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 discovers a mysterious death…
There was a poll conducted not long before I write this (in late August 2013, three months after this excursion), in which the pollsters gleefully revealed that a substantial percentage of Louisiana Republicans blamed Obama for the failure of the federal government in dealing with Hurricane Katrina. The point, of course, is that Obama was not even president at the time, but rather a freshman senator from Illinois who had nothing to do with Katrina, good or bad. What I think this speaks to more generally is how flexible people can be—flexible in terms of things ranging from memory to burdens of proof—when something they want to be true (or not true) is on the line. Think of conspiracy theorists, for example. Pick a conspiracy theory: UFOs, the Kennedy assassination, the New World Order, 9/11, you name it. Conspiracy theorists generally impose an impossible burden of proof to accept contentions by non-conspiracists while simultaneously lowing all barriers of critical thinking when it comes to accepting contentions or evidence from like-minded people. This is true for more than simply conspiracy theories or political beliefs; it actually happens quite a bit in ordinary life as well.
In which our intrepid hero slakes his lake thirst…
When I was a kid, my dad had hunting friends who owned a gas station and convenience store (with a rare New Mexico liquor license) at Caballo Lake, a reservoir in southern New Mexico formed by damming the Rio Grande. We would occasionally go up there (a two hour drive) and spend the day there. However, the place was still a bit of a distance from the lake—too much for a kid—and so we didn’t really see the lake except as a distance. I think I may have only been out on the lake itself once, on a small boat. So I truly was “underexposed” to large bodies of water as a kid. I remember when I was 17 or so and had to fly from El Paso to Pennsylvania. The plane changed in Chicago and I was able to see Lake Michigan (from the air) for the first time. It was remarkable—like an ocean to me (who had not yet seen one).
In which our intrepid hero encounters a reasonably great lake…
I grew up in the desert and as a result have always been fascinated by large bodies of water. As a kid, I had never seen any body of water larger than the Caballo or Elephant Butte reservoirs in New Mexico. When I was a freshman in college in San Antonio, I drove one night with friends to the Gulf of Mexico, but it was pitch black and I didn’t see a thing! I don’t know how old I was before I ever saw an ocean. So bodies of water—large rivers (the Rio Grande doesn’t cut it!), large lakes, oceans, bays, all of that stuff—is sort of like a fascinating foreign country to me.
Unearthed Ohio 