The Small-Town Alabamians Fighting a Data Centre

In McCalla, Alabama, out where the Appalachian foothills yawn and stretch before coming to rest further south in fields of ripening cotton, there’s a lake where David Havron used to swim. He was little more than a boy then, topping the crests in his red Chevrolet with his dog riding shotgun beside him. A few years back, David bought a house not far from the place. “It just felt to me like ‘this is home’,” he says. Now in his 70s, David has the sinewy look of a man who has not known much idle time. Yet standing with him in his yard, it’s not hard to imagine him in his younger days: on a certain kind of morning, when the Dog Star is rising and the sun is restless in the Southern sky, you can almost see him out there on the lake — a skinny kid gazing up at Longleaf pine trees, his dog paddling in the near distance.