Tag Archives: landscape

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

October 19, 2013

Posted under

Excursion 10 (6/8/2013)

Comments

2 Comments

Excursion 10, Part 2 (The Bottomless Barn)

In which our intrepid hero learns that there is at least one way to skin a barn…

When I was a kid, there was a popular t-shirt that depicted a mouse in the grasp of an eagle’s talon.   Even as the eagle was lifting him off the ground to be lunch, the mouse gave the eagle the finger.  I tried to find such a shirt on the web, or the original artwork, but failed.  However, you can find a cruder, less dynamic version if you do a Google image search on “the last great act of defiance.”  Why do I mention this 1970s t-shirt?

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

September 1, 2013

Posted under

Excursion 9 (6/1/2013)

Comments

2 Comments

Excursion 9, Part 1 (South by Southeast)

In which our intrepid hero discovers people making hay while the sun shines…

Southeast Ohio has always appealed to me.  Geographically, it is one of the most interesting and diverse parts of Ohio.  It is also of cultural interest: Southeast Ohio in many ways is the heart of Appalachian Ohio (though strictly speaking, it is only one of three regions in the state that are technically considered Appalachian Ohio).  Appalachian Ohio is sparsely populated (the largest city in all three regions is Youngstown, Ohio, and the next largest city has fewer than 50,000 inhabitants) and economically depressed (especially Southeast Ohio; most of its counties are considered economically “at-risk” or even “distressed”).   Appalachian Ohio was originally settled by the same demographic groups of people who settled western Virginia and eastern Kentucky and as a result shares most of the elements of Appalachian culture with the Appalachians of other states.

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

August 24, 2013

Posted under

Excursion 8 (5/19/2013)

Comments

1 Comment

Excursion 8, Part 7 (The Flatlands)

In which our intrepid hero enjoys the pleasures of the horizontal plane…

There’s more than one type of flat.  First, there’s Western Flat.  Western Flat may be very flat and it may be very flat for a very long way but typically there are mountains in the distance.  Among other things, this allows you to orient yourself.  Then there is Closed In Flat.  That’s when the country is flat but vision is obscured by buildings and/or trees.  When I moved from El Paso to Columbus I went from Western Flat to Closed In Flat.  You lose your bearings in Closed In Flat because there is nothing you can see with which to orient yourself.  I easily get lost in Closed In Flat if I am not familiar with the area.  Lastly, there is Open Flat.  That’s just plain flatness to the horizon.  Northwest and North Central Ohio is primarily Open Flat.  No hills, not much woods, just a lot of farmland.  That’s what I was driving through on this, the final leg of my eighth excursion.

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

August 24, 2013

Posted under

Excursion 8 (5/19/2013)

Comments

2 Comments

Excursion 8, Part 6 (Justice for Jake and Ella)

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.

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

August 4, 2013

Posted under

Excursion 8 (5/19/2013)

Comments

Leave a comment

Excursion 8, Part 4 (Depot Man)

In which our intrepid hero unexpectedly encounters the American Dantooine…

Although I have had a lifelong interest in military history and, indeed, advanced degrees on the subject, military battlefields have never interested me much.  I’ve been to a number of Civil War battlefields, for example. and my collective reaction has basically been “meh.”  I think the reason is because old battlefields, by the very nature of the warfare of earlier eras, were typically places where there wasn’t much of anything.  Given the linear nature of warfare  at the time, a typical battlefield might feature defensible terrain near a strategic location—unless, as at Gettysburg, the battle was an encounter battle, in which case the location might not even be significant at all.  Again, because of the nature of warfare at the time, the geography of the battlefields is also usually not that interesting.  However, military structures can be quite interesting indeed.  So when I unexpectedly came across an abandoned military base in northwestern Ohio, I was quite delighted.

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

July 25, 2013

Posted under

Excursion 8 (5/19/2013)

Comments

1 Comment

Excursion 8, Part 1 (Lake Effect)

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.

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

July 21, 2013

Posted under

Excursion 7 (5/9/2013)

Comments

1 Comment

Excursion 7, Part 3 (Cafes on the Left, Left, Left Bank)

In which our intrepid hero discovers a saintly town…

One thing I discovered very soon after moving to Ohio was that Ohio is a state that steals place names.  This is true of many areas of the country, no doubt, but it wasn’t true where I grew up.  Place names near me included El Paso, Las Cruces, Canutillo, Anthony, Fabens, Alamagordo, Truth or Consequences (well, that was stolen from something, but not a place), and so forth.  But in Ohio?  We have Toledo and Moscow and Athens and Brooklyn and Cambridge and London and Dublin and Geneva and Macedonia and Ontario and Oxford and Toronto and many others—none of them even modest enough to throw a “New” in front of their theft.  The one that gets me the most, though, is Rio Grande, Ohio, because locals don’t pronounce it the right way, they pronounce it “Rye-Oh.”  As someone who used to ride a horse along the actual Rio Grande, that grabs my goat by the balls and twists.

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

July 19, 2013

Posted under

Excursion 7 (5/9/2013)

Comments

1 Comment

Excursion 7, Part 2 (Urban Urbana)

In which our intrepid hero encounters a county seat…

What makes you love a place?  I grew up in El Paso, Texas, and though I have not lived there in over a quarter century, I am still possessive and protective of the place.  When I left Texas in 1988 to move to Ohio to go to graduate school, I really did not know what to expect.  Having grown up in the west, I had a number of prejudices against the eastern United States.  To the extent I knew anything about Ohio, I knew that it got very cold there in the winter and humid in the summer and that the state was part of the “rust belt.”  I also knew that it had none of the grandeur of western geography.  It had no mountains, no gorges, no big waterfalls.   When I arrived in Columbus, Ohio, I was pleasantly surprised (except about the humidity, which is indeed nasty).  But between then and now I somehow moved from being pleasantly surprised to loving the state.  I can’t say how exactly Ohio started to grow on me, but I know it started early on and I was soon defending my adopted state from the disapproving remarks of some of my stuck-up fellow graduate students.  I came to love the diversity of Ohio, the quiet beauty of the Midwest, the little places.  Over the years, more and more, it just seemed like home.

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

July 19, 2013

Posted under

Excursion 7 (5/9/2013)

Comments

Leave a comment

Excursion 7, Part 1 (The Anchorhead of Ohio)

In which our intrepid hero embarks upon a journey to the mythical land of Troy…

Everybody who has ever seen the movie Star Wars knows the city of Mos Eisley, even if the name is not familiar.  That’s the city on Tattooine that Luke and Ben and the droids go to that has the funky bar with all the aliens.  It’s where they meet Han and Chewie and from whence they lit out on the Millennium Falcon.   But you know what?  It’s not the only place on Tattooine.  Brief references in the movie tell the viewer about another place, a much less exotic place, called Anchorhead.  It’s the place where all the moisture farmers go to buy a new clutch.  It’s a farm town.  Nothing happens there; it is only a place from which people depart.  “I can take you as far as Anchorhead,” Luke tells Obi-Wan.  “You can get a transport there to Mos Eisley or wherever you’re going.”  It’s a Greyhound Bus stop.  Well, Ohio has its Anchorheads, too.

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

July 7, 2013

Posted under

Excursion 6 (5/4/2013)

Comments

2 Comments

Excursion 6, Part 4 (The Return of the Urn)

In which our intrepid hero re-encounters a persistent mystery…

An interesting thing happened to me the other day.  I was going on another excursion and had to pass through the town of Coshocton, Ohio, which happens to be a town in which I spent some time on this excursion as well (see Excursion 6, Part 3 as well as this post).  I passed through Coshocton from a different direction and for a different purpose, and yet somehow the choices that I made in terms of streets to turn on managed to take me past the same old industrial buildings I had seen on my first trip and past the same urns (see below) I had passed by on my first trip.  Although completely unintentionally, my brain had decided to take me on the same turns and I ended up in the same places.  It occurs to me that this is a useful analogy to our own lives:  all too frequently we think we are starting anew, but we end up back in the same old spots, despite all intentions.

Continue reading →