RISING FAWN

Through the rain, over the miles, and all the places in-between.

If you are from Alabama or Mississippi and driving up to the Smoky Mountains or to see the Christmas decorations at Dollywood or family in Tennessee you will cut through a corner of Georgia. When you’re little it gives you bragging rights, because you can tell people at school you went to two other States over the break, even if it’s maybe cheating a little bit because it’s just a corner.

Yet it is a beautiful corner, and by this time you’re firmly in the Appalachians, there are mountains in the distance and hills and valleys and it is vast, so different than where you live. The sign when you wander through this magical passage says “Rising Fawn.”

But this is between Fort Payne and Chattanooga, far after you started and long before you can stop—like many places, like nearly all places, which are between where you left and where you are trying to go. As an in-between place it is unknown; not unexplored in terms of no-one has been there but strange to you and perhaps un-knowable until such time as you have been. Remember how when you were growing up each backyard was a country, every patch of woods a galaxy, only known through the descriptions of your friends at school or overheard in snatches of conversations between adults. A different school and neighborhood were utterly mysterious—yeah, she goes to Bottenfield, or my grandparents live off of Cedars of Lebanon.

The interstate has existed since before I was born, and now I ride around in a machine that can travel nearly 500 miles on a tank of gas, but it is so hard from me to get from place to place now, because I just want to see it all. I wonder so much about the places I have never been, that I drove past, the universes of lives and beauty exploding all around, every second, a new world with every turn of the head.

I wonder about them all.

Rising Fawn, Georgia, Polaroid SX-70 (Christmas Day 2023)

May your New Year bring you journeys to new places and quests to all those places in-between.

“RISING FAWN” is a chapter of GORJUS, 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 sending this letter to a pal who is like us. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see an archive of Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.