12.

That was nearly the end of our trip. We came down out of the mountains and finally found a tiny restaurant to eat in like we had been looking for our whole trip. It was called Turner’s Corner Café, and it was tucked into a tight little valley looking over a mountain stream. We ate and were satisfied and finally rolled out of the hills of Northern Georgia as it was getting dark.

We still didn’t take the interstate though. We drove toward Adrian on old roads that I think even the towns along had forgotten about, and it was probably the most surreal experience in the entire trip. We had the t-tops down, and we stopped for a few minutes to try and take pictures of a full moon rising low under power lines. It was gorgeous, but in the pictures it’s only an orange ball in a dark sky. Then we were off, and Jon drove and I tipped my head back and watched the power lines follow us along the highway. They were batting stars back and forth between them as the car’s motion made them rise and fall like plucked strings. I imagined swamps along either side of the road, unseen in the darkness.

We passed through the towns like a ghost, past the silent courthouses that looked like whitewashed tombs in the center of empty squares, and we held empty bottles out the top of the car until the wind caught in their throats and made them moan. Then we probably did sound like some screaming ghost train to the people in the quiet houses that we passed. We drove all the way into Adrian Camp like that, howling as we passed down the streets and through the night.


End. (Thanks for the good times, Jon.)

11.

We slept at Ryan’s house that night, and I won’t say much about it except that in the morning, after we had done our best to get our traditional morning photo in front of the Firebird, Jon and I both tried to express to an intelligent young man how lucky he was to have a home of his own, a beautiful woman who seemed to love him, and two beautiful children. I’m not sure if he listened to us, but I hope he did.

The trip into Georgia, the final state of our road trip, was uneventful. We left Interstate 75 as soon as we were able and cut east across the northern edge of the state, planning to hit our last high point. We had finally driven into springtime somewhere between Nashville and Chattanooga, but now it almost felt like summer. We rode with the top off the car and the shirts off our backs.

We stopped four times before we actually reached the high point. The first was for a late brunch at a tiny air-conditioned diner in the middle of nowhere. We had sweet tea, and we looked like the only men in there who weren’t taking a break from farming or construction or some other honest form of work. The second stop was at an even smaller Mexican grocery store in a town with the hills rising up right behind it. I have no idea what a Mexican grocer, complete with cashier who barely spoke English, was doing in northern Georgia, but we stopped long enough to get charros and strange apple sodas and beverages flavored with tamarinds. The drive to the high point was long, and we kept wandering in and out of the hills, so our third stop was at a chamber of commerce to get final directions.

Georgia’s highest point is Brasstown Bald, and the drive into the park surrounding it and up the road leading to it was worth the trip in and of itself. The hills are high, and they turned blue and bled off into the distance. I took a picture the last time we stopped before the high point. It was a scenic turn-off, and the picture shows Jon, shirtless, slouched on a guard rail with his back to me photographing the scene. It was a very good drive, and I felt guilty and let Jon drive on the way back down because the roads were so winding and exciting.

The Bald itself is simply the highest hill in a landscape of very high points. The park was semi-closed, due to the fact that it was Good Friday and early in the season. Still, the parking lot that sat on the side of the mountain like a paved football field held a good dozen cars and accompanying tourists. There was a bus service to the observation building at the very peak, but it wasn’t running. There was a footpath, but it was roped off with a sign that said it was under construction. We ignored it along with everyone else.

At the top, the building itself was under construction as well. Most of the visitors milled around the base, taking in the sights, but Jon and I quickly bypassed the barriers and scrambled onto the roof of the building. From here it was possible to go even higher. There was a tower with a stairway along the outside. The stairway was locked, but I pulled myself up the outside and onto the highest opened exposed balcony, much as I did in my apartment at school whenever I was locked out. I’m still kind of proud of that, because no one else could climb up there, and for a time I was without a doubt the highest man in the state of Georgia, probably for that entire weekend. It was kind of hard to get back down.

When our feet were back on the ground, we met a retired astronaut. He and his wife had hiked the trail, and he was trying to find the geological marker to photograph, proving that he had been at the high point. It turns out that this is a thing people do—people who are more serious than two guys on a road trip. They travel around the country trying to reach the highest point in each of the fifty states. Of course that gave Jon and me ideas, but to hit all fifty you have to hit Alaska’s too, which is Mount McKinley. That’s not just the highest point in Alaska; that’s the highest point in North America.

But that wasn’t bothering Mr. Allan at the moment. He showed us pictures of all the high points he had reached, which included Indiana’s and Ohio’s just a day after we passed through. There are websites that give the directions to each of these places, and the website said that the highest place in Indiana had actually been the rise we had seen across the street from the field. Mr. Allan wasn’t satisfied though, because there had been no geological marker. We told him we had found it across the road in a field, so I’m still not sure who actually reached the official high point.