I leave Jax early Thursday afternoon. The sun is shining, the birds are singing. I walk 12 miles before I run out of sidewalk and strip malls. I cross a bridge over what I assume is the lower James River and am suddenly on a 4-lane highway. Jax is behind me, nothing much is in front of me.

It takes 4 days to go a distance that would be barely 2 hrs by car. I arrive in Savannah having walked almost halfway. The marvelous shelter CJ spoke of in such glowing terms no longer exists as a mission. It is now exclusively a drug and alcohol rehab center. The only other mission in town is pretty much the same as all the other missions and shelters – you line up every night and fight for a space. At least, I am told, you don’t have to sit through a religious service to eat – a condition the woman who tells me this calls, in the phrase I’ve been hearing for weeks now, “a blessing”.

Amen.

Savannah at first blush is a mass of uneasy contradictions, a hodge-podge of clashing styles. It shows up in everything from the architecture to the sidewalks. It seems to have been slapped together in pieces and the pieces allowed to remain even when they don’t fit the ones around them. An ornate Georgian townhouse sits between a concrete monstrosity of a blockhouse and a collonaded Grecian-front funeral home that must once have been the last word in Southern grace and elegance.

The sidewalks, even downtown, show the same ingrained split personality. They begin, perhaps, as ancient cobblestone, suddenly turn into a modern-eyed version of Victorian brick, neatly spaced and evenly laid. Then, just as abruptly, there is no sidewalk at all. Just unadorned dirt connecting to grass patches connecting to…more concrete.

Nothing about Savannah’s physicality makes any sense. Yet there is an eerie peace about it, as if its past and present live in some sort of harmony without either taking over. The other cities I’ve been in down here have the feeling that a war was fought between the overwhelming nostalgia for a Past of Glory that was never as glorious as it’s remembered and a blank, featureless Present of bland housing developments and long empty nights in front of the tv. It is a war the Present has won, a war it could not lose, and it is a victory resented by those who dream of hyacinths by the door and darkies working the fields, a life they define as “gracious” but never admit was in its soul brutal, heartless and monumentally selfish.

In Savannah it is as if the war ended in a stalemate where neither the Past nor the Present was able to vanquish the other. The tension here is the long-settled tension between neighbors with old grudges but whose wives want peace in the ‘hood. The terms have been accepted, the boundaries have been drawn, and the new good feelings after the last fun barbecue mix with the old bad feelings left after fights over who borrowed the lawn mower have receded into dreams.

It is an uneasy truce but a truce nevertheless. The fact of it is in the unholy conjunction of buildings that shouldn’t be in the same country let alone the same city. It is in the smell of the quiet in Forsythe Park, an odd mingling of jasmine and gasoline exhaust. It is mostly, though, in the true Southern pace at which Savannah moves.

It meanders. It saunters. Sometimes it stops altogether and rests in the shade of a cedar tree. Where every other Southern city I’ve been in has been injected with speed thanks to the invention of air-conditioning and the influx of Northern businessmen looking for cut-rate Southern costs – along with the flood of upNorth workers who followed them – Savannah has fought to maintain its leisurely pace. When a tall, stunning black woman crosses the street on the hop despite the fact that the traffic in Savannah moves as fast as snails making for a picnic tryst at some undefined date, even the newcomer thinks, “She’s not from here. She must be a Northerner.”

It is a speed-switch like running a 78rpm record at 33 1/3, and the newcomer has made that switch in the space of a single afternoon. In the heat of the day he slows his steps, shortens his stride, lowers the amount of energy and effort in walking. He discovers he sweats less. He slows his breathing, steadies it, deepens it and discovers he doesn’t care whether he gets to the library in 15 mins or 30 or at all.

He has been successfully Savannah-ized.

Pittsburgh Speed

There is a bit of the same feeling I remember from Pittsburgh, but there it isn’t really about speed – they move as fast as New Yorkers. It’s more about the quality of the movement. It isn’t as purposeful or as intense. There’s a sense in the streets that life is what happens away from work rather than at work. Work in Pittsburgh is just the thing you have to do so you get to do the things you really want to do. Leisure seems to be the point.

It’s a livable city and that attitude is part of what makes it livable. The restaurants and bars may be designer-mod but the people in them are Steel City ragheads and Once-Upon-A-Time Hippies. Gary drives me around one morning and shows me the neighborhoods, explains how they connect – or don’t – and how the Mom-and-Pop character of the Industrial Age survived post-industrial destruction in Pitt. Many of the houses in the neighborhoods he shows me have been rehabbed but it isn’t a guts-to-glory, foundation-to-attic re-do. It’s a fixing up and returning to the way they were with a few added modernizations. Nobody wanted the character of the house to actually change, only for it to be more like it used to be but with a wide-screen plasma tv in the living room.

I like it. There is only one misgiving that bangs against the back of my mind and it shows up the day I leave.

Gary buys me lunch at a sports bar and over a hamburger buys my bus ticket to Philly and gives me $60 in cash. “Be careful how you spend it,” he smiles. “Cheap food.” He has no idea how cheap.

When we come out of the bar to go to the bus station, it is snowing. Big white flakes falling as lightly as feathers wafting from a molting seagull, only much much colder.

Pittsburgh, I am reminded, is close to Canada and the Great Lakes. Winter there is as bad as winter in Buffalo, of which there is nothing worse.

I keep Pittsburgh on my list of possible retirement homes, but only if I don’t have to work. I don’t want to be forced to go out in this stuff if I have food in the cupboard and coffee in the pot.

South Carolina gets moved up higher on the list.