What Happened to the Slow Lane?
by Ricky Fitzpatrick for The Creative South
There was a time, not terribly far back, when Jackson County felt like the kind of place where a person could put their life in neutral and still get where they needed to go. Folks moved at a gentler pace. Somebody might wave you down on the road just to ask after your mama. A trip to town took as long as the conversations you couldn’t avoid, and nobody seemed to mind.
But somewhere along the way, right about the time we became “one of the fastest-growing counties in America,” according to people who keep track of such things…we misplaced something precious: the slow lane.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Growth brings blessings. New restaurants. Better coffee. A place that sells dog treats shaped like tiny hamburgers. And I’m glad our kids have more schools, more opportunities, and more places to work besides the chicken plant or the feed store.
Still, it’s hard to ignore that the roads where we used to pull tractors across now look like qualifying laps at Talladega. There’s a whole new breed of driver on Highway 129 or 441. People who consider the speed limit a suggestion and a turn signal an intrusion on their personal freedom.
The other day I saw a man in a brand-new black SUV weaving so aggressively that I honestly thought he might take flight. Meanwhile, a mile back, an old gentleman puttered along in his dusty Ford, windows down, arm out, the embodiment of 1973. He was unbothered, steady, and absolutely determined that no amount of modern progress was going to rush him into the grave.
If you want to know where the slow lane went, just get behind that guy. I promise you, it's alive and well.
I ran into a young couple at the grocery store recently…new Jackson County residents, judging by the California plates on their Subaru and the mild panic in their eyes. They said they moved here “for the peaceful, pastoral life.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell them they had settled directly between a high school, a chicken farm, and the world’s most determined Dollar General construction crew. But even so, they’ll learn what the rest of us have: beneath the noise, there’s still quiet. You just have to look for it.
Take Ms. Henson, for instance. She sits on her front porch every morning with her coffee, watching cars shoot by like she’s observing some rare and skittish species. She doesn’t rush. She doesn’t chase. She just waits until the world slows down enough to wave at somebody who’ll wave back. And people still do.
Or consider the fellows at one of the old family-owned stores, who gather around the worn, wooden counter and discuss matters of great local importance…the weather, the high cost of hay, and the uncanny ability of somebody’s cows to escape no matter how much money they spend on fencing.
Those conversations, and the relationships they build, can’t be speed-run.
The truth is, Jackson County may have gained people, traffic, and more subdivisions than anyone can count, but underneath it all, we’re still who we’ve always been:
steady, rooted, quick to help, slow to judge (publicly, anyway), and stubborn in all the best ways.
We still stop for funeral processions.
We still hold doors at the grocery store.
We still wave from the steering wheel.
We still check on folks when the lights go out.
We still believe that time spent talking isn’t time wasted.
So what happened to the slow lane?
Nothing at all. It’s still here. It just takes a little more intention to find it.
You’ll see it in the early morning fog over a pasture that somehow hasn’t been turned into a subdivision yet. In the neighbor who stops by with tomatoes. In the line at the Bojangles drive-thru where everyone has quietly agreed to move like honey instead of lightning.
If the fast lane is where Jackson County is headed, the slow lane is who we’ve always been. And as long as somebody keeps waving from the porch, keeps rolling down the windows on a back road, keeps leaving tomatoes on a doorstep…the slow lane’s not going anywhere.
Not here. Not in the Creative South.