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February 28, 2015

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Excursion 27 (2/22/2014)

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Excursion 27, Part 1: (Return to Mud House Mansion)

It was February 2014.  Cold and brisk, but the weather was fine and it looked like a nice day to take an excursion.  I decided to do something I had been hankering to do for quite a while, which was to return to Mud House Mansion.  I had discovered this fascinating old building located a bit east of Lancaster only the month before, so the landscape (barren, winter) would look pretty much the same, but what I wanted to do was to get there very early in the morning and get some good pictures of the mansion during the pre-dawn and dawn minutes, the so-called “golden hour” of photography.  Well, the plans of mice and men oft gang agley and my exquisite timing was ruined completely when a woman driving a jeep mounted with a battering ram rear-ended by Pilot in downtown Lancaster.  She had a grill guard on the front of Jeep (designed to protect vehicles from deer and such hitting the front of the car), but it was one that protruded well in front of the vehicle and that steel frame ploughed into the back of my SUV, caving in the rear door and doing about $7,000 or so worth of damage.  So much for golden hour.

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February 21, 2015

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Excursion 26 (2/14/2014)

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Excursion 26, Part 1 (Vortacular)

Unearthed Ohio is active again, after some time off for questionable behavior.  Unlike most blogs, where inactivity for an extended time portends doom, the extended hibernation here was deliberate.  Much of my free time this past year was spent working with a designer and a developer to create a new version of my other website, then I had to import and convert the old content, then catch up, and, well, it was a monumental undertaking.  I had to put Unearthed Ohio to the side—though I never stopped the actual photography.  Now I can catch up a bit.  With this blog entry, I present photographs from a trip I took in mid-February 2014, deep in the heart of the Polar Vortex.  As I write this intro, however, I seem to be deep in the heart of Polar Vortex 2:  Electric Boogaloo.  Two very nasty winters in a row.  The one advantage that a winter offers is winter landscapes and last year I took the opportunity of a recent snowfall to do some experimentation with snowy photography, which I present to you herewith.

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May 18, 2014

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Excursion 25 (1-14-2014)

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Excursion 25, Part 1 (Mud House Mansion)

In which our intrepid hero chances upon the manse macabre…

A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs.
B is for Basil, assaulted by bears.
C is for Clara, who wasted away.
D is for Desmond, thrown out of a sleigh.

Those are the first few lines of the Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet book consisting of 26 different children meeting untimely ends.  The Tinies are the work of Edward Gorey, a rather amazing author and artist, whose distinctive visual style was a sort of goth Edwardiana.  I first encountered Gorey in high school and fell in love with his dark wit and unique artistic style.

Little did I know that a bit more than 30 years after I discovered Gorey that I would encounter a mansion that looked as if it came right out of one of his books.

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May 11, 2014

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Excursion 24 (12/25/2013)

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Excursion 24, Part 2 (The Merry Mannequins of Cambridge)

In which our intrepid hero gets in touch with his inner Victorian…

For many people, the Christmas season is rather depressing, but I must confess that I typically am filled with good cheer during that time of year, even though I am not Christian.  There is just something to the Christmas season for me, a period in which—in theory, at least—there really is “good will towards man” and with the gift-giving, people often do make an attempt to be thoughtful to others.  As a result, I am very pro-Christmas, even if from a secular viewpoint.  On this Christmas day, I found several examples of this seasonal “good will” that made me think the world wasn’t really all bad.

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May 11, 2014

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Excursion 24 (12/25/2013)

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Excursion 24, Part 1 (Sleep in Heavenly Peace)

In which our intrepid ventures out on Christmas morn…

In November 2013, I finally purchased my first DSLR camera, a Canon EOS 70D, something I had been itching to do for several months at that point, although the Canon Powershot SX50 HS superzoom camera that I had been using is in some ways better suited for roadside photography.  But I felt it was time for me to step up.

Work and the Polar Vortex combined to prevent me from taking the camera on a test ride for some weeks, but one possibility did intrigue me:  going on on Christmas day.

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May 7, 2014

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Excursion 23 (11/29/2013)

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Excursion 23, Part 2 (Meccas and Maples)

In which our intrepid hero passes motorcars and motor hotels to reach the shores of Lake Erie…

One day, when my sister and I were little, we were playing in the backyard of my grandparents’ house in El Paso.  We got a little bored and were wondering what to do when I had a brainstorm.  I went inside and brought out a spiral notebook—I almost always had one with me, because I loved to draw, even at that early age—and on a page of that notebook, I drew a treasure map, snaking around the outside of my grandparents’ house.  It had a dotted line for the adventurer to follow and even a big X at the place where the treasure would be.  When I was done, my sister and I started following the map, tracing that dotted line until finally we came to the place on the map marked by the X.

And you know what?  There was no treasure there!  Despite the fact that it was clearly marked on the map, there was no treasure in the actual spot.  And I learned a valuable lesson that day:  you make your own treasure.

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May 7, 2014

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Excursion 23 (11/29/2013)

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Excursion 23, Part 1 (Northern Exposures)

In which our intrepid hero journeys into the northern wilds of Ohio…

During the course of 2013, I was able to visit several stretches of Ohio’s Lake Erie shore, but one stretch had eluded me—the area roughly from Sandusky to Cleveland (the central shore).  So, on a bright but cold day at the end of November, I decided to complete the chain and headed north across Ohio’s farmland to Lake Erie.

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April 27, 2014

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Excursion 22 (11/9/2013)

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Excursion 22, Part 2 (Shacks of Yore, Galore)

In which our intrepid hero gets to dwell on dwellings…

Are you a home orphan?  By that, I don’t mean homeless, but do you no longer have ties to the home in which you grew up?   Some of us can easily go back to the home of our youths, because other relatives, typically parents, may still live there.  You can revisit your old room, for example.  But not me.  My parents sold my childhood home in 1988 or so, the year I graduated from college and moved to Ohio.

I grew up in a house on 2624 Hawick, El Paso, Texas.  This was a subdivision with streets named on Irish themes built in the late 1950s.  My house was built in 1959.   It was a tiny house, three bedrooms but only around 1,000 square feet or so.  My mother was from El Paso, my father from Pennsylvania.  They lived in Pennsylvania after getting married but in 1970 they moved back to El Paso.  I was four years old.  We stayed at my grandparents’ house until my parents bought the home on Hawick.

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April 26, 2014

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Excursion 21 (11/3/2013)

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Excursion 21, Part 2 (Frack Attack)

In which our intrepid hero hopes that oil’s well that ends well…

Fracking concerns me, I admit it.  I should hasten to point out that I do not, as many do, oppose fracking, no more than I oppose genetically modified crops.  But I believe both technologies should be treated prudently, with an eye towards identifying and preventing problems.  I am concerned about groundwater contamination, I am concerned about earthquakes.  I can only hope that Ohio is wise enough to create a good regulatory and oversight foundation and will be proactive enough to try to deal with potential problems before they become actual ones.

Beyond that, though, I am concerned about something that it may not be within the power of the state of Ohio to regulate, and that is that Ohioans themselves will not benefit enough from fracking.  One would think that it is a rare blessing that Ohio’s deposits are located in the economically blighted Ohio Appalachia; those areas certainly deserve a break, right?  Yet it is those same areas that have Ohio’s traditional oil deposits as well, as can be seen by the hundreds and hundreds of wells dotting the countryside.  And that traditional oil wealth seems not to have benefited eastern Ohioans much at all—so will fracking do so, or will the gains simply be siphoned out of the state, much like Ohio’s gambling money largely is?  I hope the people who need the money the most get some of it.

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April 26, 2014

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Excursion 21 (11/3/2013)

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Excursion 21, Part 1 (Far From the Madding Crowd)

In which our intrepid hero contemplates nature and navels…

One of the things I love about my driving excursions in Ohio is the feeling of freedom that they give me.  I can drive anywhere, do anything; I have no deadlines or schedules or things I must do.  The only pressure at all in that regard is the pressure to wake up early enough in the morning to catch some good light.  Sometimes it seems to me that this sort of freedom is disappearing in modern society.  I don’t mean this in any sort of Glenn Beck/right-wing/libertarian way at all.  I am not talking about politics but personal freedoms.

Let me illustrate what I mean.  I think far fewer children simply play than when I was a child.  These days, it seems that all too many parents channel their children’s “playtime” into organized activities, like team sports and day camps and so forth.  I have to say that when I was a kid, if you wanted to play, you walked down the block and knocked on the door of some other house and got the kid who lived in that house to come out and play.  We played “cops and robbers,” or “pirates” or “cowboys and Indians,” and we played games like hide and seek, and we played sports, like baseball or basketball.  We rode our bikes all over the neighborhood.   I never once was on an organized soccer team or anything like that.  We didn’t need those things to have fun.  These days, however, it seems like organized activities are all parents think about—this is certainly true for the parents I know.  And those few parents who do seem to allow their children the chance to simply play do so like they were East German border guards.  One set of parents I know would never let their children play outside—on their own block!—unless one of the parents was outside watching them.

I confess that I get very crotchety about this.  My parents would set limits, which varied as I got older, typically making sure I knew when to be back, what geographical limits I had, and so forth.  But then they would simply let us play.  To me that seems to superior to choosing an organized activity for your kids and making them engaged in that supervised, constrained activity.

Where has that freedom gone?  The freedom to simply be a kid?

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