Today was the peak day for leaf color in the Georgia Mountains – 30 years ago

Is Hurricane Helane the new norm?

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect & City Planner

This year the peak leaf color in the Southern Appalachians will be almost a month later than in 1994. Climate change is real! However, like so many other aspects of life here in the United States, I am observing with horror how quickly contemporary Americans are being brainwashed to believe that what was formally unthinkable is now the norm.

Above is a photo of a mountain near where I live now, made on October 15, 1994. That same mountain this morning is as green as it was in August. A legion of Southern Appalachian towns still hold their “Fall Leaf Festivals” in the middle of October, but they have had to change the names of their festivities, while urging tourists, “Y’all come back up in about three or four weeks.”

From 1985 until a few years into the Clinton Administration, Robert Hanssen was both a principal administrator within the FBI Counter-Intelligence Division and Russia’s most important agent in the USA. He was Susan’s ultimate boss. Clinton’s appointees were immediately suspicious of Hanssen, but initially assumed that he was a mole for ultra-conservative politicians, Little-by-little they realized that he was a traitor. Hanssen is the probable reason that so many covert federal agents were killed in the Shenandoah Valley, while I was living there.

While working intensely on virtual reality technology that will raise the portrayal of historic and ancient communities to a whole new level. I am inserting from time to time essays on relatively recent history.

I have noticed that most are not as popular as wandering through North America 500 to 5,000 years ago. However, American society is current facing a multi-headed crisis as potentially lethal as when the Huns entered the Roman Empire around 400 AD. Analyzing history enables us to understand how we got here. Real history, indeed, is the process of national and regional events interweaving with our own personal experiences. It is by living our lives on this Earth that we create new history.

For example, twenty years ago officials of the Muscogee-Creek Nation were trying to make my mother’s family citizens, so I could be hired as the MCN’s official agent in the Southeast. Her family had been recognized as legally Creek Indians in the 1930s by the BIA, but the trouble was that my only close federally-recognized relatives in Oklahoma and Florida had joined either the Choctaw or Seminole tribes, when the Five Civilized Tribes were reconstituted in the late 1970s! Fast forward twenty years and the political extremists in Ocmulgee, OK, have demonized me as “a White man trying to steal Muskogee history.”

March 16, 1993 – The Great Winter Hurricane

Background

In mid-March 1993 a “winter hurricane” devastated the Southeast and New England. The roofs of factories in Georgia collapsed from the snow load. Hundreds of campers in the Appalachians were trapped, wearing short sleeves. We had 38 inches of snow, 15 feet deep drifts, sub-zero temps and 55 mph winds on our farm in the Shenandoah Valley. My tractor, under a shed, was covered in snow for almost two weeks. Hundred feet high waves sank fishing trawlers off the coast of New England.

If you have not read The Shenandoah Chronicles . . . for most or all of my former marriage, my Caucasian wife, while pretending to be a Fundamentalist Christian, had been a member of a clandestine cult, which believed that women should rule the world and only a few men should be kept around as slaves. This eventually led to me being stuck at my parents house in suburban Atlanta after Easter weekend in early April 1993.

After persuading me to visit my parents, my estranged wife cleaned out the bank accounts, ran up the credit cards to the limit and cancelled my cellular phone account. In seeking a temporary separation judgment the next week, she told the judge that I had cleaned out our cash, left without warning and was living with an older woman in the suburbs of Atlanta. She told our friends and National Park Service Director, Roger Kennedy, that I had suddenly disappeared on Good Friday and that she didn’t know where I was. Knowing that she had been involved with her married principal for seven years, (plus some other people), her excuse led them to think that she had paid for me to be murdered.

I was in financial straits and very lonely for many months, but first was hired as Director of Design for a architecture firm in Midtown Atlanta then was appointed Principal Planner of Cobb County, GA.

I hated working for Cobb County. Despite adopting the Liberty Bell as its logo, the new people in charge in fact, were creating a police state, within the progressive State of Georgia. There was incessant spying on employees, lying and bullying. However, I needed the money to get on my feet, so I could get back to the Shenandoah Valley.

I designed the original Peachtree City Path System in 1973!

In the meantime, Susan Karlson appeared on a bicycle, while I was riding my bike on the Peachtree City path system. We had worked together in the summer of 1991. We were supposed to fake having an affair, so I could transmit intel from honest cops and deputies in the Shenandoah Valley. She would carry the intel to the wife of an FBI agent, living in Manassas, VA. Her husband then would deliver the intel to the US Justice Dept. Task Force on State and Government Corruption in Downtown Washington, DC. Very soon, (Oops!) we were having to fake having an fake affair.

The only arguments that Susan and I had during a 15 year period of on and off again togetherness was at the beginning. She was a very healthy 26 and being a good lawyer, proved that according to the Old and New Testaments, I was single in the eyes of God.

I balked at going to the logical conclusion for several weeks . . . which made Miss Susan very frustrated and even more angry. Once that conflict was settled to her point of view, we got along like old time friends. Then, she received a big promotion in the FBI for the investigation. My name was specifically mentioned in the last paragraph of her citation . . . urging us to keep on working together. Then suddenly, she was transferred to the Atlanta Regional Office. I did not see her for a year and a half.

Susan was in a covert assignment, so she couldn’t tell me where she lived or what she was doing, but offered herself as a “friend with benefits” until a more traditional woman could appear on the scene. She did suggest that we attend a Singles Sunday School class and worship services at Roswell United Methodist Church. She lived somewhere near there and officially owned a real estate law firm in East Cobb. She made no effort to lose her Swedish accent, because that helped her “cover.”

By mid-1994, Susan had failed miserably at being just a casual friend with benefits. We had always been in love since the summer of 1991. On the second time we met in Virginia, she had performed an ancient Hebrew marriage ceremony with me in my front pasture! Alas, within a few months after then, she was transferred to Atlanta.

1994 – While watching the movie, “Forrest Gump,” Susan admitted that she loved me.

Eventually, I figured out that my job with Cobb County was no accident. Susan was fluent in Russian and was supposed to infiltrate a 1st and 2nd generation web of Russian spies in eastern Cobb County and Roswell. The original spies had been planted by Stalin to infiltrate the management and workers at the Bell Bomber then Lockheed Aircraft Plant. Several of the spy families were active members of Roswell United Methodist. Some were in our Singles Sunday School Class.

Long ago they had changed their names and mastered Southern accents. While secretly Communists, they had been early members of the John Birch Society in Cobb County and then the ultra-right Newt Gingrich wing of the Republican Party. Because North Metro Atlanta was growing so fast, it was easy for the reborn Georgia Crackers to be accepted by everyone as old time Georgia families.

After the Soviet Union fell, they flipped 180 degrees and became ardent Fascists. They also made contacts with the Italian Mafia and Russian Mafia in New Jersey. Some crypto-Russian spies in the Roswell-East Cobb Area married New Jersey wives to facilitate the movement of the Mafia into Cobb County and then Cartersville, GA, immediately to the north.

My boss, the Community Development Director of Cobb County, was in bed with the Mafia and unknowingly, the Russian FSB. His father was Mayor of Peachtree City, GA and in the same situation.

Susan turned 29 in July 1994. She could not get married or even live with a man, unless she wanted to quit her job and then move to another part of the USA with a different name. However, her biological clock was ticking. That explains the events, which followed

Periodically, I was invited to “political” social events in which powerful Republican Congressmen Newt Gingrich and Bob Barr were usually in attendance. The Boss Hogs of Northwest Georgia were contemptuous of the blue collar voters, who put them in power.

Ginrich was fond of saying, “These Georgians are so stupid . . . I could tell them that the Librul, Tax and Spend Democrats in Washington had passed a law saying that they couldn’t exercise their 2nd amendment rights to shoot themselves in the head. Over half of ’em would go straight home and put a gun to their head and pull the trigger, praising Lord Jesus for inventing guns.”

It came as no surprise to me that after Speaker of the House Gingrich began an extra-marital relationship with one of his college interns, he never lived in Georgia again. To be fair, though, after Gingrich asked his second wife for a divorce as she was dying of cancer in a hospital, he did eventually make the young intern, his third wife.

Several crypto-Russian spies were always at these parties. They were now getting wealthy from real estate developments, funded by organized crime, so probably were receiving little financial support from Moscow. Susan, the beautiful Swedish “real estate lawyer” was at my side at these parties. Inevitably, one or more of the crypto-Russians would hire her for a real estate closing.

October 15, 1994 – On Oct. 15, 2024 the trees are green in Dahlonega

The weather was gorgeous . . . absolutely perfect in October 1994. For the first time, there were no frosts that month. Susan suggested that I take Friday the 14th off as comp time and be her guest for a romantic weekend. We would drive up to Ellijay in her Volvo for the Apple Festival and pick some apples then drive over to Amicalola Falls and kiss under the cascades. We would stay at the Amicalola Lodge then drive over to Dahlonega for the Fall Leaf Festival then spend the night at a new resort motel near Dahlonega. On Sunday, we could party at Helen’s Octoberfest then cuddle at the new state park at Tallulah Gorge, before returning home to Roswell.

On December 4, 1994 Susan strangely asked that we meet for breakfast before going to Sunday School. Normally, we would meet at church and not sit together in Sunday School, so no one would know that we were an item.

Over a Shoney’s breakfast buffet, Susan announced that we could not see each other for at least two years, maybe forever. She didn’t tell me that she was pregnant. She added that she would point out a pretty Sumatran musician, who would be a nurturing girlfriend for me. The Caucasian women in the class ignored her, but she was really a class above them.

Susan stopped coming to church, but from time to time, would pass by me on an expressway, honking, smiling and waving. One time, the Sumatran lady, left her keys, pocketbook and cell phone in her car, while we were eating at a barbecue restaurant in Dawsonville, GA. Susan appeared out of nowhere, wearing a pony tail and big sun glasses. She called the lock smith for us then disappeared on the highway, going to Gainesville.

When the Sumatran lady dumped me 2 1/2 years later, because I didn’t make enough money to fulfill her dreams, Susan was instantly back in my arms. However, she now had a woman’s figure . . . if you know what I mean.

What we thought was an unusual October in 1994, became the new norm. In early October 1995, Hurricane Opal devastated the Georgia Mountains. Whoever heard of a hurricane in the Appalachian Mountains?

Now, almost every year, a hurricane causes flooding somewhere in the Southern Highlands. Each year since the great Winter Hurricane of 1993, the peak time for leaf color has been a day or two later, while the weather, in general, has become more and more typified by violent extremes.

That appears to be the new norm.