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January 26, 2014

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Excursion 15 (8/6/2013)

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Excursion 15, Part 1 (Up the Old Ohio)

In which our intrepid hero travels up a lazy river…

Typically, in introductions to blog entries such as this one, I have tried to evoke personal memories of years long since gone, but recently, the only memories easily evocable have been dreams of only a few short months ago, those naïve times before I had ever heard of terms like “polar vortex.”  After several years of very mild winters, the winter of 2013-2014 has been a shock to my system I still have not quite gotten used to.  Although we’ve had years with more snow, in terms of pure coldness, this is the nastiest winter we’ve had here in Ohio in 20 years and I guess I was getting spoiled.  As I type, though, the temperature is around 11 degrees, it has been snowing, the wind is whipping outside my window, and the forecast is telling me that two days from now the high temperature will be below zero and the low somewhere around 15 below.  In times like these, I can look at photographs such as these from early August 2013 and almost feel the warmth coming from them.

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January 12, 2014

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Excursion 14 (7/13/2013)

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Excursion 14, Part 4 (Alone in East Liverpool)

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.

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January 4, 2014

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Excursion 14 (7/13/2013)

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Excursion 14, Part 2 (Turn and Face the Strange)

In which our intrepid hero looks at some ch-ch-ch-ch-changes…

A few times when I was a kid, a neighbor of ours took his kids and me and my sister out into the desert outside El Paso to go “sand surfing.”  This involved taking the wheels off of a kid’s red wagon and tying the wheel-less wagon to the trailer hitch of a truck with four-wheel drive.  The truck would then go up and down some of the dirt roads and arroyos, dragging the wagon behind it, and you would be standing on the wagon, holding on to a rope also tied to the truck, hanging on for dear life and hoping that when you were finally bucked from the wagon you would not land on a cactus or rattlesnake or sharp rock.

Many years later, I reminisced about this to someone, who let me know of her sharp disapproval.  “Don’t you know how fragile the desert environment is?  Don’t you know how much damage you did to that ecology?”  Not being from El Paso, she didn’t understand, so I had to explain it to her.  “This was the desert right outside El Paso,” I said.  “That desert was only going to be there for a couple more years before development would swallow it up.”  This was because, thanks to geographic and other conditions, the tide of growth in El Paso is overwhelmingly in one direction, to the east.  And I was right.  What was desert for me back then vanished in the blink of an eye, to become three and four bedroom ranch houses.  And then the desert beyond that.  And the desert beyond that.  The rate of change in that place at that time was incredible.  Where I used to have to go to get out of the city into the desert is now miles and miles within the city itself.

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January 4, 2014

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Excursion 14 (7/13/2013)

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Excursion 14, Part 1 (Pastoral Ohio)

In which our intrepid hero cows some cows…

As I sit here typing on my computer, the weather outside is 11 degrees (Fahrenheit, of course; I do not belong to Al Qaeda).  The next few days are going to get much colder.  The winter of 2013-2014 so far has been a pretty darn cold one for Ohio.  That arctic quality is only enhanced when I look at the photographs in this blog entry, which were taken last July 13 on a gloriously sunny summer’s day.  As an obese person, I tend to prefer extremes of cold over extremes of heat (you can always put on another layer, but you can only get so naked), but I am not much for extremes of any sort.  Although I can put up with cold weather, I really am a weather wimp.  I would be much happier if the temperature always stayed between 69 and 72 degrees.

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December 29, 2013

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Excursion 13 (6/22/2013)

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Excursion 13 (Checking Out Without Checking In)

In which our intrepid hero checks out a collection of old motor hotels…

In various previous excursions, I traveled along most of Ohio’s stretch of US-40, once one of America’s most important highways but now a forgotten backwater.  The most interesting thing about US-40 are its many old motor hotels or motels, constructed mostly from the 1930s through the 1950s before the Interstate Highway system doomed them to oblivion.  Now some have been razed, others are in ruins, still others have been repurposed to some other effect (typically as low income apartments), and a few manage somehow to hang on.

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December 22, 2013

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Excursion 12 (6/15/2013)

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Excursion 12, Part 4 (Relics of Yesteryear)

In which our intrepid hero finds himself transported to days long past…

I am always aware of my photographic limitations.  Not only does the methodology I employ (roadside photography) have many drawbacks that limit the number of good photographs I can take, but my own inherent limitations reduce that number still further.  As of this writing, I have been taking these sorts of photographs for only around eight months; these particular photographs were taken after only three months.  So much of my photography is either of the “even a broken clock is right twice a day” variety or of the “interesting subject, not so good photograph” variety.  I acknowledge that.  On the other hand…

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December 22, 2013

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Excursion 12 (6/15/2013)

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Excursion 12, Part 3 (All Roads Lead to Coshocton)

In which our intrepid hero discovers a lonely house on a hill…

Having always basically been a city boy, some aspects of living in the country seem very different to me, including basic issues of convenience.  For example, for many years I lived in a townhouse apartment in Grandview, a Columbus neighborhood/incorporated town.  My apartment was not just in walking distance but within ridiculously easy walking distance of a grocery store, a pharmacy, several ATMs, a gas station, a number of restaurants from fast food to fancy, two bookstores, a couple of coffee places, two bakeries, a post office, a produce store, and much more.  I live in a more typical suburb now, which means that only a few things are that close, but essentially everything is just a short car ride away.  But if you live in the countryside, nothing is going to be close, and your options will be fewer.  There are many places in Ohio so far away from a gas station that unless you maintain a gas tank on your property you essentially have to plan when you are going to get gas.  Do you have a late night craving?  Better hope you took that into account when you bought groceries two weeks ago, because no store within many miles will be open.

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December 21, 2013

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Excursion 12 (6/15/2013)

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Excursion 12, Part 2 (From Farm to Forest)

In which our intrepid hero  visits one of his frequent crossroads…

I have a long history with the television show “I Love Lucy.”  In fact, when I was three or four years old, “I Love Lucy” taught me a valuable lesson.  Sometime in 1969 or 1970 I was watching an episode of “I Love Lucy” and my mother walked into the room and announced that the family was going somewhere.  She turned off the television and we got into the car and left (I have no idea what the destination was).  When we returned, some time later, I turned the television on so that I could finish watching “I Love Lucy.”  But it wasn’t on!  That was when I discovered that when you turned the television off, the shows on TV did not stop playing but continued while you were not around!

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December 21, 2013

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Excursion 12 (6/15/2013)

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Excursion 12, Part 1 (A Man of No People)

In which our intrepid hero explains his hermit ways…

One reaction that I’ve had to the photographs posted in these blog entries has been to wonder why my photos rarely ever contain people in them.  One person who viewed some of the photos in the blog wondered jokingly if they were images taken after the Zombie Apocalypse.  It’s true that human beings are far and few between in my photos.  One reason is that my photos are all developed using Soylent Green software.  But there are other reasons, too.

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November 14, 2013

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Excursion 11 (6-10-13)

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Excursion 11, Part 3 (Motor Castles for Motor Carriages)

In which our intrepid hero encounters much roadside lodging of a bygone era…

Every frequent traveler has their hotel stories to tell.  One little one of mine comes from a trip to Little Rock, Arkansas, in the 1990s.  I walked into my hotel room to discover that there was an agitated bee in the hotel room.  That was a little disconcerting.  I am not afraid of bees but I respect them and being in the same hotel room as one struck me as being a mite too close for comfort.  So I called down to the front desk and told them to send someone up with some bugspray.  Eventually a hotel staff member arrived but he didn’t have any bugspray.  How the hotel expected him to kill the bee was beyond me.  What he did have was bug-eyes and I soon discovered the reason that he was so fearful was because he was, allegedly, allergic to bee stings.  “So the hotel sent the one guy allergic to bee stings to come kill my bee?” I asked.  “And didn’t give him anything to kill it with?”   We saw, eventually, that more than anything the bee just wanted out of there—he kept trying to get out through the window (which did not open).  So finally we decided to team up—one of us trapped the bee in some of the window curtains while the other thwacked him with a book (probably the hotel room bible).  Final score:  Bee 0, Two Idiots 1.

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