Monthly Archives: March 2014

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March 29, 2014

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Excursion 18 (9/13/2013)

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Excursion 18 (Cornucopia)

In which our intrepid hero contemplates the passage of time…

For my 18th excursion across Ohio, I decided to head northwest, essentially in the direction of Findlay.  Northwestern Ohio is heavily agricultural and relatively sparsely populated (until you get up to the Toledo area) and this excursion, conducted in mid-September, came at the tail end of Ohio’s agricultural season.  Over recent months I had driven all around Ohio, but typically every week or two, which turned out to create an odd, strobe-like effect when it came to crops like corn.  You’d go out one time, and see seedlings, then the next time young stalks and before you really had a chance to adjust, you were seeing corn in its full growth.  The effect could be jarring, like seeing a child after an absence of a couple of years, missing the interim of wild growth.  Watching in this fashion the 2013 crop come in created a sense of acceleration of time for me, like things were moving too quickly.  Of course, we experience that in our own lives, too.

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March 2, 2014

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Excursion 17 (9/5/20130

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Excursion 17, Part 2 (Town & Country)

In which our intrepid hero ducks and cranes…

One of the things I like best about eastern Ohio is the surprises of slopes.  Western Ohio is flat, often flat-flat, and its vistas cannot surprise.  But eastern Ohio is full of hills, usually wooded, and sometimes quite large.  As a result, if you are driving through eastern Ohio you are sometimes gifted with the pleasure of arriving at the top of a hill or ridge to see a wonderful expanse of countryside stretching out before you.  All of a sudden, there it is.

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March 1, 2014

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Excursion 17 (9/5/20130

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Excursion 17, Part 1 (The Eagle Has Landed)

In which our intrepid hero encounters an unusual eyrie…

I saw a UFO once.  I use this term in its literal sense—an unidentified flying object—rather than as a synonym for “flying saucer” or “alien spacecraft.”  I was probably about 13 or 14 years old at the time.  It was very early in the morning—I was outside putting stuff in the car, as my family was getting ready to go on some trip (one of our rare vacation trips, I suppose).  The sky was perfectly clear and I just happened to notice an odd little circle hovering high up in the sky.  It was extremely tiny and I was kind of surprised I even managed to see it in the first place.  I couldn’t figure out what it was, and neither could my family.  My father suggested getting his spotting scope, so we brought it outside and looked at the object through it.  Even through the spotting scope, we couldn’t really make out any details.  We eventually decided it was most likely a weather balloon, which I still think is the most likely explanation.

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March 1, 2014

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Excursion 16 (8/18/2013)

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Excursion 16, Part 4 (The Hanging House)

In which our intrepid hero encounters some bad noose…

This year I “celebrate” my 20th year of studying extremists in the United States, something that began as a completely unplanned and odd little outgrowth of my dissertation (which had nothing to do with extremism or, for that matter, the 20th century).  By January 1995, I was spending a lot of time looking at domestic extremists and the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing essentially changed my life forever, causing me to focus on extremism and terrorism, first voluntarily and soon professionally.  I’ve done that ever since.  But my very first encounter with extremism occurred decades earlier, when I was a child.

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March 1, 2014

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Excursion 16 (8/18/2013)

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Excursion 16, Part 3 (Requiem for a Limousine)

In which our intrepid hero sees horses and horseless carriages…

When I was a kid, my father bought a horse.  He liked to hunt and his hunting buddies liked to go deer hunting up in the Gila Wilderness.   They used horses to get back up in the mountains where there were no roads, so my dad decided he needed a horse, too.  He found a quarterhorse with the dubious name of Maude, a former barrel racer whose career in rodeo ended with an injured leg.  I don’t know how much Maude cost him, nor how much it cost to keep Maude at a time when not much money was coming in.  Horses are expensive.  My father did save on the stabling.  He convinced an uncle-in-law, who owned a small farm that grew cotton and alfalfa, to let him build a corral on the uncle’s property (probably paying him some form of rent).  This began for me a long relationship with Maude and an even closer relationship with Maude’s manure.

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