Portrait 'o America

I can't speak from experience about road trips where the intended purpose of the trip is to pick up women from some a women's college a few dozen miles. I don't really know much about the kind of road trips where you get drunk and career around the countryside at high speeds screaming and so forth. But I do know about the kind of road trips where the intended purpose is to fetch up in small towns in northeast Georgia in hopes of finding either good pork barbeque or one of those big barn-like fish camp restaurants where the tables are all picnic tables and they serve all-you-can-eat fried catfish dinner and they'll even call a doctor for you if you keel over from cholesterol overdose during the meal.

During my three years as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, 1985-1988, my friends and I liked to do what we called "Portrait o' America." Portrait o' America consisted of piling into a car with our friends and heading off along one of the roads leading out of Athens, Georgia, until we got hungry, whereupon we would find someplace to eat, and then turn around and go back. I always seemed to be working on those days when the guys wound up in some small town getting the local sheriff's deputy to pose for photos with members of the expedition.

I was along, though, the time we wound up in the City o' Hell, Maysville GA. Maysville is an extremely small town in Banks County, Georgia. You could go through it in a minute, which many people did, since the local industry was chiefly chicken ranching, and those of you who've been around chicken farms know that they stink to high heaven. But if you stopped in beautiful Maysville, Georgia, you would immediately take notice of the following: a bank which was in fact smaller than the billboard next to the bank which called your attention to it in the first place. The billboard said "BANK OF BANKS" which sounded boastful enough until you realized that the natives were being humorous since the county Maysville was in was Banks County. The bank itself was in a small mobile home. We debated coming back with a pickup truck and stealing it, but figured we'd probably become civic heroes and have to accept medals and that went against the spirit of noble, self-effacing discovery we'd set out in. That was it as far as landmarks went. So, since it was such a humdrum town, we of course decided to steal the traffic signs which directed people driving through town to slow to 35 miles per hour (presumably in order to appreciate the beauty of chickens numbering in the high eight figures and the aroma generated by all their daily production of excrement). Georgia was just then going to 65 mph on the interstates so we planned to remove the 35 mph signs, head to an interstate, steal a couple of 65 mph signs, and return to Maysville to turn the 'main drag' into the Highway of Death. Somewhere around the time we got the second 35 mph sign down and stashed in the back of the car, the fried foods we'd consumed in quantity a few miles back began to roil and fester in our digestive tracts and we called off the project in order to return to Athens or the nearest Golden Pantry convenience store along the route back in order to procure Alka-Seltzer and possibly also some Sprees.

That was it for the expedition to Maysville; the signs were mounted on the wall of a rented house on Grady Avenue in Athens, home of one Radford Bunker, a member; how Radford escaped prosecution for Theft of Public Property during the Great Raid eludes me. What was the Great Raid, you ask? The Great Raid was when three University of Georgia police cruisers screeched onto Radford's lawn in order to explain to him that perhaps target-shooting at bottles with a high-powered air rifle in his back yard was perhaps not a good idea given that the house on the other side of the back yard fence was in fact the mansion where the President of the University of Georgia, the honorable Charles Knapp, was in residence.

Presumably Radford agreed to cease and desist with his mayhem and destruction before it became necessary to hale him forth from the house after a full-scale siege which would in all likelihood have uncovered the presence of the two "35 MPH" signs on his living room wall right next to the "Welcome to Gainesville" sign and the "No Fishing" sign and the "Property of Brenau College" sign.

Through Time and Space with Joel Furr

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