Why is it that we mythologize the places we grew up in? That, after traveling and living all over the globe, we persist in the kind of thinking that goes: "the hottest place in the world is that soccer field we used to play on in Cobb County, Georgia," or that our hometowns always had the sweetest onions, the most violent thunderstorms, the best pheasant hunting, or some other quality about the land itself--like the way a Maine birch forest looks in late September--that we can't quite articulate but still carry with us like a wrapped gift? 

One obvious answer is that wherever we spent our formative years is special to us by virtue of association. As we grow we remember back to the lands we rambled through when we were kids. A couple years ago there was a report  from a neuroscientist on NPR explaining how the vast majority of people stop listening to new kinds of music after 35 and continue listening to whatever music they listened to when they were in high school and college for the rest of their lives. 

The conclusion, not surprisingly, was that as people age, listening to music that reminds them of when they were young makes them feel stronger as adults, as if certain things can remain constant in a changing world. 

I'd argue that remembering our hometowns works much the same way. The difference is that unless we still live there, or go back and interact directly with the place--walking the streets or woods, paddling the rivers--hell, for a lot of people it's just going back to a football game--we can only access the place through memory, or when talking with friends and family from back home.

In this way we create and add to the mythology of the place, its local lore. As the years go on, these stories--with facts being less important than essence--become our personal mythologies. 

My facts: We moved to the the suburbs between Marietta and Roswell, Georgia when I was 3 years old. We lived in the first wave of subdivisions built during the white flight from Atlanta in the 60s. Except for these houses, the mill and township in Roswell (which was where Confederate Uniforms were produced for the Civil War) a couple shopping areas (Parkaire Mall--originally a local airport, and Merchants walk), schools, and baseball diamonds, the entire region from was a single expanse of Rolling Piedmont forests and farmland that extended several miles along the Chattahoochee River. 

Many of the family farms went all the back to settlers who moved in after the Cherokee were forced out in the Trail of Tears. And some of these farmers--even in the late 70s---still worked the land with mules.

As a young boy I explored these forests--on foot, on bike, and by canoe--and then later, in high school and college, I led campers and students of all ages back into these forests, some of them children of Mexican immigrants who had never been in a forest before. It's the place I know better than any other. 

The farms slowly disappeared throughout my early childhood . And then as I entered high school and went to college, this growth seemed to explode. Atlanta was booming (It still is). Mansions began popping up along the banks up and down the Chattahoochee River. Johnson Ferry Road became a four-lane highway with strip malls and subdivisions sprawling from lower Roswell all the way to Upper Roswell Road. 

In spite of this however, there was one last farm, Hyde Farm, that sat unchanged, and had been unchanged from the 1830s. The Hyde family lived like pioneers in the 20th century. They farmed the Chattahoochee bottomland raising corn, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, hunting deer, and fishing. 

As the land value increased exponentially from the 90s through the present, the family has been faced with having to sell the farm to pay for taxes. Two days ago however, the Trust for Public Land announced it had reached a deal with the family, and would work with the National Park Service to continue utilizing the area as working farm that would be open to the public, thus saving this last chunk of land from McMansion developers.

I'm so grateful to everyone who worked for this to happen. 

If you ever visit Atlanta, make sure you go to see Hyde Farm, and the stretch of Chattahoochee River between Morgan Falls Dam and the Johnson Ferry Bridge. It's the last green heart of where I grew up and still love. There was and is a magic about the abandoned fields you come across in the middle of the forest--places completely buried in kudzu (see the cover of r.e.m. Murmur)--and the stands of oak and tulip tree, hickory and sycamore, that flanked the slopes of the river. 

My mythology: while everyone else was growing up as member of the 20th century, a couple miles away from where I went to bed each night there were still people living in the old way. I never met them, but snuck around a lot on their land, which was the land of other people a long time before them, and which, in the manner of children owning whatever place they explore, became my land for a while too.