Yesterday, I returned from a long weekend in Georgia. It was my first visit to the state since my family road-tripped to Florida decades ago, back when state lines were meaningless abstractions to me. Back before I grasped that the American South was fundamentally different from the Northern world I called home. And, let’s be honest, back before I harbored a subtle, unfounded prejudice that Southerners were… well, simple.
It took an old friend’s wedding to lure me back. The wedding was in Athens, Georgia—the quintessential college town and a pilgrimage site for any self-respecting music lover. While I’ve never been a die-hard fan of Athens’ most famous exports (B-52s, R.E.M., Widespread Panic—meh), I was intrigued to soak up the essence of this indie music haven.
When I boarded my plane in Boston, it was 35 degrees and raining, so I wasn’t exactly heartbroken to leave. The flight was uneventful, as was the rental car experience—aside from being “upgraded” to a Chevy HHR, which, if you’re unfamiliar, is a compact hearse disguised as a car. The 90-minute drive to Athens was a revelation: an effusively green landscape of towering trees and lush grass, paired with a 70 mph speed limit. (I thought life moved slower in the South. Then again, this is Nascar territory.)
I was excited to reunite with my college friends in a college town. Even if Athens wasn’t our college town, at least the atmosphere was familiar. Here is the front lawn of a fraternity on Sunday morning. Ah, the thoughtless degradation in pursuit of a fleeting good time… that brings back memories!
The downtown of Athens is a blocky grid of brick buildings featuring a main drag with all of the essentials of collegian commerce: Coffee, music, fashion, and kitsch. A parallel boulevard provided space exclusively for sit-down restaurants and bars, and the side streets that adjoined the two offered low-rent pizza, ice cream, and even a girlie bar. All around town, painted bulldog statues (for the Uni. of GA bulldogs) inspired pride in the locals while thoroughly intimating visitors like myself.
The ‘token’ college marijuana paraphernalia store was located directly across from City Hall. Here I am, taking a picture of City Hall as a reflection of a green bong shaped like the Eiffel Tower.
Athens wouldn’t be Athens without its music scene, and the signs are everywhere: recording studios, independent labels, performance spaces, and music stores where vinyl still holds equal ground with CDs. I found myself wistful, standing in one of these idealistic spaces. Music stores now seem like relics of a bygone era, filled with a hopefulness that feels almost quaint.
And that’s what I loved about Athens. Like all great college towns, it brims with idealism, a buoyant energy that seems to defy reality. The skies are impossibly blue, the flowers obnoxiously vibrant, the music effortlessly cool, and there are three ice cream shops within a block of each other. Even the hangovers are charming, thanks to an invisible army of someone-elses who clean up the messes of the night before.
Ah, to be young again.
