in the mountains

I drive down from the mountain to one of the little towns clustered below, a half hour in pitch blackness until suddenly you see, of all things, a Panera. I keep driving to the downtown, to a restaurant I read about having legendary Alabama food.

Like all Southerners who are very circumspect about such things I’m like oh yeah, we’ll see about that. For we are all convinced that not only do we already know where the most legendary food is, we are quite certain that you do not know, and wouldn’t even be able to conceive of it, because, and I’m sorry, owing to the fact of what county you are from. It’s not your fault, it’s your parents.

York, Alabama, Polaroid SX-70 (2025)¹

It’s Friday night and they’re slammed and there’s a band playing, which is a rocky start, as I just sort of stand in the middle of the entrance at a lectern that says please wait to be seated for what feels like a good five minutes. But the band is pretty sharp—I’ll later overhear that it’s a family outfit, dad on bass, son on guitar, daughter on vocals—doing semi-acoustic and slightly folky versions of nineties hits, which is turns out is extremely my jam.

There is a great mix of people, which I like, a table full of bros in Carhartt and then a two-top with a couple on a fancy date, one in a gray suit and another in flowing material that my brain only codes as prom-like stuff, with glinting earrings. I figure out later a country singer who was really big in the nineties is playing right next door and some folks are pregaming. The band is doing a frankly fantastic cover of “Zombie,” which reminds me that once in high school after hearing “Dreams” I told a friend the Cranberries would never make it big, because you couldn’t sing along to them.

A server never arrives and I delightedly drop a dollar on the table and leave. I’m happy as a pig because I knew this restaurant wasn’t the best one, because I had read that it was, so now I get the satisfaction of not only being right but hearing a family band cover “Zombie.” I ended up having incredible Vietnamese food, maybe the best banh mi I’ve ever eaten, on Highway 78, which is one of my talismanic highways, the artery of my youth.

Polaroid 600, Somewhere in East Alabama

The cabin was built just a shade under a century ago by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and sits up on a cliff of rock overlooking the valley below. Those boys picked the right place. I stand on the edge of a gigantic boulder and stare into the distance. This might be the most beautiful place I have ever been, I think to myself. It’s so big I struggle and fail to get it on film, hoping to try to preserve what makes it seem so special. But you can’t hear a waterfall in the distance in a picture, can’t see the hawks diving and swooping and playing during a sunset in a Polaroid. You’ll just have to trust me that a stone cabin perched on top of a mountain in the complete, all-encompassing silence at the end of an Alabama winter is worth a few hours’ drive.

The view out the door, as best I could muster it.

After a morning of hiking I decide to head into town. I finished up the book I was reading about the Beatles and even though I told everybody I was going to the woods to read The Secret History, and I’ve got a copy of the beautiful first edition with the fancy cover—the one where there is this transparent sheath where the type overlays a photo of a Roman statue—(I picked it up for $4.50 at a thrift store in Vicksburg, the same place I got an early painting by Mildred Wolfe for forty bucks)—that seems a little too on the nose so maybe there’s some comics at a junk store.

I’m more or less disappointed by what I consider ridiculous prices, but realize I’m halfway between Birmingham and Atlanta and I suppose there’s a lot of tourists. But I don’t think tourists are buying the tiny painted ceramic bust of Coach Bryant, which I would’ve dropped twenty on, but not one hundred, or the battered and rusty lunchbox with Bo and Luke Duke grinning in perfect cartoon bas relief, for which they wanted three hundred American dollars.²

I finally cave and go to a chain store that dabbles in second-hand books and comics and end up with a haul of super 90s Starman and a bunch of Powers trade paperbacks plus a Super Challenge Baseball cartridge for the Atari 2600, which my family loved, that costs only a single dollar. We used to cluster around the TV at my Nana’s and play this thing for hours (there was actually a lot of strategy with pitching and you could totally fake people out!).

Now I’m back home in Mississippi and the storms have mostly passed. The back of the car is filled with bags of soil and fertilizer and I’m going to try to get a few dead zones in my front yard patched, maybe plant an azalea or two. It’s chilly but beautiful. I’m going to listen to The Bends and get in the dirt.

GORJUS is a dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, held fast with instant film. If you liked what you saw and read, if you maybe felt a twang in your belly while you looked it over, then this is for you, and I reckon we would be friends. Consider forwarding this letter to a pal who is like us. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see an archive of Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.

1. I know this is a bad photo, but it’s might be the only photo I will ever make of the beautiful Snowdrift Shortening mural (“For Cakes, Bread, Pastry and Frying”). It was super overcast and I realized, with great angst, that my camera was slowly dying on this trip. Normally I’m content to just blame the film, but the bizarro exposures led me to have the concern that the Electronic Control Module is giving way.

2. Also it was behind glass like it was some kind of Southern crown jewel. When the clerk (nonplussed at me saying “That is psychotic” to the quote) (an accidentally mean aside that has caused me surprise guilt over the past few days) asked me “well, what’ll you give?” I realized I didn’t have an answer. Ten dollars, twenty-five? What I really suppose I meant, down in my bones, was that it shouldn’t cost anything at all for me, I grew up in Alabama in the 70s and 80s, you should just give me that. I know this is extremely delusional.