In which our intrepid hero visits a ruined castle of glass…
Let me pick up where I left off, and show the final part of my excursion in late November 2013 north to Lake Erie and east to the environs of Cleveland. As I drove east along the shores of Lake Erie—or as close as I could get to the shores—I came an amazing site, east of Sandusky and Huron: a huge, overgrown ruin of a greenhouse complex.
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.
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.
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.
In which our intrepid hero looks at the past and the passed…
Death comes to us all in the end, but you never know how news of the deaths of others will affect you. Although I mourned their passing, the actual deaths of neither of my maternal grandparents caused me true sorrow, because in both cases, the circumstances of their passing meant that death, when it came, was something of a blessing. The relief of their suffering outweighed the sorrow of their absence.
The circumstances of death thus play a large role in how deaths affects us.
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.
In which our intrepid hero coasts along a coast…
Lakes, great or not so great, are hard to come by in West Texas, smack in the middle of the Chihuahua Desert. The first lake I ever saw was Caballo Lake in New Mexico, about a two hour’s drive up the Rio Grande from El Paso. Caballo is a reservoir lake, created during the Great Depression, and is the smaller cousin to Elephant Butte Reservoir. The first time I saw the lake, I did not even know that I had seen the lake. In the 70s, my dad was hunting buddies with a family who owned a convenience store/gas station near the reservoir (and also owned a valuable New Mexico liquor license!). The first time my family went up there, I craned my neck as we got close, so that I could see the lake, but to my disgust the lake was totally blocked from view by a high light-blue wall that someone had put up. It was a long time—an embarrassingly long time—before I realized that the “wall” was actually the lake itself.
In which our intrepid hero encounters aged agrarian advertising…
I learned a new (to me) word the other day: earworm. You and I and everybody we know have experienced them; an earworm occurs when a piece of a song or melody gets stuck in your head and you can’t get it out. It seems to me that there is a linguistic equivalent, of sorts, to an earworm, and that is when a particular phrase gets into your head. It may not repeat itself but it is there and will come to mind, unbidden, with the right trigger. Let’s call them eyeworms, just for the sake of convenience. Earworms and eyeworms alike must be gold to advertisers. Surely that is something they seek: a commercial jingle or an advertising pitch line that lodge in people’s brains like G.I.s on Omaha Beach. Think for a moment—do you remember any commercial jingles or advertising slogans from your childhood? God knows I can. “I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony, I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.” “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” “I can’t believe I ate that whole thing.” “You’ve come a long way, baby.”
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.
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.
Unearthed Ohio 