Yesterday, I had a wonderful trip with my grandchildren and daughter in law to the North Georgia Mountains. We went to the area of Clayton, Mountain City, and Dillard, Georgia. Close to the North Carolina border.
It was breath-taking scenery from Gainesville going past Tallulah Falls and seeing the awesome sight of the beauty of the mountain region at the foot-hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
About two years ago, I moved from Atlanta to Hall County’s Gainesville, Georgia. It’s a pretty little town, about 50 miles north of Atlanta, nestled not far from the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It has a beautiful historic district of old Southern mansions in midtown.
It’s not very far from Commerce, Georgia, where I was born. In years past, I would drive through here on my way roaming around in beautiful North Georgia. Back in the late 60s, I used to visit a friend—one of my oldest and dearest friends, Grace Zabriski, a movie actress now living in Hollywood—at Brenau College that is located around here. Grace has been in many movies like “The Burning Bed” starring Farrah Fawcett, the movie starring Sally Fields about the mill worker, and many others, as well as having many appearances on “Seinfeld.”
I’m one of those people that collects any and everything, particularly newspaper items, magazine articles, pictures, old letters, and all sorts of mementos. I think it was Andy Warhol who had a room full of things he had collected, from matchbox tops and old menus to Broadway show souvenirs, among other things. And I have done the same.
This morning as I was going through boxes of “time capsule” stuff, I ran across so much I had not thought about in a long time. One was a stack of newspaper clippings of articles I wrote and published in a local newspaper when I was a 16-year-old junior in high school.
In the middle part of the 20th century, it was decided the Corp of Engineers would dam up the Chattahoochee River and build a man-made lake, called Lake Lanier, named after the Georgia poet Sidney Lanier who wrote the poem, “Song of the Chattahoochee.” It flows from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico. Some refer to it as “The Hooch.”
As I understand it, Lake Lanier is the largest man-made lake in the United States, covering five counties with a shoreline of 500 miles. I live within a stone’s throw of the lake. I view it, cross it, and use the water, but have actually never been on the lake. If I happened to fall in, I can’t swim, and definitely could not drink it dry. Therefore, it’s just one of those things I enjoy looking at. Nevertheless, for thousands of others into boating and fishing, it provides a great recreation area. Surrounded by many parks and boat docks, Lake Lanier is a huge tourist attraction.
This past year, the severe drought dried up so much of the lake that in the hundreds of inlets, one could see the bottom, and many boats were left high and dry. The recent heavy rains are refilling, but there’s a ways to go before it’s up to its normal capacity.
Copyright 2008-2012, Anne Cleveland. Feel free to quote me or use snippets of my text with attribution – but please refrain from reusing entire posts without first procuring written permission.
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