Travel Thoughts: Savannah, GA
Sunday, August 15th, 2010Author note: This post was written several weeks ago while traveling without internet access. I recently moved away from Boston, rather further down the east coast, and stopped at a few places along the way. Savannah, Georgia was one of those stops, chosen more for its location along the Amtrak route than anything else. Not to detract from the tone of this piece, but if any of you for some reason find yourselves in Savannah, do go and check out Papillote. You will not regret it.
One gets the impression in Boston that the city’s bitterly cold winters freeze history in place. Savannah provides no such illusions, although its obsession with its own past seems even stronger.
Decay and growth share this city, working in synergy with one another and united against human pretensions. Every edifice here is crumbling, every suitable surface covered by moss or lichens or vines. That combination defines the image of the city, the way it presents itself to the world. Picture Savannah and you see antebellum homes with vines crawling up the wrought-iron and masonry, pushed to the background by antebellum oaks draped with Spanish moss, their bark covered in lichens the colour of oxidised copper.
That’s the tourist board picture, and it’s true. But it doesn’t show the plants sprouting in every crack between bricks, the moss spreading up utility poles, the lichens blanketing show awnings. It doesn’t show the boards over shop windows. It doesn’t show the empty lots where buildings simply ceased to exist, their carcasses carried off, their neighbours suddenly standing naked, exposing walls no eye was meant to see, doors to nowhere, rusted-out service elevators disused because the upper floors are vacant anyway. And probably have been for decades. All it covered in vegetable growth of one kind of another.
One wonders whether Oglethorpe and the other original colonists (a great source of local pride, of course) even intended to settle here or if they simply stood in one place too long and became trapped. Perhaps Sherman didn’t burn it down only because he was afraid that the other, natural inhabitants would simply grow back twice as fast an engulf him, too, the way they quickly engulf every square inch not vigorously patrolled by the historical preservation societies.
I have Ambergris on the brain after finishing The City of Saints and Madmen, and Savannah isn’t helping. I know I’m seeing this city through the lens of that other one at the mouth of the River Moth. I wonder whether the essential tension between natural growth and human artifice I see here is really as essential as I think or if Ambergris has changed me. Perhaps I’ll start seeing every city this way. I arrive at my destination tomorrow. We’ll see whether Ambergris finds me in REDACTED as well.
