Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
shabby, giving them that requisite raffish air I had been looking for since Hannibal. Some
of the shops were just a bit chichi, I must admit. One of them was called The Cutest Little
Shop in Town, which made me want to have the quickest little dry heave in the county. A
sign on the door said, ABSOTIVELY, POSILUTELY NO FOOD OR DRINK IN SHOP. I
sank to my knees and thanked God that I had never had to meet the proprietor. The shop
was closed so I wasn't able to go inside and see what was so cute about it.
Towards the end of the street stood a big new Hyatt Regency hotel, an instantly depressing
sight. Massive and made of shaped concrete, it was from the Fuck You school of architec-
turesofavoredbythebigAmericanhotelchains.Therewasnothingaboutitinscaleorap-
pearance even remotely sympathetic to the old buildings around it. It just said, “Fuck you,
Savannah.” The city is particularly ill favored in this respect. Every few blocks you come
up against some discordant slab-the De Soto Hilton, the Ramada Inn, the Best Western
Riverfront, all about as appealing as spittle on a johnnycake, as they say in Georgia. Ac-
tually, they don't say anything of the sort in Georgia. I just made it up. But it has a nice
Southernringtoit,don'tyouthink?IwasjustaboutatthepointwhereIwasstartingtoget
personally offended by the hotels, and in serious danger of becoming tiresome here, when
my attention was distracted by a workman in front of the city courthouse, a large building
withagolddome.Hehadaleafblower,anoisycontraptionwithmilesofflexsnakingback
intothebuildingbehindhim.Ihadneverseensuchathingbefore.Itlookedsomethinglike
a vacuum cleaner-actually,it looked like one ofthe Martians in It Came from Outer Space-
and it was very noisy. The idea, I gathered, was that you would blow all the leaves into a
pile and then gather them up by hand. But every time the man assembled a little pile of
leaves, a breeze would come along and unassemble it. Sometimes he would chase one leaf
halfablockormorewithhisblower,whereuponalltheleavesbackatbasewouldseizethe
opportunitytoscuttleoffinalldirections.Itwasclearlyanappliancethatmusthavelooked
nifty in the catalog but would never work in the real world, and I vaguely wondered, as I
strolled past, whether the people at the Zwingle Company were behind it in some way.
I left Savannah on the Herman Talmadge Memorial Bridge, a tall, iron-strutted structure
that rises up and up and up and flings you, wide-eyed and quietly gasping, over the Savan-
nah River and into South Carolina. I drove along what appeared on my map to be a mean-
dering coast road, but was in fact a meandering inland road. This stretch of coast is littered
with islands, inlets, bays and beaches of rolling sand dunes, but I saw precious little of it.
The road was narrow and slow. It must be hell in the summer when millions of vacationers
from all over the eastern seaboard head for the beaches and resorts-Tybee Island, Hilton
Head, Laurel Bay, Fripp Island.
