Chattahoochee River: The Flow of Fulton

Lyrics

[Intro]

Before the county line was drawn.
Before the city had a name.
There was the water, moving south.

[Verse 1]
The map calls it the western edge.
A sharp, convenient ink-stroke separating Fulton from Cobb.
But the real line is this red-brown water.
Carrying mountain cold down from the bottom of Buford Dam.
Cold enough for trout to live.
A mountain fish, surprised to be swimming through Georgia clay.
Past the roots of river birches, past the manicured lawns that stop just short of the floodplain.

[Chorus]
They call it the Chattahoochee.
The slow, unarguable boundary.
It carries no deeds, no charters of incorporation.
It doesn't recognize the yard signs from 2005.
It just wears down the stone.
And keeps on going south.

[Verse 2]
There are ghosts on this water.
The shadows of dugout canoes, silent as the fog that rises on a summer morning.
Then the splash of a bright yellow kayak paddle.
A fisherman casts a line from the bank, hoping for that cold-water trout.
Generations of footprints washed away with every heavy rain.
The river holds no memory for them.
Only the silt.

[Bridge]
At Morgan Falls, we built a wall.
Told the water to wait.
And for a while, it does.
It pools there, patient, a long quiet breath called Bull Sluice Lake.
Glassy surface for the rowing clubs.
But on the other side of the concrete, it remembers its job.
It falls, and churns, and forgets the wall was ever there.

[Chorus]
They call it the Chattahoochee.
The slow, unarguable boundary.
It carries no deeds, no charters of incorporation.
It doesn't recognize the yard signs from 2005.
It just wears down the stone.
And keeps on going south.

[Outro]
From the Blue Ridge, it comes.
On its way to the Gulf.
A long story, told in a language of erosion.
The only true contour.
The only line that matters.