Author: Jim Garvey

They’re ugly. They’re prehistoric. They’re protected. And they’re on their way. Here come the sturgeon. There goes the neighborhood.   Well, that’s how some people react to a Corps of Engineers plan to restore habitat for the endangered fish by replacing the Lock and Dam near Bush Field with a rock weir and fish ladder to give the creatures access to Augusta’s front yard. Doing so would lower the pool at the city center by three feet, shrink the width of the Savannah River, and turn many expensive riverfront homes into much less expensive mud-front homes. To be fair,...

Historian Ed Cashin called him “the loneliest man in Augusta.” Every day he would climb the 110 steps up the steel tower past the huge bell to the cupola 90 feet above the intersection of Greene and Eighth Streets. There hour after hour, while buggies and pedestrians passed and kids played on the green far below, he would watch over the city for signs of fire. If he spotted telltale smoke or flames, he would ring that bell, whose gong boomed over the whole city. “I think there were eight wards in the City, then, watched over from the...

If you live in the Augusta-Aiken area, your yard was once a piece of a forest. Your lawn and garden were the domain of the longleaf pine.  That longleaf forest covered 90 million acres. It ran all the way from the sand hills to the sea, down to Florida, up to Virginia, and out to Texas. No roads cut through it, just Indian trails. Augusta and Aiken stand at the western edge of that longleaf forest, at the fall line where the coastal plain gives way to the hilly Piedmont, and the longleaf pines give way to hardwoods. You...

Photo courtesy of Mark Swanson   If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, the road to Broadway is paved with inspiration, perspiration, and their companions: trepidation, exasperation, desperation, determination, and if all goes well, celebration. Mark Swanson knows that road. Every block of it. Figuring 20 New York City blocks to the mile, Augusta’s Le Chat Noir is about 13,341 blocks off-Broadway. That’s where Mark Swanson started with his first full-length musical, Misconception, an edgy Christmas romp written for Le Chat Noir in 2011. But his second musical, A Scythe of Time, made a leap of 13,337...

My inner mountain man began to stir this summer. I didn’t even know I had an inner mountain man. But suddenly here he was, grunting and spitting, prodded to life by an invitation from a friend: would I like to hike a section of the Appalachian Trail in New Hampshire with him? It would include climbing Mount Washington—6,288 feet of the meanest mountain east of the Mississippi. Up to now I’d been pretty content with my sedentary life: 40 years teaching literature at Augusta University, writing, then in retirement acting a bit, generally playing one silly geezer or another....