A Visit to the Mecca of the South

Once upon a time, a few hundred million years ago, a large but unassuming granite rock decided to emerge from the earth. Mostly, it just sat there and let the elements expose more and more of its vast bulk while collecting rain and sunshine. Then, very recently, (geologically speaking), little organisms started crawling over it. At first this wasn't such a big deal until the little organisms started taking chunks out of the rock. Then, unbeknownst to the rock who was above such things, a little war broke out amongst the little crawly things who lived on the same land mass as the rock and one side lost. Things were quiet for another brief instant until one of the little organisms decided not to take the loss graciously and decided it would be a cool thing to carve out of the rock, a large mural honoring the men who got their asses kicked during that little war. Some 52 years later, using some really hot things, these organisms succeeded in creating a large piece of graffiti on the side of the rock. They also turned the surrounding land into a Memorial Park complete with a fake lake so that like-minded people could honor the graffiti depicting the primary heroes of their side of that little war. Thus, Stone Mountain Park was born: the Mecca of the South.

Stone Mountain, a rather inelegant and uncreative name by international standards, is probably one of the biggest focal points for those aggressive and resentful descendents of the Confederacy. In addition to being the only significant natural feature near Atlanta, the rock is a spectacular sight, even without the graffiti, and is visible from miles away. With the graffiti, a detailed carving showing Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis on horseback, it's still spectacular, depending on your perspective. It is a remarkable carving from an engineering point of view. The rock is still pretty darn big. Also, if you're an advocate of the Old South, the carving does do a good job of honoring the leaders of the Confederacy. If however, you're a nature lover, you'll probably take issue with carving up a wonder of nature (which has also happened a lot around the world in human history - humans can't seem to resist pissing on their surroundings to show that they've been somewhere). If you're not an advocate of the Old South, you might question the subject matter.

When I first visited Stone Mountain, it was mostly a memorial and historical park complete with little bits here and there about the War of Northern Aggression, little plaques commemorating each state, quotes about the nobility of state's rights and standing up for the principles of freedom, and many artifacts of the South which included a Gone With The Wind museum, a recreated plantation with period buildings, and a riverboat on the fake lake. There was a laser and fireworks show that had a climactic finish in the form of the Confederate Flag on the side of the mountain. To a West Coaster, like myself, I thought the whole thing was pretty funny and had the feel of sour grapes. After all, the South lost the war which, ironically, they shouldn't have engaged in. Of course, how were they to know that Lincoln would probably have kept the institution of slavery rather than risk splitting the Union? I appreciated the spin on which the secession was justified in the park itself. It wasn't so much that the institution of slavery was wrong (never really admitted anywhere in the park) but that the Southern states were justified in their actions because the Northern ones were seeking to change their way of life and that was un-American. Slavery and the Civil War cast big shadows down here. Stone Mountain is the biggest memorial that glorifies the Old South and it seems to be a requirement for any advocate of The Way Things Used To Be to travel here and pay their respects.

As you may have guessed, I'm not terribly fond of the park, the graffiti, or the message. Part of my dislike results from the fact that the park seems to reinforce those outdated and misplaced notions of Southern chivalry and the mythic Glory Days built on the backbone of slavery. I'm mostly annoyed that out of all the possible subjects that anyone could have carved on a large rock (Freedom, Love, Human achievement, War, God, etc) the people down here chose to honor the losing side that was fighting to preserve what was becoming an outdated institution. Again, as a relatively objective student of history, I understood why the Civil War happened. I also accept that, in their own way, these three men were what you would have called honorable and principled, especially by today's standards of moral relativism and political pragmatism. But to me, institutions like Stone Mountain (and issues like reparations to descendants of slaves) only prevent people from learning, maturing, and moving on with the times. What's remembered in the South through things like the park is not that some white guys decided to split the country in two to maintain an economic system built on a subjugated underclass because they felt they were morally right to do so. The message is that once upon a time, white people down here had it good and a bunch of uppity Yankees took that all away from them and that's why things still suck. Walking through the park on subsequent visits and looking at the enormous rock with its chunk of Confederate graffiti had the same appeal to me as standing naked in the middle of a blizzard running all my fingernails across a large chalkboard while Barney the Dinosaur dances around me singing that awful song.

Unfortunately, Atlanta doesn't have that much to offer to tourists. Inevitably, someone would visit me. Inevitably, they would ask to go see this place. Always the good host, I would take them, gritting my teeth and amusing myself by politely criticizing the park with clever invective throughout the trip. But after about 7 trips (2 of which, admittedly were around Halloween to listen to Southern ghost stories at night and were quite fun), I'd had enough. Never again, I said to myself, after the last trip which involved some incredibly awkward blind date with the niece of my mom's best friend's cousin and her friend from Taiwan (no joke).

Now not surprisingly, given the changes in national sensibilities since its completion in 1972, Stone Mountain has been having difficulties making ends meet and was facing dropping attendance each year. The park management grudgingly gave way on the format of the laser show after numerous public protests, replacing the fluttering Confederate flag finale with the American one (but leaving in the South will Rise segment where the statues come to life and the Civil War is recapped). The park also toned down its slightly aggressive pro-Confederacy message across the park to make it more palatable to non-Southern visitors. Eventually, in the face of rising debt, the management of the park was turned over to a newer and hipper company that set about the business of keeping the park afloat by adding some new attractions and some better advertising. Today, Stone Mountain is a Themed Memorial Park or maybe a Memorial Theme Park or maybe it's a Theme Park with a Memorial slant. It's hard to say. But what's inescapable is that it borrows heavily from Disneyland, the historical role model for all modern theme parks.

The new vision of Stone Mountain is a place that is fun for the entire family. For a parking fee ($7) and a nominal fee ($23 per person), you can enjoy the many attractions that the park has to offer. Why did I go back? Well, for one thing, my friend Angel was visiting me in Atlanta for the second time and had yet to see the Mecca of the South. However, she didn't feel that she had to go. No, the real reason was that I received this brochure that crowed about the park having the South's first 4D theater, the Great Barn, live Southern-style entertainment, and a new 30 million dollar complex that recreated life in the good ole days. I felt the same irresistible deadly curiosity that almost coerced me into seeing "From Kelly to Justin", the American Idol revival of the 60s Beach movies. It sounded too cheesy to pass up and I made plans to go when Angel arrived.

On a Sunday, Angel and I took our time getting to the park figuring that we didn't really need to see everything and that we didn't want to have to spend a horribly long time waiting for the fireworks / laser show finale at 9:30 PM. At about 2:00, we got our tickets and were fitted with some wristbands which would allow us entry into all the attractions. We skipped anything having to do with water. That meant no waterslides, no paddle boats, and no steamboat. Why? Well, everything was still open but the artificial lake was closed to swimmers due to elevated bacterial levels from the rainy season. I had no idea where the water slides dead ended, no desire to paddle in unsafe water, and have been on a paddlewheeler before - and not just at Disneyland. We saw but didn't make it to the Antique Car and Treasure Museum. That left, well, everything else.

One of the first things we saw besides the little brook designed "For Wading only' was a sign in front of Miss Katie's Sideboard Restaurant that gleefully pointed to the door and read "Intrance". I graciously assumed that this was placed their by rascally liberal Northerners trying to reinforce the media image that Southerners, as solely evidenced by their drawl-heavy dialect, are a bunch of ignorant, backwards hicks with sunburned necks. Unfortunately, these charming variations on King's English were scattered all over the place and much too consistent to be anything other than an intentional act to present the stereotype of the drawling ignorant Southerner to visitors. This was further reinforced by our first attraction, the 4D Theater.

What is a 4D theater anyhow? Remembering from simple geometry, certain Twilight Zone episodes, or, reading A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle, you might remember that the first dimension is a line, that 2D is a plane, and that 3D is the space that we perceive and exist in. The 4th dimension is supposed to be Time so a 4D Theater doesn't really make much sense since all movies already have a time component. 4D Theater is simply a sense-enhanced 3D movie. 4D is just a term used because it sounds both retro and cool. That's okay because it's right up there with "Cholesterol-free" Tomato Salsa as a catchy but ultimately knowledge-deprived marketing effort. The queuing area of the theater depicts a charming rustic setting with all the trappings. A video begins playing on the monitors showing some stereotypical, backwoods, grandfatherly-looking old man begins drawling about how Southerners sit around and spin tales and how he was taught the art by his grandfather. Then the scene transitions into a music video playing a corny and catchy tune (which is still @#&%* playing in my head) while showing the lovely vistas that are available in the South. Then the grandfather guy says that he's going to tell the story of how he learned how to tell stories and the doors open. The theater screen is framed by a swamp scene consisting of moss covered trees. Once everyone's seated and wearing their 3D glasses, the movie begins with a 3D title composed of 3D fireflies. The movie's characters are a boy and girl who are paddling in the middle of a dangerous swamp, in the middle of the night, to hear stories from their grandfather. On the way, they are menaced by an alligator and a large boa constrictor (native to Central and South America but possibly escaped from a traveling zoo). Why a swamp? Why night? Why an immigrant boa constrictor? And what kind of parents would allow their kids such liberties? Safety issues aside, it was a flimsy setup so that the completely Surprising and Untelegraphed 3D special effects will scare the younger audience members. All in all, the movie was pretty bad, as all 3D movies are, but probably entertaining to kids. Only 1 out of 3 smells worked (the hot chocolate but not popcorn or skunk), water sprayed on you, wind blew at the appropriate moments (although not at the gale-force levels that I wanted to feel while watching the 3D tornado), and the stories and acting were no worse than anything you might see on Disney's House of Mouse. The 4D theater was not mindbendingly horrible as, say, having to sit through a Pokemon movie but not worth a second trip. 3 on the Good Movie Scale and 7 on the Bad Movie Scale.

The next thing we did was to ride the 5 mile scenic railroad around the rock. Angel and I got into what I thought were going to be the last car but ended up being the first car after the engine. This proved to be an ironic bad choice as the whistle inconveniently blew during the juicier segments of the voice narration accompanying the ride that would have helped me to explain to her what I thought Stone Mountain was trying to represent. Instead, we only heard the history of the area and how the rock was graffitied. There was also the incredibly silly statistic about how if person who had ever lived took a quarter pound of rock for some large number of years that the rock would only have less than 1% of its total mass removed. My clothes weigh more than a 1/4 pound. The writers should have just recalculated this number using the entire estimated mass of the rock over a 100 year period for a more impressive statistic. Why they chose a quarter pound is beyond me except that maybe they figured your average tourist has no conception of mass except in a hamburger. Now back in the 70's, they introduced the Bolin Brothers, Alf and Ralf, who would rob the train. This was discontinued briefly then revived, then discontinued. In their place is The Battle of Buzzard Creek which was so horrific that it bears a little bit of explaining. At some point, the train slows to a stop in front of the set of a Western town. You can tell that it's a set because most of the buildings only have 2D presentations and could have benefited from some 4D treatments. A guy in a Stetson hat, white shirt and leather pants sets fake dynamite to The Bank and blows the door open. A girl in a Stetson hat, white shirt and leather pants but wearing a Sheriff's star comes out of another building. Together they begin a skit that can only be generously described as a summer camp improv mimicking a Bugs Bunny - Yosemite Sam showdown. The jokes were not good as was evidenced by the deadening silence when the guy tried to evoke the IRS as a thing of ridicule. The special effects were too cheap to rise to the level of "campy". The dialogue.... well, my new version of a private hell is having to ride that railroad eternally, watching that skit over and over again. I can only imagine how the poor actors feel and wonder what they had done in the park to merit such punishment. Later at the next stop, which was Confederate Memorial Hall being remodeled as an environmental education center, the people in the first two cars were told that they couldn't exit from there to take the hiking trail up Stone Mountain due to safety reasons and that they had to ride the train again but from the middle cars to disembark. Did I mention that the front row seats to Battle of Buzzard Creek are the center cars of the train? We felt very sorry for those people who had to ride the train again and wondered why someone didn't say something at the Crossroads train station.

After we escaped the train, we took a leisurely stroll around Crossroads. Outside of stands selling things like those infernal Dipping Dots, that fake and overpriced "Space Age" ice cream novelty, the town is actually pretty interesting. There were several crafts shops that had people blowing glass, forging iron, making candles, and so on. The prices seemed to be mostly reasonable and the goods were nice. Of course, being the non-materialistic sorts, these trinkets were mostly lost on us but were still fun to look at. There were also live performances of music and humor enacted by people who were more competent than their Buzzard Creek colleagues. Then there was stuff like "Stoney the Talking Fountain" that talked at certain times during the day while spraying water at bystanders. We can only hope that it was named for being a stone fountain and not for Stonewall Jackson. Jackson would probably be fuming from the Great Beyond at having gone to the trouble of dying in the War of Northern Aggression for state's rights only to be caricatured on the face of a fountain that spits water at giggling children. In spite of these occasional flops, I found Crossroads to be fairly well designed and a nice roaming area.

Our next stop was The Great Barn, home of "the world's coolest computer game". We passed a place where you could buy a bag of dirt to pan for iron pyrite in a sluice. In front of the Barn were some cool water devices including one of my favorite things, the collaborative water fountain. One person activated the spout for the other person and vice versa. The Great Barn is the most brilliant thing that I've seen in a while. It's essentially a devilishly clever structure designed to drain energy from little children, presumably to make them more manageable for their parents towards the evening. Of course, we didn't realize this at first. I glanced at some of the rules including the bit that said "Fruit bruises very easily and shouldn't be thrown." The attendant saw our wristbands and was about to wave us through when I asked what the fuss was about. She looked us over, saw that we weren't kids, and politely asked, "You want to play the game?" "Well, of course," I replied. We were outfitted with wristbands and directed to monitors where we supplied fake names and addresses for the marketing database before walking into the main room. The Great Barn's theme is ostensibly one of being a gigantic harvest sorter. Foam fruits representing oranges, peaches, plums, green apples, and red apples were in abundance everywhere on the first floor. You got a harvest sack and filled it with foam fruit. Then at various stations, you had to supply 4 apples or maybe 6 peaches or maybe you had to move 6 pieces of fruit up a conveyor belt. In return, your account would be awarded some points. There are also rope ladders that you use to reach the upper levels, slides to go back down to the main level for more fruit, and air guns to load with fruit and shoot at people. I will admit to firing fruit at random people through one of these guns but stopped after experiencing a moderate feeling of guilt and remorse after scoring my only hit on a 7-year old girl (who didn't even notice). Angel, wiser and more sensible, had seen the real purpose of the Great Barn and wasn't willing to have her energy drained needlessly by these mindless devices. She patiently followed me from machine to machine, occasionally handing me the correct fruit depending on the current requirements, as I attacked each working device with an engineer's enthusiasm. Many of the machines stood broken and clogged, overwhelmed by thousands of enthusiastic children. Clearly, they were designed by engineers ignorant of the creatively destructive impulses of inexhaustible little kids. Finally, we climbed the last cargo net to the 4th floor where I checked my impressive score of 1450 points. At least, I was impressed until a 9 year old boy put his wristband over the same machine to display a score of 14,950 points. Feeling old and just too darn grown up, I turned in the rest of my fruit (dumped them randomly over the railing to seed the chaos on the main floor) and took the spiral slide down to the beginning. I liked the Great Barn a lot although at this point in my life I would probably have much more fun designing more imaginative and rugged fruit sorters than playing on them.

Since we had no desire to ride the train back to hike the walking trail, we took the skylift to the top of the rock. It was also late afternoon and we wanted to leave enough time to eat before getting to the lawn in front of the carving for the laser show. The ride to the top was fairly uneventful and provided a nice view of the graffiti while a narrator talked for what seemed like the umpteenth time about how workers would take refuge in the mouth of one of the horses during rain. We walked around the rock for a while and took in the view. I noticed off to the right (NE) a large formation of clouds. Now earlier in the day, the Weather Channel had announced unequivocally that there was only a small chance of rain. My head told me those were thunderstorms and I mentioned this to Angel. Unfortunately, my head wasn't really working very well that day and this proved to be problematic later.

So far, we were having a pretty idyllic day. Stone Mountain didn't appear to be anything other than a nice place to bring the family as opposed to the bit of Confederate propaganda that it was supposed to be. I didn't want Angel to leave with the wrong impression and made one last feeble attempt to demonstrate this by taking Angel down the sides of the lawn where the state plaques were. When we reached the proper memorial area where statues stood solemnly in state over various quotes that justified the Southern Secession, we discovered that both areas had been roped off for safety reasons due to fireworks. Foiled again! I didn't understand why they closed it off during the day except, possibly, it was easier than having to make sure that the safety areas were set up every day.

The plan was to walk back to the car, play a round of miniature golf on the course that we saw on the way over, and retrieve the folding chairs from the trunk. One of my big gripes about Atlanta is that it lacks good miniature golf courses. The ones in the city are mostly a couple steps up in aesthetics, creativity, and overall entertainment from playing croquet in your own backyard, except that there's usually no waiting in your own backyard. In addition to being sparse and awful, the course designers down here seem to enjoy using red brick to line the walls of the green. Brick is one of the least contiguous building materials in existence. In miniature golf, where it's all about resurrecting those high school geometry proofs and Newtonian physics to create that hole-in-one bank shot, the golfer prefers not to have to deal with unexpected variability. To me, miniature golf should have funny themes, large fantasy structures, water hazards, and difficult hole placements like the tops of volcanoes. Mini-golf at Stone Mountain was more like miniature miniature golf or mini-me golf. It had two 18 hole courses, crammed into a 1/3 of an acre. All the courses were lined with red brick and had barriers and hazards constructed from piping and aluminum siding. The course cards didn't even bother indicating the Par scores for each hole. What was the point? Of course, since we had the wristbands, the games were free with general admission and we were just killing time anyhow. We settled in behind what could have been stunt doubles of the Weasly family from Harry Potter: a redheaded father and 3 redheaded sons who seemed to be 13 (and a very moody 13 at that), 10, and 8. Our main amusement value was watching how the father tried to offer both encouragement and well-meaning advice to each boy, turning what should have just been fun into a painful exercise of hitting the ball a lot. In between shots on the boring courses, I made comments about how I really missed playing on good miniature golf courses. Angel made the positive observation that the designers did a really good job with being creative. She hypothesized that they were probably only given so much land, Astroturf, cement, bricks, and aluminum to build 36 holes. I was impressed by this observation and was willing to forgive the course until my ball dully thudded on one of the pathetic aluminum barriers causing my ball to drift off to a forlorn corner of the green. We decided that one round of golf was more than enough and turned in our putters.

Our next stop was the Antebellum Plantation. Now this, admittedly, is one of my favorite stops in Stone Mountain and almost redeems the place. Buildings built during the 1800s were relocated from all over the South and placed here to recreate what life on a Southern Plantation would look like - down to the slave cabins and smokehouses. Occasionally, some actors dressed in period clothing would tell you about how life used to be. In spite of the addition of a petting zoo to entertain the children (did Southerners really raise Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs?), it's a place where a visitor might actually learn something about Southern and colonial history. Unfortunately, the place is as boring as dirt. Sure, there are some succinct museum style descriptions of the artifacts and furniture in each room with brief explanations of what role they might have played. But the plantation has no real interaction or engagement here which is very unfortunate. This place is dying to be made into either a real entertainment area or a real education one. Right now, it's only serving to suck income from the rest of the park for air conditioning and groundskeeping costs. Still, it's worth at least one visit.

A trip to the Southern Mecca requires a Southern meal and this brings us to the one thing that I would not mind repeating at Stone Mountain. We made our way back into Crossroads and went into the Intrance of Miss Katie's Sideboard. We were told that it would take 40 minutes for a table but were too tired to argue. It took less than that because a lot of people didn't bother to wait. The restaurant is modeled to look like a luxurious boarding house from the 1800s, it is staffed with employees dressed in period clothing and decorated by old photographs and period trinkets. The interior has a large handicapped access ramp that leads to a second story landing. Off to the right, you can see a fake upper floor scaled to 1/3 perspective. While reading the menu's selection of very Southern cuisine, I read something about hand tossed rolls. This didn't make any sense to either of us until we had placed our orders of fried chicken and pulled BBQ pork. I noticed that the table next to us had four girls who were getting very excited about something. Suddenly a dinner roll came flying down the room from the second floor landing. We looked up and saw our waitress flinging dinner rolls to that table. It took several dropped rolls but finally each of the girls had their dinner roll. Our waitress looked at our table and asked if we wanted some. To my credit, I caught both of our rolls on the first try. Later, she dropped off (not thrown) some sweet potato fries which are part of the restaurants courtesy appetizers which include fried pickles and corn fritters (which we didn't see). All in all, it was a great restaurant (fair food, fair price) which was definitely better than I expected given everything else that we had seen. It was certainly better food that you'd get at a big theme park like Walt Disney World or a Six Flags. Of course, I started wondering about the business model. Nothing that I had seen today would compel me to ever pay full price for admission again. Yet everything in Crossroads seemed dependent on tourists. After all, no one in their right mind would pay $23 just to go to a restaurant and shop to spend more money. This isn't some Renaissance Faire, after all. I asked the waitress this and she informed us that the park management was being deceptive by requiring that people have wristbands before entering the Crossroads area. No admission is required to hang around the town. It's only for the main attractions. If you feel compelled to go to Stone Mountain yourself even after reading this, you can sneak into Crossroads by way of the lawn by the train station.

After dinner, we picked up our chairs and made our way to the lawn in front of the graffitied surface of the rock. Unfortunately the spot we found placed us downwind from three chain-smoking pilgrims doing their best to represent the worst stereotypes of the poor white Southerner. As we sat there and waited for the show to begin, I heard a low bass rumble off in the distance. My brain tried feebly to tell me something again but I wasn't listening. A couple drops of rain fell and people began to leave the lawn. At last, the show started. Or, at least, the pre-show. We sat through various laser and slide show advertisements for many of Atlanta's corporate giants, textured by the grim faces of Lee, Davis, and Jackson. This lasted a long time. Angel wondered whether that was kind of disrespectful. This thought occupied me for a while as I calculated surface area to see whether you could have achieved the same effect by beaming advertisements around the stone figures. Finally the real show started titled, "A Night on Stone Mountain" with the opening strains of Mussorgsky's "Night on Bare Mountain" and accented by real thunder. It also begin to drizzle slightly. More people were starting to leave. Angel and I were made of sterner stuff and stayed. After all, we had suffered the entire day for this finale and weren't about to be scared off by a little rain. The first number was a laser music video playing Pink's "Get this Party Started" with the back story taking place in outer space. This was followed by a country song about a boy and girl. Then, to light applause and cheering, the chords of the Charlie Daniels Band playing "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" began. As long as we're on this topic, I'd like to mention that the idea of a gold fiddle is a pretty stupid one since the gold frame would be a pretty awful sound conductor and gold strings lack the tension-carrying ability necessary for good vibrations. But I guess winning a useless instrument beats losing your soul and you could always melt it down to buy a better instrument - like a gold harmonica. This was followed by the beginnings of a montage of songs paying homage to the Southern States. I figured, this was it. After the statues came to life and the Civil War recreated, I could prove to Angel that my dislike of this seemingly harmless family vacation spot was justified. The laser display moved on to Alabama and "Sweet Home Alabama" started playing, accompanied by a Southern thunderstorm. Lightning flashed, thunder boomed, and the skies simply opened up and released a torrential deluge. Everyone around us began running for the parking lots. The laser show stopped with the ensuing panic. Angel and I just sat there and absorbed water. I couldn't believe the timing. Angel couldn't stop laughing. The thought that was bouncing about my brain finally found an audience, "Don't leave the umbrella in the trunk. It's going to rain." We just sat there in the downpour for the next 10 minutes or so. Finally, unable to take any more irony or water, we picked up our things. I used one of the chairs as a makeshift umbrella to cover us as we waded through the rushing water, past the train, through Crossroads, past the 4D theater, past the Wading Area (now a small rapid), up the hill towards the Intrance, and the car as we made our escape from the Mecca of the South.