Tallulah River Log Jam

When I was a kid, my family had a cabin on Lake Burton in North Georgia. The headwaters of the Tallulah River are about twenty miles north of Lake Burton. We spent many, many days exploring the river. To this day, I know every boulder, twist, and turn, every water-carved hole. It is an old friend. Now, as then, every time I visit, I am both eager and amazed to discover how the simple power of water has altered everything and nothing.

When I was a kid and considered fifty years an incomprehensible eternity, I was mesmerized by the thousands of years it must have taken to smooth jagged chunks of rock the size of small houses to the smooth polished state they were in. I tried to visualize the generations of Native Americans who had sat on the same boulders, swam in the same water holes, and fished for the same trout.

This image conveys that sense of time and the river's power, what changes frequently, what changes so slowly it seems immutable -knowing full well it is not.

In my lifetime, it is both old and new.