Living in a Shrinking World

A good friend and I played golf in Hilton Head, South Carolina yesterday. We were paired up by the starter with Clive and Gwen, a nice married couple from Toronto. And they convinced me that it really is a “small, small, world.”

There was a time when foreign countries, like far-off and exotic Canada, might as well be alien worlds. And expeditions into remote places like the Arctic, the Amazon jungle, Mount Everest, or the African wilderness were major and significant events—think Columbus, Sir Edmund Hillary, David Livingstone, Ernest Shackleton, or Bear Grylls from Man vs. Wild. Weeks or months later, the explorers would emerge, or not, bearing tales or images of strange lands, exotic animals, and bare-breasted natives. Today, it seems that all the bare-breasted natives are wearing Gap clothes and have probably been witnessed to by enough missionaries to fill a decent-sized Methodist Church. And millions of people now know how to bait a crab trap in freezing Alaskan seas or learn just what truly creeps out Mike Rowe. And that’s where Clive and Gwen come in.

Throughout yesterday’s round of golf, which stretched to four-and-a-half hours, Clive and Gwen were amazed by the critters around the course. Despite National Geographic Explorer and twenty-four hours of Animal Planet, seeing an alligator live was captivating. I'm sure I would have felt the same way if a moose had come leaping out of a bunker. They took more photos than a busload of Japanese tourists. And then asked, “Do you watch Dirty Jobs? Have you seen the episode with the alligator farm? Has Mike Rowe ever been to a town near you?”

Seconds later, Clive and Gwen found out that Gray, Georgia, my home town, was the home of Old Clinton Barbecue, the restaurant where Mike Rowe cleaned the smoker in the 2008 season of Dirty Jobs. It’s a landmark. And it has the best barbeque in Georgia—at least that’s what the sign says, and I believe everything I read. Don’t you?

I took this shot of Old Clinton Barbeque last year for a community brochure. I’m sharing it with you so that like Clive and Gwen, you too can relive the memories of Mike in the smoker. It will probably never make the pages of National Geographic. But thanks to the internet and modern explorers like Mike, the world seems just a little smaller.