March 10, 2004
SENTINEL CHIMNEYS
You know what I'm talking about. I've spoken of them before. Those lonely chimneys standing by the side of the road, like Easter Island god heads, mute testament to some long forgotten tragedy.
I don't see them anymore, although I don't drive the backroads of Georgia like I once did, calling on customers in Attapulgus, Bainbridge, Cairo, and Albany. Rob just made a South Georgia trek; maybe he saw some.
They piqued my curiosity as a child: what the hell happened there, way back when? Of course, living on the swath Sherman cut through Georgia during the Great Howl, I figured at nine or ten years of age that Sherman's Mongol Horde had torched the places, after butchering the livestocks, pillaging the hope chests, and deflowering the magnolia blossoms that later grew into our matriarchs.
Now I understand, of course, that the causes were more recent and quotidian than that. A kitchen grease fire gone exponential, an inauspicious confluence of corn liquor drinking and smoking cigarettes in bed. The occasional Depression-Era version of no-fault divorce.
Speaking of Easter Island, those things are deteriorating rapidly. Great efforts are being made to stabilise them, but the prospect is bleak. Between 1000 and 1600 AD the islanders made about 900 of them. A few hundred they managed to erect as lookouts, as sentinels, the remainder were strewn around the quarry or abandoned in transit. Tragedy of monumental proportion struck there, too, only no one knows why.
As for the chimneys, perhaps it's just that brick and mortar crumbles, too, only sixty years later.
I'm going looking for some sentinel chimneys this weekend. I'll let you know if any of them speak to me.