Headed to the Okefenokee
I kissed my wife goodbye and headed south with my daughter for 217 miles on Interstate 75. The further south we drove, the higher the temperature readout displayed. Hour after hour, and mile after mile of semi-trucks, exits, and billboards until finally, just 16 miles shy of the Florida line, we turn due east at Valdosta, Georgia.
Another sixty-one miles of long, flat, boring roads through the pine flat-woods of South Georgia on GA-94. Besides the occasional barns and homesteads, the landscape is devoid of memorable landmarks. If the roads weren’t so perfectly straight, one might feel as if he were going in circles. In his Florida Sketch Book, Bradford Torrey writes…
“…the traveler rides hour after hour through seemingly endless pine barrens, otherwise known as low pine-woods and flat-woods, till he wearies of the sight.”
Bradford Torrey, Florida Sketch Book, 1894
The pine flat-woods in South Georgia are much different than the pine forests of the Piedmont. The southern pines seem taller and less foliated; they are more mindful of each others’ personal space than their crowded Loblolly cousins in the north. With only patches of Saw Palmetto and Broomsedge, the pines stretch beyond and behind, and on either side; like fields of telephone poles ever receding as one approaches. Other than passing shadows cast by the soaring vultures, there is little shade or retreat from the overhead sun.
We will soon be entering the Okefenokee, the Land of Trembling Earth…
Okefenokee Photography Project by William Wise 