a few gaps in our neighborhood.

–Malcolm

No need to destroy a Georgia mountain to build a new road

When I lived in Rome, Georgia in the late 1970s, driving to Atlanta—a mere 56 miles to the southeast, as the crow flies—became problematic in Bartow County. Quite simply, the route that began as a four-lane highway at Rome turned into a mess of urban sprawl before one reached I-75 South for the remainder of the trip.

Today, when I visit friends in Rome, the US 41/411/SR 20 interchange has another 30 years worth of development around it to make it a driver’s nightmare. The Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) has a proposed a 411 Connector solution.

For reasons that are not easy to comprehend, DGOT favors a costly and an environmentally unsound solution (Route D-VE) that includes the destruction of the beautiful Dobbins Mountain.

Members of the Coalition for the Right Road (CORR) want a 411 Connector. But they believe alternative routes are not only cheaper, but also avoid destroying a mountain.

If you live in northeast Georgia and believe it’s important to guard the environment against massive and unnecessary civil engineering projects that also represent a waste of taxpayer dollars, you can sign the petition here asking GDOT to select a cheaper and shorter route.

According to the latest CORR update, GDOT has announced it is studying up to three modified routes for the 411 connector. The cost of the original GDOT “solution” may be as high as $279.5 million. The estimated cost of at least one alternative route is $98.4 million.

Upcoming CORR events

• Saturday, April 30: Taste of Cartersville at Friendship Plaza in downtown Cartersville.
• Saturday, April 30: Southern Veterans Festival at Adairsville Middle School from 10 am to 7 pm.
• Saturday, May 7: Spring Fling Festival in Kingston from 11 am to 4 pm.
• Saturday, May 14: Duck Derby Day at Riverside Park Day Use Area in Cartersville from 10 am to 5 pm.
• Monday, July 4: Stars, Stripes & Cartersville at Dellinger Park in Cartersville. Parade starts at 9 am; activities at 10 am.

We Need a Road

Drivers between Rome and Atlanta need the new road. It will cut time off the trip and reduce gasoline usage. Those who live and work around the current US 41/411/SR 20 interchange need long-distance traffic removed from their surface streets.

We just don’t need to move a mountain to make this happen.

–Malcolm

CORR graphic showing proposed mountain cut

That Little Horse They Call ‘Miracle’

While horses have played important roles in my novels “The Sun Singer” and “Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey,” I haven’t ridden a horse in 30 years. Nonetheless, within the infinite pastures of my memory, I recall riding bareback across a snowy field on a cold morning, sitting like a proverbial sack of potatoes on an old roan named “Flame” in the sunshine on a high Alberta mountain trail, and fording a wide Montana river by the light of a bright moon.

These days, I might find a stationary carousel horse to be a riding challenge, proving, I think, that my practical horsemanship skills are limited. Yet, even from my limited perspective, I’m quite sure that there’s a special hell for those who abuse horses and a special heaven for those who save them.

Miracle: “Well Broke Under Saddle”

In February, a friend whose farm stands across the road from my father-in-law’s farm here in Georgia, drove out to look at an 8-10-month-old filly he saw advertised as well broke under saddle. The horse he found had been so badly injured, starved and otherwise abused, that he convinced the seller to let him haul it away and at least give it a decent burial.

The top photo, taken February 3, shows the horse lying down because it couldn’t stand or walk. The lower photo shows Miracle a month later. Our friend cared for her until she could travel again, and then she was moved to the nearby Sunkissed Acres in Summerville, Georgia for a rehabilitation.

According to the Sunkissed Acres blog of February 3rd, “She has no legs, she has no chest, she has no hope. She is literally run into the ground. I can almost pick the little thing up by myself. She is eating and drinking well, when we stand her up, she can walk around but when she gets tired, she lies down again and cant get herself up.” (Click on the photo for the entire post from SunKissed.)

Miracle’s New Home

On March 14th, the angels at Sunkissed Acres finished their work. The starved and damaged horse that couldn’t stand up was now able to run. Miracle now runs and eats well in the heaven of a horse retirement farm named Paradigm.

On the day the filly arrived, the Paradigm Farms blog said, “Today Miracle had an ending and a beginning. Her time at Sunkissed Acres came to an end today. Lori, the founder of Sunkissed Acres Rescue, did an amazing job of rehabilitating Miracle and getting her healthy and strong enough to move on to her new life. When one chapter ends a new one begins, and today was the beginning of Miracle’s new life with us.”

The U.S. Equine Rescue League defines neglect “as failure to provide sustenance and care sufficient to maintain an equine’s good health. This includes food, water, shelter, veterinary and farrier care.” Because of the compassion of a farmer named David, the loving rehabilitation by a rescuer named Lori and the long-term care being provided by Jason, the little horse they still call Miracle no longer fits this definition.

This is one story with a happy ending. With our donations and with the good work of the folks at farms such as Sunkissed Acres, the number of prospective miracles is infinite.
-

You May Also Like: Night in the Shape of a Horse

–Malcolm

When the Grits Trees are in Bloom

Grit Flower

“Giving Northerners unbuttered instant grits is an old remedy for getting rid of tourists.” — Lewis Grizzard, author of “Don’t Sit Under the Grits Tree with Anyone Else But Me.”

You know it’s spring in south and central Georgia when the grits trees are in bloom.

True grits, as the late Atlanta humorist Lewis Grizzard would attest, are not INSTANT: “The idiot who invented instant grits also thought of frozen fried chicken, and they ought to lock him up before he tries to freeze-dry collards.”

After a hearty breakfast of grits and red eye gravy, true Southerners drive south on I-75 through Macon into what was once Stuckeys and pecan praline country toward Tifton where, years ago, Captain Tift once built a saw mill in support of his family’s shipping business.

The captain was also into turpentine, tobacco, pecans, sweet potatoes and grits. Northern historians, thinking grits were made in factories, overlooked Tift’s grit orchards, so you won’t find them in your grade school history books. But those orchards flourish today and every year on March 25, the kind of people who might take exception to freeze-dried collards, head into the lush agricultural lands of Georgia’s coastal plain in search of evergreen trees with large white flowers.

Years before the white man knew there would one day be a Southern state named Georgia, the Apalachee Indians discovered that the natural result of crossing a Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) with a Southern Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) was the Grits Tree (Quercus grandiflora Zea mays).

Like pearls in oysters, Grits are created in the soft tissue of the tree’s magnificent flowers. In the late summer and early fall, Grits fall like rain from the trees where Grits Sweepers gather them into windrows that look like dunes of snow. They dry in the sun until they are ready to be vacuumed up and cast before swine in the form of bacon, ham, and breaded pork chops.

But in the spring, it’s the white grits flowers that attract the attention. The kind of person who would eat freeze-dried collards or who thinks red eye gravy is the airline food served on long, over-night flights, will mistake a grits flower for a magnolia blossom. Magnolias have a musky, cloying scent. Grits flowers smell like Waffle House.

True Grits are in the Bag

“Sitting under the grits tree” is a phrase that goes back to founding of Georgia Grits Day on March 25, 1901 in honor of the birth of Georgia Brown beneath such a tree near Tifton. Sitting under a grits tree is about jazz and having babies and eating red eye gravy on a hot summer afternoon when it seems like every breath of air between Macon and the Florida border smells like breakfast at a Waffle House.

There’s no love better than the love built with true grits. It’s Southern love and you can’t get it in a factory and you won’t find it in the hashed browns part of the country. Every March, we celebrate true grits, not the movie, but the food and all it stands for.
-

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the satirical novel, “Jock Stewart at the Missing Sea of Fire,” now on sale on Kindle for about the same amount as a steaming bowl of grits.

Crawford W. Long Museum Included in Civil War Sites Guidebook

The Crawford W. Long Museum in Jefferson is among the 350 historic sites included in Crossroads of Conflict: Guide to Civil War Sites in Georgia from the University of Georgia Press.

The entry, which includes a photograph of the museum’s historic 1858 Pendergrass Store, notes that the facility “honors the physician Crawford W. Long, who attended the University of Georgia where he roomed with Alexander H. Stephens, the future vice president of the Confederacy. Long is credited as the first physician to use ether for surgical purposes.” Long served in the Athens, Georgia Home Guard and as a surgeon for the Confederacy.

Written by Barry L. Brown and Gordon R. Elwell, the Georgia Civil War Commission publication is an expanded update of the 1994 edition of the guidebook. The 304-page new edition, which arranges Georgia sites into nine regions beginning with the Chickamauga Battlefield in the northwest, includes 65 black and white photographs, 190 color photographs and images, and twenty maps.

According to the University of Georgia Press, “The impact of the Civil War on Georgia was greater than any other event in the state’s history. Approximately eleven thousand Georgians were killed and the state suffered more than one hundred thousand in total casualties. Georgia was extremely influential in this nation’s most tragic conflict, and the war touched every corner of the state.”

Born in Danielsville, Georgia, Crawford W. Long (1815-1878) first used ether for surgical anesthesia on March 30, 1842.

“Do a Georgia resident, friend planning a cultural tourism vacation to the South, or student of the Civil War might enjoy this guidebook? If so, click the Share This button below to send a link by email or recommend this post on your favorite social site.”

Coming Attractions on Malcolm’s Round Table

November 17 – An interview with author Vila Spiderhawk
November 21 – Second Annual Blog Jog Day
December 17 – Virtual VHP Dine-a-Round

–Malcolm

Snow is falling across North East Georgia

The rain turned to snow this morning while I was running early-morning errands to the pharmacy and the grocery store.

The checker at the grocery store looked out at the snow in the parking lot and demanded to know “Who authorized this?” I told her to blame “corporate” since the brass are responsible for most of the stuff that doesn’t go right in the grocery business.

The weather service was on again, off again about the snow. Now they’re on again. School systems are already sending kids home, or plan to, as 1-4 inches are expected in varying amounts from Atlanta northward into the mountains. Many flights out of Atlanta have been canceled or delayed. Salt and sand trucks are out.

I’m glad I topped off the bird feeders yesterday: quite a few birds are there giving my cats something to watch from the kitchen window. As always, e-mail messages and phone calls seem to taper off during “bad weather” around here, so that means I have more time for work.

Those of you who follow the weekly Tuesday Teaser postings in many book-related blogs can find my teaser for “The Women of Camp Sobingo” on today’s Writer’s Notebook.

My sketch about the Blue Ridge Parkway, “A Gentle Road, A Gentle Land” can be found on my Xanga weblog.

Memories of my grandfather and his role in promoting irrigation in the dry land of central Washington, “Looking for Water in the Promised Land” is on my Sun Singer’s Travels weblog.

I notice that the paperback version of the new second edition of my mountain adventure novel “The Sun Singer” has now appeared as in stock on Amazon.

Good reading, I’m hoping, for a snowy day.

Malcolm

Crawford W. Long Museum Re-opens Jan 9

Jefferson, Georgia-–The City of Jefferson and the Crawford W. Long Museum Association, Inc., have announced the upcoming grand re-opening of the Crawford W. Long Museum to celebrate the completion of a two-year restoration of the facility’s three, interconnected buildings. The museum will open January 9, 2010, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The museum has been closed to the public for major structural renovations and exhibit upgrades since June 2008. The renovations were paid for in part through a matching $200,000 USDA Rural Development grant.

Historic Building Restoration

The two-story, brick 1880s former doctor’s office and pharmacy used as a medical exhibits gallery, received a new roof, including larger scuppers and downspouts, restored brick work and custom windows that are exact copies of the originals which were beyond repair. The project included Interior re-plastering, painting, rewriting, updated lighting, and new upstairs flooring.

Exterior Structural Brickwork

The 1850′s Pendergrass General store building was jacked up, leveled, received new masonry piers and a new coat of paint. The interior of the re-created 1840s doctor’s office in the rear of the store was repainted and refurbished.

Craftsman Frank Resciniti at Work in Doctor's Office (Athens Banner-Herald Photo)

The smaller Stoval Building, used as the museum entrance, reception area and exhibit gallery received a new exterior sign and new interior painting.

Updated Museum Exhibits

Since the interior of the Stovall and Medical Gallery buildings had to be cleared for the restoration work, project manager Lesa Campbell and administrative manager Vicki Starnes had an opportunity to modernize the interpretive exhibits in accordance with current museum best practices.

The Crawford Long Gallery has colorful new informational panels (see detail below) and artifact displays tracing Doctor Long’s heritage, medical practice, family life and his 1842 discovery of the use of ether for painless surgery.

“A lot of the Crawford Long exhibit tries to put him in his time and place,” said Campbell. “If you don’t understand the fact that Jefferson was a frontier town in 1842, you really don’t get the full measure of how amazing it was that someone here was the first person to apply anesthesia to a patient and be able to revive them.”

The upstairs–which had previously been closed to the public–now contains a new history exhibit that traces the evolution of anesthesia from the early use of towels, sponges and drop masks to the development of machines that measure, control and monitor a uniform concentration of anesthetic gases. Fourteen machines, in use between 1913 and 1970, are be on display.

The General store displays have been reorganized with new artifacts, displays and signage.

“Jefferson is privileged to be the home of such an important international event,” said Mayor Jim Joiner. “The development of a practical surgical anesthetic is considered America’s greatest contribution to modern medicine, so it is only fitting that Jefferson maintain a museum to commemorate Dr. Long’s discovery.”

The Crawford W. Long Museum was founded in 1957 by the Georgia Historical Commission and in 1974 the Crawford W. Long Museum Association assumed ownership. In 1979 the Museum building and exhibits were renovated, accomplished partly through contributions from the members of the Medical Association of Georgia and the Georgia Society of Anesthesiologists.

In 1986-87, an expansion program was carried out, enlarging the Museum into a three-building complex. This complex was owned and operated by the not-for-profit Association until ownership was transferred to the City of Jefferson in 2007.

Detail from a New Exhibit Panel

Admission to the Museum is $5.00 for adults and $4.00 for children (6-12) and $3.00 for students/military. Children 5 and under free. Beginning January 9, the museum will be open to the public during normal operating hours of Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm. For more information about the grand opening, contact the museum at 706-367-5307.

–Malcolm

Hello North Georgia Readers

I’m happy to announce that “Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire” and “The Sun Singer” are both available at the Bookstand of Northeast Georgia in Commerce.

For those of you traveling through the area, that’s at exit 149 on I-85 about 60 miles north of Atlanta.

This bookstore is well organized with hundreds and hundreds of books grouped into easy-to-find categories. Great prices on used books! My books join some other cool books on the LOCAL AUTHORS shelf just a few feet past the register.

The store is on Pottery Factory Drive in Commerce Crossing shopping center, just across the parking lot from OUTBACK STEAK HOUSE.

Buy the book, then read it with a glass of Black Opal Cabernet while waiting for your dinner.