The modal Helen visitor arrives for the river and departs with a sunburn and a cuckoo clock. Kaitlyn Reese-Brockman has spent two months identifying a second, parallel Helen that requires no inner tube and no tolerance for lager at 11 a.m.
In 2024, a video of a man rolling down the Sautee Nacoochee Indian mound accumulated 4.1 million views and produced a formal response from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Kaitlyn Reese-Brockman spent a week at the site documenting what came next.
The Heidi Motel's windmill has 11 moving parts and a two-person maintenance crew that arrives, without fanfare, on the first Tuesday of every month. Kaitlyn Reese-Brockman spent a morning with Rolf and Brunhilde, and left changed.
Seventeen wineries, fourteen varietals, six weeks of field research, and one unexpectedly transcendent Chambourcin. Kaitlyn Reese-Brockman has done the work so that you do not have to — though, frankly, you should.
When Kaitlyn Reese-Brockman booked a Windmill Suite at the Heidi Motel, she expected a hot tub and a night off. She did not expect to spend 90 minutes analyzing the motel's sight lines or to arrive, via Sontag, at what she can only describe as a reckoning.
Kaitlyn Reese-Brockman spent three days renting tubes, documenting social dynamics, and eating a surprising number of pretzels at river's edge in what she considers the most sustained ethnographic immersion the Chattahoochee has seen from someone with a comp-lit degree.
