Traffic was thin, but as I threaded my way through downtown the mist drifting from the lowered sky increased to a light rain. Turning right on Abercorn, I went toward the river before turning north on Liberty and making my way to Highway 21. Crossing old U.S. 17, I cast a quick glance to the right and saw, rising high over the broad waist of the Savannah River, the great piers and suspension wires of the Talmadge Memorial Bridge. From its center span, 185 feet above the river’s surface, Tonya Causey had plunged with finality, to the rapidly flowing and darkly fatal waters below.

Once, on a night jump, I’d had a total parachute malfunction. And to this very second, I can recall the electric jolt of terror that blasted through my being as I struggled to cut away the useless main parachute. And I can recall, just as vividly, the overwhelming sense of relief that flooded my body when I felt that lifesaving reserve parachute yank me back from the maw of certain death. But Tonya Causey had nothing in reserve. Tonya knew the full horror of that fall—all the way to fatal impact.

Once above the industrial and port area of the city, Highway 21 turns almost due north. For the most part, it runs parallel to the Savannah River, staying well away from the broad swamps that flank that great stream. But the land lies low, and as often as not, the terrain is characterized by the coffee-colored, tannic waters of the meandering creeks, cypress and gum swamps, and the curiously elliptical water-filled depressions known as Carolina bays. Dry land in this region is generally known as “the Hill.” But true hills, here in the lower coastal plain, are nowhere to be found.

To the sides of the highway, the land, where not immersed in water, alternates between wide, flat fields of cotton, corn, soybeans, deep grass pastures of cattle, and forests of pine. To see these magnificent conifers standing straight and proud, limbless for the first seventy-five feet above the ground, is to understand the meaning of the phrase “tall as a Georgia pine.”

Soon I crossed from Chatham County into Effingham. For the first decade of the new millennium, Effingham County has been one of the fastest-growing places in the nation, its population almost doubling during that period. But even with that rate of growth, the number of people residing within its boundaries is still slightly less than forty thousand souls.