Jeff Whitten, Contributor.

Pardon this trip down memory lane, but when I was 4 or 5 years old up in South Carolina my paternal grandfather – he was known to us as Papa – would plop me down on the hood of his LTD somewhere next to the hood ornament, hand me a bucket of marbles and a sling shot and drive me slowly around the hills on the outskirts of Pendleton, S.C., looking for rabbits to shoot. This was in the 1960s, of course, when you could get away with stuff.

Try putting a kid on the hood of a car with a coffee can full of marbles and a slingshot and driving him anywhere in this day and time and see what happens.

There may still be places in Georgia and out in what’s left of the wilds of South Carolina Upstate where you could get away with it, though if law enforcement saw you they’d very probably write you up for failure to put your kid in a car seat before you propped him up there on the hood and handed him a slingshot. And you’d likely wind up going viral and having the online social media peanut gallery calling for your head.

That’s because we live in different times, and more crowded times, and times where it sometimes seems everybody knows what’s good for everybody else and can’t wait to tell them. Maybe that’s progress.

But there are still a few places in the South where you can at least get away from other people if you need to, though they’re further and farther between and I’m not handing out grid coordinates or directions, other than to say this: My wife’s from Arabi, Ga., a little town somewhere outside Cordele, and when we’d drive down there the traffic would start dwindling somewhere on the other side of Vidalia and by the time you got past McRae and Alamo it would turn off and you pretty much had the road to yourself. The whole thing.

Once, we got stopped by a train for what seemed like 20 minutes, and when the track cleared I was astonished to find we were still the only ones waiting at the crossing. Get stopped by a train around here and traffic backs up half a mile if it lasts longer than two minutes.

All this growth is supposed to be a good thing, but it’s turning a lovely, easy-going place once rural and quiet into a grinding, noisy, crowded, uptight place full of selfie-taking suburbanites where peace and sanity are getting tougher than ever to find.

Even the homogenous suburbs are getting squeezed by the pursuit of the almighty dollar, with people who moved down from up North putting out those “don’t box in” yard signs to protest the latest warehouse or commercial development to spring up. I’ll say one thing for transplants. After they move in they don’t want anybody else to move in behind them.

“I moved down here to get away from all that,” they’ll say, not realizing they weren’t the only one with that idea in mind and before you know it, they’ve brought everything they were moving away from with them.

Not that I’m banging on about anything that hasn’t been banged on about before.

And here, an aside: I’m also a transplant, being nth generation indigenous to the Upstate portion of the Palmetto State – my hometown is probably closer to UGA than you are right now -- so I should probably hush, not being a native of the great state of Georgia, which if I recall was initially intended to be a place for people to settle who got into money trouble over in England. Which might explain some things.

Ah well, we’re all transplants compared to the Native-Americans who were here first. They’re the ones with the real complaint when it comes to illegal immigration, which back in the day came in the form of us greedy white folks from Europe. Look at what all we brought with us and what we took from them. Seems somewhat hypocritical to go on about folks trying to get into this country without permission.

In the here and now, pray tell, where will all the garbage from all the newcomers and businesses go? In ever-expanding landfills? It’s got to go somewhere and there’s more of it every day. The EPA once said the average American generates about 5.91 pounds of garbage a day, which if you do the math is more than 2,100 pounds a year.

Multiply that by the population growth and it’s probably more than I want to know.

I just know I clean it out of the ditches bordering our 1.1 acre homesite that used to be neighbored by cows and crops before the developers got started.

Back then, though, they built houses with bricks, not vinyl, and left at least a little bit of space between them and you. At least in the immediate vicinity. Now, just down the road in both directions the vinyl houses that just might melt in the sun are springing up left and right, and filling up as soon as the cement driveways harden enough to keep moving vans from bogging down.

Ah well. Maybe some kid in a STEM class can figure out a way to take all that garbage and use it to pave all the potholes from all the dump trucks and tractor trailers out here. Or turn it into hot air balloons to hold all the gas coming out of your’s truly.

Anyhow, times are changing, indeed.

Just the other day I saw an ad somewhere for a “southern cooking” buffet restaurant over in Chatham County where they served “Sunday dinner” starting at 4 p.m.

In the South I’m from Sunday dinner usually ends by then, having started sometime after church or 1 p.m. or so at the latest. Supper is what you eat on Sunday evening if you’re still hungry.

Have a great weekend. 

Jeff Whitten is a former editor of the Bryan County News, as well as an infrequent correspondent and occasional columnist. Fun fact: his star sign is Scorpio.