Highway 280

US Highway 280 runs across the middle of Georgia, Columbus to Blitchton, where it intersects Hwy 80 and stops.  Two-hundred and forty miles, crossing rivers, passing farms and fields, miles of pine, running through small towns, Americus, Plains, Cordele, Mount Vernon, Vidalia, Lyons, Claxton, Pembroke.  The road sets an arbitrary boundary between Middle and South Georgia, from the fall line hills in the west, east across the Vidalia uplands, a slow rise and fall as it crosses ancient shore line dunes, remnants of Pleistocene seas.

I’ve been the full length of the road a few times, sections of it many times.  In the summer of 1961, I hitchhiked 150 miles of 280 from Lake Blackshear east and home to Pembroke.  I was fifteen, at a summer camp on the lake.  An uncle arranged my admission to the camp.  Run by the State Patrol it offered the usual archery, swimming, canoes, bunk houses, and bon fires.  I have no recollection of anything about the camp, save one thing.  On the morning after my first night I was looking for the door.  Pulling my stuff together I slipped out, walked the short distance to Highway 280, started hitchhiking.  I made it home by late evening.  A State Trooper was sitting with my grandmother on the front porch and while I don’t remember what he said I feel certain he would have been agitated, incredulous, and worried.  But I didn’t have to go back to camp.  After he had driven away, my grandmother got up and went inside.  ‘I saved some dinner.  I thought you might be hungry after your big adventure.’

I have only hazy memories of the day or the people who picked me up along the way.  I got rides from men and women, some of whom went out of their way to get me to the next town or the next busy intersection.  People picked up hitchhikers in ’61.  It was a more trusting time.  There were still service stations, which is to say places where they checked the oil and water and maybe cleaned your windshield while pumping your gas.  Fortunately, they had water fountains.  At a couple the owners gave me a coke and a pack of crackers, fathers of sons perhaps, or perhaps recalling themselves as boys who may have benefited from the chance kindness of strangers along the road. 

Not many people pick up hitchhikers today, not many use their thumb to get a ride.  People didn’t have so many cars back then, usually only one per family.  Now that getting a car at 16 is very nearly a rite of passage there is less need to hitchhike, and maybe the people who still do appear too desperate to risk picking up.  I doubt I looked desperate.

The little towns along the way were prosperous in 1961, before interstates allowed residents to drive farther to bigger towns to do their shopping and find work.  Most had a bank, a Ford and Chevy dealership, local grocery and hard ware, barber shops, dry goods and drug stores, tractor dealers, cattle and hog auction barns, tobacco markets, a local paper.  The structure of the economy changed over the next 40 years, many of local stores closed, made obsolete by economies of scale and more efficient transportation.  Even the farms got bigger and fewer, many replaced by the endless rows of planted pines. 

Highway 280 took me through Lyons, home of a great-uncle, Omie Norris, my grandmother’s brother.  He was a slight man who left his home in Washington County in the early 1900s, came south to work the railroad running from Macon to Savannah.  Most of the towns along 280 had been founded as railroad towns, strung along every 10 to 15 miles, each with depot.  Omie worked on crews that cut timber for use as cross ties, sawed them by hand and pulled them out of the woods with a mule, hard work for anyone, let alone a small man.  When the railroad work ended, he worked in dry good stores for the rest of his life.  Surprised to see me he gave me some lunch and offered to drive me the rest of the way.  Thanking him for the meal I said that having it made it as far as Lyons I’d like to try and make the rest of the way.  He and his wife had no children and rest now in a cemetery out in the country, their faces and voices forgotten to the living, ‘each in his narrow cell forever laid.’

I enjoyed hitchhiking and would do it from time to time over the years.  I liked the silence and solitude that came walking along a highway, the sound of my shoes in roadside gravel.  I enjoyed the anonymity and the independence, the freedom of no expectations and no hurry to be anywhere, the awareness that nobody knew where you were.  Hitchhiking was to pare things down to a minimum, a modest chance to see if you could make the distance without the aid of anyone or anything, save you willingness to try the road alone.  Young Ike McCaslin set out early each morning from Major DeSpain’s hunting camp searching for The Bear, the near mythical presence at the heart of the story, each morning going deeper and deeper into the Big Bottom with only a compass to guide him and each morning he would fail.  Then he realized that his search and he himself were tainted.  To find the bear he had to set aside the contrivances that men carried to the wilderness.  So he left the compass hanging by its lanyard on a branch, left his grandfather’s pocket watch, left even his walking stick.  And then, for an instant, as he found his way through pathless woods, the bear appears, regarded McCaslin, saw that he was fit, and disappeared back into the drifting shadows of the darkening woods. 

In later years riding a motorcycle was the closest I would come to such an experience, and, in truth, the speed and mobility of a good road bike offered real advantages.  I rarely rode on highways, staying on country roads, with not as much traffic, one small town followed by another.  There were still a few small, independent country stores along the roads, soon to be replaced by the standardized, faceless convenience stores.  The proprietor of one store told me about the afternoon when Dianah Shore and George Montgomery stopped in for gas, snacks, and small talk.  They were in a big car, she said, a convertible, on their way South to Florida.  “She looked and talked just like she did on TV, and just as friendly. She was from Tennessee, you know.” 

I had a job selling Yellow Page ads for Bell South for a short while in 1965-66, very short, as I knew I was going into the service.  I needed a job in the meantime so I went to work selling ads.  It was a good job for a single guy, the pay was decent and it came with an allowance for travel and meals.  I worked on a team that traveled around Middle Georgia, selling ads to local businesses.  Selling the book.  A team would move into a town when the book opened, selling ads for the coming year’s yellow pages.  Small towns might take a week or two, then the team moved on to another. Lyons and Vidalia, two of the towns I worked, were on Highway 280.  I was not a particularly good salesman, maybe because I knew I would soon be in the Army and didn’t care very much, or maybe because I was just not a good salesman. 

It was a pleasant job, going from one small town to another.  As with hitch hiking, I liked the aloneness of it, the independence.  Having a solitary meal in a little café in Mount Vernon and you become what Hazlitt describes as ‘the gentleman in the parlor,’ when he stopped for meal at an inn in Llangollen.  There were also things to see:  a Dairy Queen in Vidalia, where worked twin sisters of regional fame.  I don’t remember exactly what they looked like, aside from being blond and widely regarded as the prettiest girls between Macon and Savannah.  Guys would come from all over for a milkshake, fries, and a smile.  How many times did I pull through to order something, anything?  I had a ’66 navy blue Chevelle Super Sport, a little money, freedom for a while, and no worries.  In the late afternoons I would drive slow through town, admiring the reflection of my car in the storefront windows, the easy pastime of idling youth.

One of the businesses I called on was a small florist shop, owned by a young woman who ran it out of a converted garage beside her house.  She was a pleasant person, worked hard, with lots energy and big hopes to grow the business.  She wanted a nice display ad for her little shop but couldn’t afford it.  In those days, a florist shop could get a lot of business out of a Yellow Page ad.  When somebody needed flowers for a funeral, a wedding, the high school prom, anniversary, Easter, Mother’s Day, they generally opened the phone book, turned to Yellow Pages and scanned the ads for a florist.  All she had or could afford was a bold type listing, lost on a page with big display ads. 

I left the shop with her order for the same little bold print listing and drove straight to the Dairy Queen, took a booth, and designed a full-page ad for her shop, with graphics, all of the services and products she offered, and then I signed the order with a name that was not spelled correctly, over a signature that was not hers.  The salesman, me, was the last person to verify the information.  I submitted it, knowing that when the book came out, followed by a big monthly bill, she would call Bell South.  I knew that when she did so both she and Bell South would discover that neither the name nor signature on the order was hers, and I knew she would not have to pay for what Bell South would take for a dreadful mistake.  I hoped that a year with that ad in the book might pick her business up a bit.  I went through Vidalia a few years later and drove by her shop.  It was double the original size, nice sign, cars in the parking lot.  Maybe the ad did the trick.  I didn’t stop and ask, but I did pull over at a pay phone and looked her up in the Yellow Pages.  It was the same full page I had designed.  Maybe by then she figured it was working, and by then could afford it.

I caught my last ride of the day on the eastern outskirts of Claxton.  I had made almost a hundred and forty miles since I walked out of the camp on Lake Blackshear early that morning.  With seventeen miles still ahead of me I figured I might have to walk it when a car pulled over and offered a ride.  The fellow who picked me up was headed to Savannah, going right through Pembroke.  We crossed the Canoochee River, marking the line between Evans and Bryan County.  The river flows south between two high dune lines, dunes formed between 17,000 and 27,000 years ago during the last great glaciation, deposited by rivers that carried water from glacial meltwater floods.  When the road rises to the top of the ridge on the eastern side, it’s plumb-line straight to Pembroke, the water oaks that run along side the road as it passes through town visible in the distance.  ‘Guess that’s where you going,’ the fellow said.  ‘Yes sir.  Be glad to get there.  It’s been a long day.’  He let me out at the corner of College Street and Highway 280, a two block walk home.