The town of Rincon, lying closest to Savannah, has experienced the most growth, followed by the town of Springfield. And with that growth has come a certain sense of cosmopolitanism, and along with it a recognition of the slightly wider world to be found not so very far away. But out in the countryside, far down the dirt roads leading through the swamps, deep woods, and fields, little has changed over the last thirty years. If anything, attitudes and expectations have regressed during that period of time, as people have lost jobs, and hope, and become more and more hardened. Panther Creek is the poster child of that phenomenon.

The rain was starting to beat harder as I turned off the main highway and, following the map I had drawn, began to navigate my way through the country by a series of unmarked dirt roads. Crossing a low wooden bridge that spanned a wide creek where the water was almost up to the road bed, I was beginning to wonder if I should proceed any farther when I saw a mailbox with the hand-lettered name Causey painted on the side. I turned in at what looked to be a driveway leading back into the thick woods.

The rutted sand track led a hundred yards to a clearing, across which were scattered three old trailer homes, an ancient tumbledown wooden shack, and a number of old sheds and animal pens. To the sides and behind one of the trailers were twenty or thirty blue plastic barrels lying on their sides, each with a hole cut in one end. There was a stake driven into the ground in front of each barrel, with a line leading into the interior. Most of the inhabitants were sheltering inside, but here and there a fighting rooster was out in the rain, scratching the ground or straining at his tether, trying, with hostile intent, to reach his neighbor.

At the edges of the woods, overgrown with weeds and brush, sat, in various stages of decomposition, a dozen or so derelict cars and trucks. An old pickup, one that must have been there since the fifties, even had a tree growing through it. All sorts of other castoffs were strewn across the clearing in a careless and haphazard manner. Broken washing machines, air conditioners, lawn mowers, and other unidentifiable remains of twentieth-century consumerism littered the ground. And I thought, not for the first time, that no one else loves their junk the way we Southerners do. We like to keep it close at hand for our own admiration and for the benefit of visitors.

At the trailer to my left sat a new pickup truck, and to the side of the trailer, parked carefully beneath a metal carport, was an eighteen-foot bass boat with a two-hundred-fifty-horsepower motor on the transom. A quick glance around the area told me that the truck and boat were worth more than everything else in sight combined.