Jeff Whitten

Guest Columnist

Different week, same process. I’m in week two of my two-week road march subbing for Andrea, the wise young managing editor of this weekly newspaper, and it’s a Tuesday p.m., and the words are like salted peanuts floating around in an ice cold bottle of Coca-Cola.

And nope, I don’t know what that means, exactly, except that if you grew up putting salted peanuts in your coke you’re probably from the South and an nth generation Southerner, not one of the new wave that likes hockey and thinks we need a team because it’s in their DNA somehow.

Also, as you can tell if you were here last week, I don’t do headlines in chronological order, bless my heart. But the basic truth behind it remains: You can’t get there from here, not last week, not this week. Not anymore. Not by pickup, or car, or motorcycle, or bus or anything with wheels.

Or maybe you can, but it’ll be aggravating. It’ll take a lot longer than it used to. And you might get road rage.

On that note, not having been to Richmond Hill for a while prior to last week, I remembered once again I’d just about rather have a colonoscopy than go through “The Hill” on 144 or 17. It probably feels the same way about me, and that’s OK.

But I can remember when the only light at the intersection of 144 and 17 blinked orange and if you blinked on your way back to Fort Stewart or Hinesville from Savannah in the middle of the night you might miss the whole city, so I’m mourning the loss of a Richmond Hill that was, once, a real small town with real people in it, and not what it has become, which is a sort of Pooler Jr.

It’s getting that way in Pembroke, too, thanks to all the lunatic development in North Bryan. It’s long been that way over in Effingham County, which is where I live. I live there because my wife’s house in there, and it would take dynamite to get her out of it.

So, we have an acre and some change and a house on top of it and lots and lots of oak and pine trees. It used to be next to cows and woods and tomato patches and cornfields and the like. Now the Whitten homestead is surrounded by a growing number of houses, which in turn are being ringed in by warehouses and apartment complexes and strip malls and convenience sores — and everywhere, all the time, thousands of vehicles shoot through that part of the county whizzing around on overtaxed roads like blood cells trying to get through cholesterol-clogged arteries.

I don’t know what that means either, sorry. But somehow, all the growth isn’t enough, because there’s money to be made and spots that haven’t been paved over to be paved over. Developers have hijacked Georgia.

Ah well. For years I’ve been trying to liken the morning and evening rush hours to the tides — they go out in the morning and come back in the afternoon — only now there’s never a low tide when it comes to traffic. And sometimes there seems to be a tsunami of it, what with all the trucks coming out of the ports.

Sorry. I’m getting old and cranky, and if I think I’ve got it bad there are folks who have it far worse. Look at the poor souls in Blitchton, which used to be a sleepy little spot mostly bothered by the sound of log trucks. Used to be.

Ah well. On a positive note, if my wife lets me I’m going to stop wearing pants when I’m out piddling in the yard. I want to feel the sun on my bahookie, and other parts, before I shuffle off this mortal coil. I just need to remember the sunscreen.

On another note, a good friend of mine is selling his banjo. Let me know if you’re interested in a real good high quality banjo. He wants $500.

Onward. Some real news here, in that there is a bill in the General Assembly that seeks to eliminate local property taxes on homesteads — that’s the house you live in — by 2032, all while increasing homestead exemptions pretty substantially along the way. I’m all for it, having seen our property taxes go up and up and up, much of it because of the need for more schools, more teachers, more school buses, more cops, more firefighters and radios and more of all the other services because there are so many more people here requiring services.

People tend to blame local governments for every ill known to this place, from floods to flus, but in fairness they’re having to accomodate a rapidly increasing number of constituents. Heck, I’m thinking at least 1,000 people relocate to Coastal Georgia every month, and they don’t sit at home when they get here.

But the increased property tax burden on top of everything else means it is actually getting to the point many people, me and my wife included, are having to cut expenses elsewhere just to pay property taxes to stay in our homes.

And when you factor in home insurance and flood insurance — our home flooded twice, and that’s another story — it can get crazy. Our house was paid off years ago, but here we are, with the rent we pay local government going up evey year Anyhow, I’ve been working on a story about the bill, HR 1114, and if you’re not aware of it I’d suggest you Google the thing, called the HOME Act — which if it makes it through the House and Senate will be on the ballot for voters to decide in November.

What else is happening? An emailed press release in my junk folder had this headline on it: “Georgia’s Southern Drawl Quietly Disappearing From Everyday Talk, Reveals Study.”

It is from the The Word Finder, an online word search tool, which somehow polled 3,042 folks to find “which accents or slang they use less, hear less, or have stopped saying entirely,” according to the press release.

“Southern” was No. 2 on the list, right behind “Appalachian” and right in front of “Louisiana.”

Though I’m from generations of Upstate South Carolinians and folks from North Georgia (mom’s ancestors, who moved down from North Carolina after the War of Northern Agression when my great-great-great grandfather was taken prisoner by the Yankees, which is another story, too), I can’t say for sure why the Appalachian accent is fading. I’m pretty sure my cousins still use it.

That said, I do suspect the reason you don’t hear much of a drawl around the South Carolina Lowcountry and Georgia coast is because many of the folks who do most of the talking ain’t from either place.

In fact, I’d wager nine out of 10 people intereviewed by local TV news reporters are from up north, as are the reporters doing the interviewing. It used to kill me, whenever you had a homeowner up in Bluffton or over on Hilton Head being interviewed before or after a natural disaster when the grocery stores didn’t have enough toilet paper and bottled water on the shelves, or the storm drains were backing up, because they’d sound like they were from Pittsburgh or New Jersey.

Disclaimer: My own accent started disappearing in sixth grade, when a teacher in Alaska told me I talked pretty after I told him I was from South Carolina.

This was about the time when Deliverance was a big hit, and I got teased a good bit, and half subconsciously decided to sound like everybody else.

My wife, however, is from Arabi, Ga., and grew up in Glennville. She still talks pretty.

And that’s that for now. Happy to have been here for a couple weeks, but I’m ready fo a beer. If you read all this, you might be too.

Whitten used to be editor of the BCN. He was never able to figure out the managing part of it the job.