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March 29, 2014

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Excursion 18 (9/13/2013)

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Excursion 18 (Cornucopia)

In which our intrepid hero contemplates the passage of time…

For my 18th excursion across Ohio, I decided to head northwest, essentially in the direction of Findlay.  Northwestern Ohio is heavily agricultural and relatively sparsely populated (until you get up to the Toledo area) and this excursion, conducted in mid-September, came at the tail end of Ohio’s agricultural season.  Over recent months I had driven all around Ohio, but typically every week or two, which turned out to create an odd, strobe-like effect when it came to crops like corn.  You’d go out one time, and see seedlings, then the next time young stalks and before you really had a chance to adjust, you were seeing corn in its full growth.  The effect could be jarring, like seeing a child after an absence of a couple of years, missing the interim of wild growth.  Watching in this fashion the 2013 crop come in created a sense of acceleration of time for me, like things were moving too quickly.  Of course, we experience that in our own lives, too.

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March 1, 2014

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Excursion 17 (9/5/20130

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Excursion 17, Part 1 (The Eagle Has Landed)

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.

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March 1, 2014

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Excursion 16 (8/18/2013)

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Excursion 16, Part 4 (The Hanging House)

In which our intrepid hero encounters some bad noose…

This year I “celebrate” my 20th year of studying extremists in the United States, something that began as a completely unplanned and odd little outgrowth of my dissertation (which had nothing to do with extremism or, for that matter, the 20th century).  By January 1995, I was spending a lot of time looking at domestic extremists and the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing essentially changed my life forever, causing me to focus on extremism and terrorism, first voluntarily and soon professionally.  I’ve done that ever since.  But my very first encounter with extremism occurred decades earlier, when I was a child.

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March 1, 2014

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Excursion 16 (8/18/2013)

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Excursion 16, Part 3 (Requiem for a Limousine)

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.

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February 18, 2014

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Excursion 16 (8/18/2013)

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Excursion 16, Part 2 (Ashes to Ashes, Rust to Rust)

In which our intrepid hero returns to the Rust Belt along the Ohio River…

The city where I grew up, El Paso, Texas, had industry of a sort, but mostly of the resource-processing kind, such as the city’s numerous refineries (oil, copper, etc.).  I think the first time I ever encountered America’s stereotypical industrial economy was the first time I visited Cleveland, Ohio, circa 1989.  I was driving on one of the Interstates in the metro area and there was a certain point where, if I looked south, all I could see, it seemed, was a vista full of smokestacks belching fumes.  That was my welcome to industry.  Of course, by then Cleveland had already been a rust belt city for some time, so I could only image what it might have been like in, say, the 1950s.  Still, even in the 21st century, Cleveland still operates as an industrial city, both in the old sense (polymers, automobiles, etc.) as well as in the newer sense (information technology, biotechnology, etc.).

In contrast, the cities and towns along the Ohio River have been less able to weather the storm.

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February 18, 2014

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Excursion 16 (8/18/2013)

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Excursion 16, Part 1 (Consider the Lilies)

In which our intrepid hero experiences his first ever car chase…

Ohio, it turns out, is not a particularly sunny state.  Ohio’s major cities average only between 63 and 77 days of sunshine (defined as 30% or less cloud cover) per year.  More than half of the days in Ohio have at least 80% cloud cover.  Chicago has more clear days than Columbus (which falls somewhere in the middle of Ohio’s range); Boston has several weeks worth of more clear days; Dallas has nearly twice the number of clear days as Columbus; and Las Vegas has three times the number of clear days as Columbus.   I was unable to find out how 2013 compared to the average for Ohio, but it seems to me, based on my excursions in 2013, that either 2013 was a particularly cloudy year for Ohio or I must have had been particularly unlucky in the days I was able to drive, because when I look back at the photographs I took in 2013, it seems like it was cloudy on almost every excursion.

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February 2, 2014

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Excursion 15 (8/6/2013)

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Excursion 15, Part 5 (Happy Trailers)

In which our intrepid hero uncovers a little Lost City…

My opinions about mobile homes and travel trailers is decidedly mixed.  While I like the idea of being a hermit crab, going around with your house on your back, taking all of your conveniences with you, I find that the practical reality is less than the ideal.   Because of little things like plumbing and electricity, you aren’t really free but still tethered to campgrounds, and having to deal with things like hooking up sewage, etc., does not appeal to my lazy nature.  Although I admit that they seem to be great for cooking meth in.

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February 2, 2014

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Excursion 15 (8/6/2013)

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Excursion 15, Part 4 (The Golden Hour)

In which our intrepid hero finds himself homeward bound as a long day winds down…

This blog is all about journeys and explorations.  Most visibly, it is about me exploring different parts of Ohio and recording what I see.  It is also about me exploring photography itself and trying to become a better photographer, despite my inherent limitations (such as considerable impatience).   I have been trying to educate myself on cameras, on photography, and, more recently, on post-processing and HDR.  From the vantage point of this writing, in early February 2014, some six months after these photographs were taken, I have seen improvement on my part and I hope there will be more.

Landscape photographers like to refer to the early morning or the time around sunset as “golden hours,” because the light is a soft, warm light that lends itself to attractive photographs, and because the dynamic range of light at those hours is close to what cameras can naturally reproduce.   An alien anthropologist who studied Earth only through its landscape photography might be forgiven for thinking that Earth was a planet of perpetual sunset.

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February 2, 2014

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Excursion 15 (8/6/2013)

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Excursion 15, Part 3 (Sins of a City)

In which our intrepid hero explores a town under shadow…

One of the more prominent rust belt towns along the Ohio River is Steubenville.  Most Americans had never heard of this town until 2012.  That year, a horrifying news story emerged from Steubenville.  A group of high school students, including members of Steubenville High School’s vaunted football team, sexually assaulted a teenaged girl at a party.   Steubenville adults were nowhere to be seen, it seems, as groups of students drank heavily at various parties around town.  The victim, already drunk, left one party to go to another, accompanied by a handful of football players.  There she drank even more and became incapacitated.  After a while, the group left the party to go to a third, and then to someone’s home.  In the car, one of the assailants removed the victim’s shirt and sexually assaulted her, while others took pictures of the assault.  At the house, the assailants took off the rest of her clothes, then two of them sexually assaulted her again.  Once again, the whole incident was caught in pictures.

What followed was as shameful as the initial assault.

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January 26, 2014

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Excursion 15 (8/6/2013)

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Excursion 15, Part 2 (The Ghosts of Steel)

In which our intrepid hero puts another notch on his Rust Belt…

When I was a young child, my parents took me to visit a ghost town, the old mining town of Mogollon (of Spanish origin, now pronounced muggy-own) in far west New Mexico in the Gila Mountains.  In the 1890s, Mogollon was a happening place, with thousands of residents who were involved, directly or indirectly, in the mining of gold and silver (the same mining that would give nearby Silver City its name).  However, by the 1920s, many of the mines had shut down and an exodus followed.  By 1930, its population was only around 200.   When the last nearby mine shut down in the 1950s, the remnants of its population blew away like dust.  When I visited the town, probably circa 1973 or so, it seemed to have been abandoned for a century.

That’s one type of ghost town.  But there’s another.

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