Atlanta Arts category interest

On the back cover of R.E.M.’s 1983 album, Murmur, is its namesake: a disused wooden railway trestle, featured in a wide shot, carrying the track listing as if down the line. In Jason Thrasher’s book of photographs, Murmur Trestle (University of Georgia Press, 2024), a more dynamic presence emerges, as his images document the wild, resonant beauty of the Murmur Trestle of Athens, Georgia.

Though the battle to preserve it is long lost and the structure gone, Murmur Trestle both elegizes a landmark lost and makes a compelling visual argument for the preservation of all abandoned, rewilding spaces.

Built in the 1880s, used through the 1990s and finally torn down for replacement with modernized walking paths in 2021, the Murmur Trestle graced the Athens area for more than a century — and also the back cover of the debut album of the alt-rock band of 1980s and 1990s fame, which started in Athens and played a number of Atlanta-area gigs, particularly in their early years.

The trestle held enough of a place in local hearts that many launched a sincere effort to stop its destruction by the Athens-Clarke County government — but to no avail. Happily for those who loved it, local photographer Thrasher documented the place over the span of a year and collected the images in Murmur Trestle as a sort of archive.

While “coffee table book” feels inadequate for a book of art such as this, the fact is that Murmur Trestle possesses a beauty that should not be relegated to a shelf. The cover shot of the crumbling rails disappearing into green forest canopy invites us on a journey through page and place.

The book opens with introductory reflections by musician Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers and by the photographer’s wife and business partner, Beth Hall Thrasher, followed by “Reason by Rot,” a long elegiac poem by J. Drew Lanham. The majority of the book, though, is the images themselves, presented without comment or adornment. In the spirit of the adage, the images are worth far more than a thousand words.

In exploring the photographs, which cover trestle and surroundings in four seasons, we find not a linear narrative but some key themes emerging, all of which support the importance of places where man-made and natural merge. The first and perhaps most profound idea is that of the spirituality of these abandoned places. In the image immediately following Lanham’s poem, we encounter the trestle shot from ground level, looking up into the beams and posts that intersect across the forest backdrop. Taken at a glance, we’re reminded of the intricate pattern of a church window, with wild green pews and sunbeams lighting up the congregation.

Another such shot, taken in a rare Georgia snowfall, puts viewers in mind of Emily Dickinson’s “certain slant of light.” Beams of a heavenly host, perhaps, or simply the power of nature — either way, Thrasher’s angles and lighting inspire a sense of reverence for the land and the trestle that was integrated within.

Another recurring notion, and the piece that perhaps makes the clearest defense of the trestle’s existence, is the notion of seamless integration between man-made and landscape. Early in the collection, Thrasher includes a distance shot of the trestle seen in winter through the tangle of leafless branches. At first glance, we see a chaotic brown lattice against a gray cloudy sky; only on closer inspection can we fully separate trellis from trees.

Elsewhere, Thrasher zooms in on the lime-green smudge of moss growing on rotting wood and later shoots directly upward to capture the dark tree trunks and trellis posts, both seeming to support a cloud of spring foliage. These and other images seem to inquire, “Who are we to interfere a second time, when nature has already done its work to reclaim the Earth?”

More than anything else, Murmur Trestle reminds us of the ever-changing nature of life itself. Drawing perhaps on his time at Plum Village Buddhist monastery, Thrasher shows us not simply the trestle itself but the world around it in all seasons — the lovely and the unappealing, the parts and the whole. We see scalloped brown fungus growing into a rotted, fallen railway tie. We see the rivulet of black tar frozen mid-drip, and we see the river in all its states: full and flowing, sickly green and stagnating. As Lanham reminds us in his poem, “We are what we are/until we cease to be that which we were” — a truth that applies to trees, objects and human beings equally.

Simple in composition yet rich in meaning, Murmur Trestle serves as a visual memorial for the wild corners and disused places that re-invent themselves in the heart of a community. While we’re reminded that, “it stands for reasons, then/that all things standing, must fall,” Jason Thrasher reminds us that even the fallen can go on living and remain beautiful in memory — even more so, that they should remain living.

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Jocelyn Heath is an associate professor in English at Norfolk State University. Her first poetry collection, In the Cosmic Fugue, was published by Kelsay Books. She is an assistant editor for Smartish Pace, and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Crab Orchard Review, Sinister Wisdom, Lambda Literary, Entropy and elsewhere.