My 50th excursion, quite a milestone, took me northeast from Columbus to Coshocton (because all roads lead to Coshocton), and well beyond. But let’s pick up a bit northeast of Coshocton, where I was driving northward through what was essentially the southern reach of traditional “Amish country” in Ohio (though Amish communities can be found throughout the state). Continue reading
I often think that being a child consists largely of being oblivious to the world around you. Children live in a world within a world, seeing all sorts of things, but comprehending or even noticing only a few. Children often have no idea why parents make certain decisions, for example, unless those decisions are explained to them. Things just happen, or don’t happen. My childhood was certainly this way. Many reasons and significances I only learned years later, or not at all. I’ll give one example. When I was around 12 or 13, my father, an inveterate hunter, took me deer hunting for the first time. Every year he went deer hunting near Caballo Lake in New Mexico with a family friend and relatives of that friend. This time he took me with him. It was very cold, up in the desert mountains in November, but I had a lot of fun (though I did not get to shoot at any deer). I kind of assumed that this was simply the first of what would be a long series of annual deer hunting trips I would now go on. But things did not work out that way. My father never took me again. Not once. To this day, I have no idea why. Had I somehow embarrassed him in front of his friends? Had I done something wrong? If I had, I never realized it. But that was the first and last time I went deer hunting.
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.
In which our intrepid hero explores the empty streets of East Liverpool…
I was 21 in 1988 when I learned I would be moving to Ohio (to go to graduate school). I knew nothing about Ohio. The mental image I had was a jumble of snow storms and rubber factories, all with healthy sprinkling of “Rust Belt.” I discovered, of course, that Ohio is a wonderful and varied place—this blog itself is sort of an ode to the state. But it is certainly true that there is a Rust Belt and certainly true that Ohio is one of the states at its center. Ohio cities like Akron, Youngstown, Toledo, Dayton, and others were thriving industrial cities. Ohio boasted steel mills, automobile factories, all sorts of heavy industry. Much of that is gone now and although new technologies and new businesses have replaced much of the heavy industry that went to Japan or Korea or China, Ohio has still not recovered from this transformation and probably never will. Many of the people who had steady factor jobs will simply never make the leap to an information-based economy. Few assembly line workers can become computer programmers. Ohio will always have this hole in it, I think.
Unearthed Ohio 