Chattahoochee River: The Forgotten Boundary

Lyrics

Chattahoochee.
The Muscogee word.
Pictured rocks. Flowing over granite.
A name older than the maps.

Before the state line, it was the line.
A border of water and wood.
Then came the paper claims. Eighteen thirty-two.
The lottery tickets felt crisp, I imagine.
Promising land west of the water.
The river didn't read the deeds.
It just kept flowing.

You are the boundary we forget.
The line we cross on a concrete bridge, going seventy miles an hour.
The vein that gives the city its drink.
We only remember your name when the faucet runs dry,
or when the lawyers start talking.

Then came the new ambition. Nineteen fifty-seven.
The rumble of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Buford Dam rose from the red clay.
And the river’s cadence changed.
Submerging old farms, old ferry crossings.
To make a new line on the map.
They called it Lake Lanier.

You are the boundary we forget.
The line we cross on a concrete bridge, going seventy miles an hour.
The vein that gives the city its drink.
We only remember your name when the faucet runs dry,
or when the lawyers start talking.

And the talking began.
Alabama wants its share. Florida, too.
Men in suits in dry rooms, arguing over flow rates.
I wonder if they've ever tasted the water they fight for.
While Sally Bethea walked the banks,
pointing out the subtler poisons.
Runoff from a thousand perfect lawns.
A different kind of war.

But you hold your secrets.
In nineteen seventy-eight, they drew a new line.
A recreation area. A thin green thread.
And suddenly, there's the surprise of wildness.
Trout, living in the cold shadows cast by the dam.
A stubborn flicker of life,
just minutes from the sprawl.

Pictured rocks.
Flowing over granite.
Past the subdivisions, under the interstate.
You are the boundary.
The one we live on.
The one we forget.