Fatlanta

They used to call it Hotlanta. Maybe still do. I know that .38 Special had a song by that name some years back. After five days in metro Atlanta, during which I put about 400 miles on my car, I have another name for it: Fatlanta. When I first moved there in the 1970s, the metro area was five counties. Last time I checked, it was 15. Could be more by now, for all I know. I can tell people I moved my horse to "Atlanta," but actually he is two counties north of Atlanta, in a rural area at the edge of the mountains. And that "rural" area is crammed with new subdivisions, shopping centers, and traffic, traffic, traffic.

Georgia Highway 20 (not to be confused with Interstate 20) is a two-lane, rural highway that snakes its way along a curving and hilly path east to west across the north metro area, probably 25 miles or so north of I-285, the infamous Perimeter around the city. I discovered, as I tried to get to my horse's new home after dark on Friday night, that 18-wheelers are using Ga. 20 as a bypass to get from I-85 to I-75. When I left Fatlanta for south Louisiana in 2000, there was talk of building a new highway, to be called the "Outer Perimeter," about 20 miles outside of I-285. The last I heard, the feds were balking at providing funding because Fatlanta couldn't meet air quality standards because it had too many cars and too many roads already. The federal government was willing to fund bike trails, but not another interstate.

Bike trails! Well, that's nice. But you can't bike your way across a 15-county metro area as an alternate form of transportation to a car. Not even public transit works well with that kind of sprawl. So we have 18-wheelers creating their own outer perimeter on a two-lane state highway. I don't know what the current status is on the Proposed Outer Perimeter (although I am sure I could find out with a Google search), but I do know that as of right now, it's not built.

And then I talked with a friend who now lives in southern California, and he told me his commute to work was 60 miles one way. (He rides in a van pool.) Okay, maybe Fatlanta isn't quite that big -- yet. But there's a reason they stopped calling it New York of the South and started calling it L.A. of the South.

My friends hope I will move back to Fatlanta. Frankly, it makes sense. There are jobs there. The economy is doing well. You can buy all sorts of exotic things in the supermarkets. (I still can't get over the display in one store that dispenses, oh, half a dozen or more different flavors of Jelly Belly jelly beans. Coffee dispensers, yeah, we have them in New Orleans. And B.K., we had grain dispensers in Whole Foods, where you could buy bulgar wheat and golden flaxseed and all sorts of things in bulk. A.K., well, Whole Foods is taking orders over the phone for pickup, but the stores are still closed.)

But New Orleans is my home. And that's a powerful reason to stay.

More on that later.

Pastor Kathy