The Southern Appalachians.

Georgia.
Yes, that’s right. After my WFR re-cert plans for Bryson City, NC fell through, I decided to swing even deeper south. I figured this would present two benefits: a chance to take the wilderness medical training course at UGA, and an “easy” route through the southern Appalachian foothills.
Maybe it was the gray day, but upon crossing the border, drivers didn’t seem to wave as frequently, gas station clerks seemed more guarded, logging trucks rumbled by, and the smell of roadside trash was noticeable. And those twisty mountain roads with their banked, hairpin turns! Well, I finally got off and walked up one. It was either that or topple into the ditch.
So the second benefit of a Georgia route proved to be a naïve assumption, and after a week of fruitless phoning, so did benefit #1. Things were not going so well. I uttered a few expletives when I hung up the phone with UGA in Jasper that afternoon. Then I bought a bagful of 75% off Easter candy at Walgreens. I sat down on the bench outside and stuffed one caramel chocolate egg after another into my mouth until I felt slightly sick and sugar high. Then I went to the library to re-plan my route, again.

“I’m just a cowboy who got lucky.” -Roy, Jasper, GA
“I love getting up early.” It’s 7:30 am. A tall, thin man is already talking business on his cell phone from the Mountain View Citgo parking lot. I eye him suspiciously-- I spent last night squeezed into a shadowy corner behind the Jasper Library. The man looks about 50, leans with one hand on a cherry red Corvette. I note his fancy sneakers and sunglasses. I continue eating my granola bar and yoghurt. He hangs up, comes over to ask the usual questions. I ask him if he rides. “No, I run. I’ve got a young wife, so I run.” That figures, I think. I smile politely. He continues making friendly conversation, extolling the merits of Peter Pan honey peanut butter. “It’s like dope for me. I’ve got some in the car right now.” He gets the jar and peels off the seal. “Go on, I don’t care if you’ve licked your spoon.”
Roy is down from Greenville, SC to do some tree work for a friend. He points to the Corvette, saying “I’ve got two chainsaws in the car.” When his friend calls to say he’ll be late, Ray tells me his life.
The adopted son of a retired Navy father and a Mexican mother, Roy grew up “in the back hills of Missouri,” in a town of 1,003, “where you’re dumb and you stay dumb.” By senior year of high school, Roy was reading at a second grade level. “You either graduate or you’ll be digging ditches the rest of your life,” his dad told him. Roy decided he had to graduate. “I went to my chemistry teacher and he said to me, ‘I’ve got a Ford that needs fixing,’ an’ I said, ‘I’ll get it fixed.’ Of course, I didn’t know anything about cars,” he smiles, “but I wanted that A.” Another teacher told him he needed help finishing his house. “I’ll pay you a dollar an hour and give you an A,” he told Roy. “An’ I went to my English teacher, an’ you know, she was about this big around,” Roy holds both arms out wide. “Well, she had something for me to do, but it gave me nightmares for the rest of my life.”
Roy graduated high school, but he didn’t have a plan. “Well, what’s one thing you can do?” his dad asked him. Roy thought this over. “Well, I can run,” he said. “I can run better than almost anyone else.” So he bought a paper route and ran it on foot. He says he delivered a thousand papers a day, more than double the usual rate by car. Then he bought a fish camp, then a gas station/country store. When the bank cut him off after his fourth loan in the early 80s, he fired everyone and ran it himself. “I worked 7 days a week and had no life,” he says. “It makes me mad as heck they now give bailouts to anyone who wants ‘em.”
Roy sold the store to a pro-football player and bought a 750-acre Texas ranch. When tornadoes blew through and uprooted his property, he discovered a moneymaker—his ranch was sitting on a special kind of gravel they use to floor industrial chicken coops. He sold it all. Roy reads at a fourth grade level now, “cuz you learn things as an adult,” and his dad no longer warns him about digging ditches. His brothers no longer call him stupid either.
Roy plans to write a book about his life someday- Dumber Than a Box of Rocks and I Made It. When he tells me about the unattractive woman who recently wowed audiences on Britain’s version of American Idol, he says, “An’ I betch you a dollar to a donut everyone there thought she couldn’t sing.”

Bear on the Square Festival, 2009.
“She’s not a mountain climber.” The Visitor Information woman eyes me from behind the counter. She’s on the phone with the Hiker Hostel, arranging for my free pick up. I’m in the small town of Dahlonega for their annual Bear on the Square Festival, a celebration of bluegrass music and Appalachian crafts that began when they found a bear sitting in a downtown tree one morning. After some serious uphill pedaling, though, I am not interested in biking “straight up a mountain” to pay for lodging. I don’t care what that makes me. The second clerk gives me an Andes mint, since I’ve been biking so hard, she tells me. I sit down to wait for my shuttle.
The Hiker Hostel feels more like a bed and breakfast than a hostel. It’s refreshingly clean and kitsch-free. I recognize photos of Western ranges and spots along the AT. The other guests are cyclists, enthusiastic hikers at the start of their Appalachian adventures, and a 19-year-old flight attendant escaping Memphis for her birthday.
Josh and Lee have run the Hiker Hostel for the last four years. They met at the local college, got married, and decided to hike the AT four years later. Three weeks into it, they were planning their hostel. Lee has cropped hair and can discuss the finer points of raising hens at length. She loves biking more than Josh, and I’m sure she could probably beat me in any race. Josh looks like a Georgia mountain man, with a blonde beard and a firm handshake. A confessed Libertarian, he explains his two solutions to the problem of government before building up the garden beds: appoint, rather than elect, state senators, and do away with the popular presidential election. On the lack of north/south commingling, he offers this opinion: “Northerners don’t come down here because they’re scared. Southerners don’t go north because there’s no sweet tea.” “And it’s cold,” adds Jonathan, a cyclist from Atlanta.
Breakfast is a line-up of scrambled eggs, country ham, pancakes, and oatmeal, as well as bagels and some fancy cream cheeses, compliments of a return guest. He sits at the head of the table, round glasses over a gray mustache, a Dixie flag stretching across his expansive belly. He’s down here hunting wild boar. “The only good thing to come out of Yankee-land was Einstein Bagels,” he declares. “There ain’t nothing good about Yankees but their bagels.” I laugh half-heartedly, glad my thrift store “I (heart) NY” t-shirt is turned inside-out. I reach for seconds. Despite my sporty company, I have the heartiest appetite; I’m the last one left eating both mornings.
Floating downhill to Dahlonega without panniers that morning feels almost like flying. The festival is in full swing when I arrive, and there are folks “pickin’ and grinnin’” on every corner. Overalls, banjo cases, and cowboy hats; musicians tote their instruments from one jam to another. Buck dancers with their tap shoes and portable wooden stages follow. Potters turn clay, a blacksmith fires up a forge, painters sketch folksy farm scenes while pedestrians meander by. I watch the clog dancers for a while, then sit outside the tent where the official band line-up performs. While I didn’t pay to actually see them, the Claire Lynch Band sounded pretty darn good.
In the evening, the hostel crew comes down and we move about in a tourist clump, sampling wine and eventually swinging a few rounds at the contradance in the square.
“Would you like to dance?” A man in a cowboy shirt holds out his arms. We waltz the last song together, then chat for a bit. He’s up from Kennesaw, has followed mountain music festivals all over the south. “I was going to grab some dinner, would you like to come?” Turns out I’m being asked on a date by the National Champion of Buck Dancing. Thankfully I was blissfully ignorant of this fact when he tried to teach me the basic steps. I was already an awkward enough date with the hostel entourage in tow and chaperons waiting up for me on the porch.

“Gateway to the Low Country.” -Barnwell, SC
I’m in South Carolina now, biking along the Savannah River to Beaufort and the Atlantic Ocean. The rural west’s red clay roads and huge rolling hills, like airline runway strips to the sky, are giving way to sandy tracks along large, flat fields.
In the north, pine forests line the highways and brush fires smoke alongside the BBQ. Mobile homes, church signs, and garages lie broken under the tornado destruction of two weeks ago. Blue tarps cover roofs and insulation sticks like cotton balls in the trees. Yellow SCDOT trucks trundle load after load of debris.
Descending into the low country, the air becomes sweetly saturated with pockets of honeysuckle, and sometimes I think I catch whiffs of licorice. I start smelling the humidity. It’s almost salty. Water pools in the forests, and houses climb back up on stilts. The air warms and condenses. My hair gets bigger with every mile I pedal to the coast.