I had six days off the bike ahead of me. After the battery drama, the brake drama, the front suspension drama, and a thousand miles of South Georgia heat, bugs, and back roads, being off the bike sounded less like a sentence and more like a vacation.

I thought about all the what ifs that got lobbed at D three years ago, when he told us he was moving here. What if Republicans get in power at every level? What if you lose every protection California gives you? The questions just kept coming. I’m not going to pretend those were unreasonable questions at the time. But I also hadn’t spent much time in Alabama, and somewhere between the steel and the people, those old questions started feeling like they belonged to a version of this place that was never quite accurate.

Vulcan

Birmingham puts its history right out in the open, fifty-six feet tall, on top of a mountain. You don’t have to go looking for the steel-town story here — Vulcan tells it to you from a mile away.

He’s the largest cast iron statue in the world, cast right here in Birmingham from local iron and shipped to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis as the city’s whole pitch to the country: look what we can make. Spear in one hand, hammer in the other, the Roman god of the forge standing watch over the mountain his own raw material came out of. Storm clouds rolled in low and heavy while we were up there, and Vulcan didn’t seem to notice — looked just as commanding with weather bearing down on him as he had from the ground looking up.

The tower itself is unapologetic Art Deco, old stone stairwell on one side, glass elevator on the other — old bones, new joints. At the top, the walkway rattled my senses more than I expected: the floor out there is see-through, perforated steel grating with a clean shot straight down a couple hundred feet to the parking lot. The view tells you most of what you need to know about the city itself — large but not huge, UAB’s red brick dominating the skyline the way you’d expect from Alabama’s largest employer and a genuinely world-class medical research institution, older homes with that distinct regional style still dotted between the trees, refusing to get fully absorbed into anything. Out past downtown, the land rolls the same way it does in North Georgia — same red clay, same gentle hills — just without the Appalachian backbone.

Inside the base, a museum makes the steel-town case better than any plaque could: a wall stacked floor to ceiling with cast iron pieces — wheels, gears, pipes, fittings — everything this city used to make and ship out across the country. I haven’t spent much time in a city this deeply invested in manufacturing, and that wall is the whole argument in one frame.

A Burger, a Drink, and a Beer

Dinner one night was Jack Brown’s Joint — a cheeseburger and mac and cheese combo called the Greg Brady that didn’t survive long enough for a clean photo. It was the kind of meal where the photo exists purely as evidence that it happened, not as a document of what it looked like. It was awesome. Everything in me recommends it other than my cholesterol.

Somewhere in there, somebody handed me a shot of Underberg — that strange little German bitters bottle wrapped in paper, the kind of thing Birmingham bars apparently keep on hand for settling a heavy meal. I genuinely don’t remember the reasoning behind it that night. I photographed it because some instinct told me to, and that instinct was apparently not attached to a story worth keeping. I drank it. It tasted like bitters. Life went on.

Billies Tavern is one of the hangouts, the kind of place that announces itself with a beat-up neon BEVERAGES arrow out front, string lights overhead, and a wall of license plates that’s been collecting for longer than I want to guess. D, his partner, and I met up with a couple of friends and settled in for a night that didn’t have anywhere in particular to be.

Memorial Day rolled around and we didn’t have a real plan. With Google Maps in hand, we ended up at Good People Brewing almost by accident. I have to say it: I love, love, love that yellow truck logo. By that point I almost didn’t care about the beer. I picked up a t-shirt and a tin sign for the garage before we left. The beer turned out to be pretty good too.

A Pool Party and a Squall Line

D had us out to a pool party with his friends over the weekend, and I ended up in conversation with three genuinely interesting people in the space of one afternoon. At one point I found myself talking to a wildfire photojournalist who’d moved to Birmingham from Redding, California, and wanted to point his 300mm lens at me on the motorcycle. Later, a thirty-year-old transplant from Tuscaloosa told me about escaping the gravity of the University of Alabama for a bigger city. Then I spent the better part of an hour with an IT leader and fellow AI nerd, going deep on workplace use cases and where all of this is headed — the kind of conversation that usually finds me at a Bay Area meetup, not a pool party in Alabama.

That’s the part that actually stuck with me. It felt easy to fit in here. That’s a signal I don’t take lightly.

I’ve noticed that signal repeatedly across the South on this trip, actually — that ease of just being let into a conversation, a group, a porch, without having to perform your way in first. It’s a thing I find myself hunting for and not always finding back west, where we’re so locked into achievement, innovation, and delivery that people, community, and context end up further down the list than they probably should.

That’s the thing nobody mentions about a city like this from two thousand miles away — it’s not one thing. It’s not the South I left thirty years ago, frozen in amber. It’s old friends and newcomers, wildfire photographers and tech workers, all floating in the same pool on a Saturday, all somehow easy to talk to.

The pool party ended the way Southern summer afternoons dramatically end: a squall line came ripping through with almost no warning, dirt visibly blowing through the air as the front bore down on us. One thing I’m learning about being this far north in Alabama — the rain here doesn’t linger the way it threatens to. It hits hard and it’s usually over fast. A few days later I caught a quieter version of the same thing from inside the house, just watching rain come down on the lawn while I talked myself out of a ride. I stayed put instead.

Honestly, landing in Birmingham during such a wet stretch was a mixed blessing. I was glad to have a roof over my head while one storm system after another rolled through — better that than getting caught out on the GS in it — but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish I’d had more clear days to actually go experience the place instead of watching it from a window.

The red clay that’s everywhere in Georgia shows back up here too, staining the ground orange-brown wherever it’s exposed. It’s the same soil and the same stain, just on the other side of a state line.

Smith Lake

D has fallen hard for Smith Lake, northwest of the city, and after one afternoon out there I understood why. But first, the road nerd in me needs to come out.. OOOOH!! A NEW interstate? Yes Felicia, a new interstate. I-22 connects Memphis and Birmingham. Now back to the lake…

It’s got that East Coast lake feel I grew up with — the foliage, the water, the whole posture of the place — but the shoreline does something I wasn’t expecting. It drops off fast. You step in and you’re at your ankles. One more step, you’re at your chest. The step after that, you’re swimming, because the bottom just isn’t there anymore. It’s a strange, almost West Coast steepness wearing East Coast clothes — Tahoe’s depth logic dressed up in Alabama humidity.

Standing on the dock with that steep gray water in front of me, it was easy to see why this place means what it means to D. Some lakes are just water. Others are the thing that explains a person.

What If

I keep coming back, quietly, to those what ifs from before D moved.

Maybe some of them were fair questions at the time. Alabama isn’t California, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. But after six days of Vulcan, Billies, a pool party with strangers who turned out not to be strangers for long, and an afternoon on a lake that means something to someone — the what ifs didn’t disappear exactly. They just got quieter than the answer that was actually in front of me the whole time.

He’s happy. His life is good. I’m happy for him and his partner.

It’s still raining. Atlanta is calling. Now it’s time to get the GS happy with some major service.