Columbus to Lumpkin, GA

I took a longer route to Miami from Athens and spent the afternoon measuring the geographic proximities and gaps between Fort Benning and Stewart Detention Center. From the road, Fort Benning's landscape is unobtrusive, and I didn't go searching around for anything super identifiable either. It's clearer from the business and school signs in Columbus that one's in a military town than it was from the road I traveled; I was on the base as quickly as it disappeared. The only reason the same stretches of kudzu and stands of pine took on meaning was knowing that I was traveling between the site of the School of the Americas and the site of one of the largest immigrant detention centers in the country. The institution responsible for military and paramilitary practices that have sent hundreds of thousands of people into movement, whether from wartime or economic violence, is a short 30 miles north of Lumpkin. Lumpkin is a tiny little Southern town with a city hall in the center and one-story brick storefronts across the street on all four sides.

I spent half hour or so driving up and down the country road looking for the turn-off to Holder Road. The woman at the gas station in town asked if i was looking for "the camp," and everyone inside told me how easy it was to get there. And Stewart Detention Center is easy to get to once you ask. No large signs on the road, but you turn off onto CCA road and immediately see a large water tower and some curiously messaged greeting signs: "You are important to CCA." I honestly do not know who their audience is.

There is no guard gate, so I pulled in past the entrance sign into a monochrome landscape of black asphalt and grey starkly cut against the wild overgrowth [where my plant people?]. Layers of grey building, grey fences, grey razor wire all blurring together in the dusk sky. And painfully silent at this time of day. The tensions between the mundane and stark, unobtrusive and sudden razor-wire demarcation, and scales of movement of people and violence are what I'm sitting with at the moment.

Will share more photos later - must get on the road to Miami. Also, be looking for news from eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina, and Atlanta. And thanks, friends, for the chats on these grim weekend drives.