This post marks the beginning of a blog that I intend will span at least a year, time spent investigating the wonders of the everyday, developing a more nuanced appreciation of my home territory in Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia. The intended centerpiece of this site will be a daily series of visits to a nearby gravel byway, Piney Woods Church Road, to take daily photographs over the course of the year 2014. Additional posts will explore natural history in and around the Georgia Piedmont, along with musings about prehistory, landscape, and the meaning of place.
Having lived over seven years now on the same parcel of land in Georgia (longer than I have lived anywhere, apart from my formative years in Pennsylvania), I have been seized with wanderlust and thoughts of hitting the road in search of another place — Utah, Florida, elsewhere. In this blog, I will indeed spend a year “on the road” — on the same road, the one that runs parallel to and a few hundred feet beyond the wooded back edge of my property, linking Rico Road (where I live) to Hutcheson Ferry Road. It has become as commonplace as imaginable — the site of innumerable dog walks over our years living here. I have walked it often enough that I have probably taken the equivalent of several hundred miles of footsteps along it. Yet all my journeys, so far, have been about exercising the dogs, about performing a necessary act. This year, I will indulge myself in the luxury of exploring the road for the sake of the adventures I might find, the wonders I might uncover. It is a journey inspired in large part by Mark Hirsch, who spent over a year chronicling the life of a burr oak in southwestern Wisconsin in That Tree (a book, Facebook page, and calendar now). He found that the experience transformed his life. Is it too much to consider the possibilities of how such an exploration as this might touch my own? Ultimately, the experiment (currently called the Piney Woods Church Road Project) is as much personal as scientific. What does it mean to devote a year to visiting the same place, a year dedicated to seeing it anew every time?