The 16th annual Hiwassee Watershed Gala will take place at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 29, at the Charles Suber Banquet Hall at Young Harris College in Georgia. 

It was an odd feeling to wake up in a natural state, rather than be disturbed by the noises of another impending day breaking through. The back bedroom in a small ranch house in the middle of vast swaths of farmland in Southwest Georgia. Silence in the large old brass bed. Sunlight trickled through antique glass windows. 

There, in Sumter County, Georgia, not far from the Alabama line lies the tiny town of Plains (pop. 784), a most unremarkable place home to a most remarkable man. 

Home for President Jimmy Carter has always been the clay roads and cotton fields of Plains, except when he was at Annapolis, in the Navy, or serving as state senator or governor or president. 

Heading west on Highway 76, the last of the warm sunshine falls behind the silent Blue Ridge Mountains. With the small town of Clayton, Georgia in the rearview mirror, your eyes aim ahead intently. At the last second, you see Persimmon Road on your right. Not enough time to place your blinker on, but just enough of a moment to tap your brakes and yank the wheel down the road, which shoots out for miles into the backwoods of Southern Appalachia.