Notes From the Dogleg by Reverend David DeChant
So at one end of Cabbagetown, you have the tunnel. Please don’t call it the Krog Tunnel because Krog is not in our neighborhood. Call it the Cabbagetown Tunnel. This is a famous entrance to our village, or a back door, depending how you look at it. The Estoria vein that most travelers follow takes them by my house where the two turns in the middle of the road are. The old timers call it “the dogleg.” [Hey, just for fun you can call me the Hogleg in the Dogleg. No? Well, think about it.] I heard it was designed to keep tractor trailers out, but instead it just traps them and there is gridlock madness as the poor sucker has to back out of here and try to get to Pearl Street. It would be funny except they pluck our utility wires down sometimes. The dogleg has its perks and its faults. I have seen probably twenty accidents involving bikes, cars, and skateboards in the last eleven years, many frighteningly bloody. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. This article will focus only on Estoria Street this time. I love every inch of Cabbagetown, but I’m partial to Estoria because we are considering seceding from the neighborhood for tax purposes, and I want to run for HNIC (Happiest Neighbor In Cabbagetown). Might name the Estoria River something cabbagey, like Slawville. This corner, Slawdog.
Work is Prayer
Cummin Landscape Supply is on the other end of Estoria. I recently had a chance to talk with the proprietor, Justin Andrews, about the business and his year and a half on Estoria and Memorial. He is a family man with four kids between the ages of (almost) three and ten. The landscape supply company has grown into a fully-stocked yard full of soil, sand, pine straw, stone of several varieties, gravel, and mulch of all types. They offer delivery and hauling and grading and the prices are phenomenally low for being in town. Justin is a nice guy and he will gladly give free advice to anyone who asks about landscaping and gardening.
When I asked him to tell me about the name of the business (cummin, like the spice) he told me about a parable in the book of Isaiah that inspired him. It says, “Will the plowman continually plow for the sowing, breaking his ground and harrowing it? Does he not, once he has leveled it, broadcast the dill and scatter the cummin? …This message comes from the Lord of Hosts, whose purposes are wonderful and his power great.” The point of the parable is that the farmer’s wisdom symbolizes the divine purposes. He decided he would become a landscaper so that he could teach the world in his humble way the divine purposes through planting with wisdom. After years of landscaping, he has been focusing now on the materials themselves. And he is here in Cabbagetown! That sounds like a plug because it is and he deserves a warm welcome to the neighborhood. Go down and buy a ton of something from him.
Great White Bears of C-town
Hey Nature Lovers! Where can you go to see large indigenous predators? It is as easy as leaving Cabbagetown by way of Estoria to Memorial. On the left just past the houses on the hill you see a halted construction site of industrial fodder and failed progress. The land has taken a shag of growth which blocks oncoming traffic with its six foot tall briar patch. It is a mixture of weeds and wild blackberries. Shh! It is a secret, but they are edible berries. A secret because apparently they have the same appeal to old white people as they would have on bears inYellowstone. So sometimes, if you are real quiet when you drive—don’t scare them or look them directly in the eyes—you might spot a pair feeding and frolicking in and out of the bushes with buckets and purple smears on their cheeks. Adorable! Occasionally they slap at each other’s buckets, but there is love in their eyes. I have not witnessed any breeding yet, but it is theorized the berries kind of make them drunk, so I would guess it is part of the ritual.
It would be nice, despite the berries and all the Nature, if that property wasn’t so conducive to bears. At the tunnel end you have graffiti and it is super urban. Down at this end, you got a forest with rusty rebar sticking out of it. Even unfinished, it needs a sidewalk. It needs a lot. It needs things that legally we are not capable of doing ourselves. Anyone could cut down the bushes, but not without a Right of Way permit. This is a Cabbagetown conundrum these days. It is impossible to get permission to do things that need done. For fun, go down to the Urban Design Committee and tell them you want to replace your rotten wooden siding for that new concrete board Hardiplank stuff you see all over. What a blast you will have! While you are there, tell them you are going to replace your old drafty window with a newly manufactured thermal insulated window. Ah, the good times you will remember forever! Need a shed to put your lawn mower in? Ask them at the UDC how easy it is to do that!
And if you are like me and you try to do a thing without permission, you might have the good luck of being turned in by someone you don’t even know, who just wants to make your life miserable because their experience downtown was that bad. One email to the right desk cost me a $1400. fine a couple years back for building a trellis for a plant in my yard. Thanks angry neighbor. You got me good.
Even without breaking an ordinance, your fellow tribesman can buffalo your life by just making a phone call. Funny story. My dog and close buddy of thirteen years, Devo, died last month. I really had a long and horrible (and expensive) experience watching my dog die. Here comes the funny part. In one of his final cancerous days of living, someone called Fulton County Animal Control and reported me for neglect because my dog was skinny. Instead of saying over my fence, “Hey, what’s up with your skinny dog?” someone instead went straight to Fulton County with a phone call. They had to come out and confirm he was dying and that we had sought a veterinarian’s care and that his shots were current. They would have taken him from my family had something as trivial as his rabies shot not been current. Thanks angry neighbor. You got me good. I have been laughing so hard ever since at your funnyness. I hope I don’t find out who you are so that we don’t have a laugh together about your joke. One of us might die! Of laughter.
George Berry’s Second Favorite Triangle
Cummin Landscape Supply also recently donated a stone to theThreePointsParkwhich has a plaque mounted to it thanking the families that donated the land for that park to the neighborhood. What Three Points Park, you say? The scrap of land left dangling between Estoria Street and Fulton Terrace is supposed to be a park, complete with sidewalks, benches, maybe a street lamp, historic markers mentioning the Fulton Cotton Mill and the Battle of Atlanta. It has been a long process that has been very frustrating to George Berry, the Cabbagetown resident who lives and works right on the property across the street, and the spearhead for the Park to exist. There is a long story behind every aspect of that land. George would love to tell you all about it, but I will give my own watered-down version. It boils down to the Cabbagetown conundrum I mentioned earlier. We can not get a permit to do anything on that property. We could donate it to the city and adopt it back, but it is not eligible for donating to the city unless it is bigger than an acre. To do any work on it, a contractor needs a right of way permit which means they can block traffic and work in the street if necessary since the work is all within twenty feet of the center of the streets that border it. (Incidentally, if you want to replace your mailbox post and it is within twenty feet of the center of the street, then you need to have 3 million dollars worth of insurance to get a right of way permit. Good luck). No machinery can work that land. No elevation changes can affect that land. Meanwhile, the widow of one of the guys mentioned on the plaque is 95 years old and she gave the triangle to the neighborhood. We have promised we would commemorate her late husband by having a ceremony of sorts to thank her for her donation. The plaque is there now, but nothing else. We can do nothing else.
George Berry’s dream for his end of Estoria is that we can switch the front door to Cabbagetown from the tunnel to the triangle. He imagines historic markers that welcome the traffic. He envisions benches where dog walkers could rest and chat, perhaps even drink from a fountain or shade oneself from the sun. Opposition which suggests people will sleep there seems far-fetched and distracting (after all, people aren’t sleeping in the main park and there are plenty of places where you could get away with that). Like all things, The Three Points Park would cost money to make, but funds seem to appear when the right people show the drawings and enthusiasm to investors. George points out that $1000. was donated already by the property owner on Gaskill on the opposite side.
In the meantime, George is spending a lot of energy and emotion on that triangle. As a student of his teachings (both philosophical and proletariat), I wish he would return full force to his mastery of woodworking. I think it not good for the soul to get so disappointed with the neighborhood, the people and its policies. Perhaps we can come together to ease these burdens. I can imagine a night when 100 of us show up with shovels and wheel barrows and we shave down that triangle in the dark of night in an hour. Everyone takes away a little dirt and we spread it around the hood. We spread grass seed and straw and we let it grow. No harm done. In this same clandestine way, sidewalks could be laid and benches could get erected. Like the “Welcome to Cabbagetown” sign that is there, it would not be clearly sanctioned by the city, but the city probably wouldn’t care. While we are there we could scare away the bears and chop back Bre’r Rabbit’s place down there at the end.
The Hogleg from the Dogleg can be reached for further guidance at 404) 822-4290.
