"Recovery Ridge" sounds like it ought to be the name of a bluegrass song. Can't you hear the fiddle and banjo already? It'd be about sin and redemption, I guarantee. Or maybe it sounds like a book title--something by Garrison Keillor or Pat Conroy.

But Recovery Ridge is a real place, and it's less than an hour away from Tallahassee. Just north of Chattahoochee and over the Georgia line, about halfway between Jinks and Faceville, along the south shore of Lake Seminole.

The ridge got its name back in the Seminole Wars (no, the pre-football ones). Soldiers stationed at Fort Scott down on the Flint River swamps tended towards malaria, and so a field hospital was set up on the high bluff to the south: Camp Recovery. Today a small memorial marks the spot.

Time erases many things, however. The swamps around Fort Scott are now under water, along with acres of farmland and countless clear springs drowned when the Army Corps of Engineers decided to Make Life Safe For Bass Fishing by damming the Flint and Chattahoochee forty years ago, resulting in Lake Seminole--also known as The World's Largest Hydrilla Farm. Only the eternal bones of dead hickories grope upward from the water's surface to indicate that the lake wasn't always there.

The ridge that forms the south shore is, in effect, the last gasp of the Appalachians that hump upward in misty folds to the north. Not even a foothill. A toehill, maybe. A bunion-hill. Further south the larger formation of which Recovery Ridge is a segment peters out along the Apalachicola, below the dramatic bluffs of Torreya State Park, once seriously proposed as the site of the Garden of Eden. Plants that usually thrive in much cooler climes flourish along the steep slopes.

And it is cooler along the lake, at least in winter. The wind seems to blow unhindered from the arctic, down across the Great Plains, and smack into the side of Recovery Ridge, ripping brown leaves from the trees and slipping into your clothes to suck every last erg of warmth from the small of your back--and this on days when people are wearing shorts and sweating just across the road, past the crown of the hill.

Conversely, there's no hotter place on earth than the top of Recovery Ridge in August. The smell of dry red clay and cow manure hangs in the air like a tangible haze. Dogs pant in their sleep. Cicadas sing their long, lazy songs that push the mercury higher with each buzzing chorus.

The ridge is an abundantly alive place, however--especially in the summer. Mayflies swarm along the lake shore. Bright green dragonflies stitch the grassy fields, peanuts slumber in the warm soil, and dirt daubers build their pan-pipes on anything that remains stationary for more than five minutes at a time. At night, owls flirt in the distance like ribald ghosts, dimly audible when the cicadas, crickets, frogs, and God knows what else pause to turn the pages of their throbbing sheet music. Nightmares on powdered and wax-papered wing buzz and swoop by the hundreds around floodlights, dodging the gigantic spiderwebs that billow in the night breeze like skeletal sails. Bobcats mewl like tabbies on steroids.

And yet, with all this clamor it is strangely quiet. You can hear a car's approach from a mile away. A small bird flitting through the undergrowth makes the sound of a passing herd of elephants. The ever-present, distant-surf background noise of the city--even a middling-size one like Tallahassee--is completely absent.

On Recovery Ridge, nature pushes against your consciousness like an insistent, nagging reminder. A reminder that here is where you belong--not in a manicured suburb or cinderblock apartment complex, but out here, away from the artificial, where the sun splashes through plate-sized leaves. Yes, even here, where the biting bugs dine on your flesh with such innocent enthusiasm that it is hard to hate them. Here, where the gopher tortoise roams, and the deer and the osprey play.

The people drawn to Recovery Ridge are an eclectic mix of died-in-the-wool Southerners and transplanted Northern retirees. It is not unusual to see a small family cemetery in someone's front yard, while just across the street a satellite dish cocks an ear heavenward. Rough-edged, dog-toting deer killers rub shoulders with polo-shirted commuters. The folks are, for the most part, genuinely friendly, and after a brief but wary getting-acquainted period will welcome you like a cousin.

Take a drive up to Recovery Ridge sometime soon. Roll down the window and get a whiff. Wave to Miz Lil as she cultivates the Tomatoes of Heaven. Say hey to Joe Clark (senior) as he prunes the candles from his crop of Christmas trees. Swap lies with the fisher-folk down at Jack Wingate's.

Get up on the hill and clear the city-fever out of your head.