Here we pick up midway through my trip to western Ohio, hugging the Indiana border closely without accidentally crossing over and touching something Hoosierish. Actually, on this beautiful April day in 2014, I was just about to start circling back to the northeast. It was great driving weather, especially since in Ohio April showers are indeed a thing. Birds were chirping, groundhogs were grunting, and even bales of hay seemed to have their own personal message to me…
Western Ohio is essentially the stereotypical place that non-Ohioans tend to think of when they envision Ohio: a flat expanse of farmland punctuated by the occasional town or city. Most of Ohio doesn’t actually look like that, but western Ohio does fit the bill. If you like plenty of sky in which to view approaching thunderstorms, western Ohio is your destination. It is not that populated; really, you have Dayton to the south and Toledo way up in the northwest, and that’s about it in terms of cities (Cincinnati is another world). In 2014-2015, I would have opportunity to traverse chunks of western Ohio because I had to travel a lot to Chicago for work. Each time I would go, I’d take another route so that I could try and find some things to photograph. On April 19, 2014, I was travelling in the region on a Saturday, just to see what sights were to be seen.
It is a shame that Appalachian Ohioans cannot replicate some of the successes that West Virginians have had bringing federal money to help their struggling state. But the problem is that all of West Virginia lies in Appalachia, while only part of Ohio does. None of the power centers of Ohio, all urban or suburban, are in Appalachia; the region does not have the population to have political clout nor money to purchase politicians’ attention. With no real economy, plus underfunded and under-attended schools, the region cannot attract money from the state of Ohio, to say nothing of the federal government. The region is a fairly equal mix of “red” and “blue” counties, but neither party pays attention to them, Republicans because they care nothing for the poor and Democrats because they know and care little about the rural white poor.
It was February 2014. Cold and brisk, but the weather was fine and it looked like a nice day to take an excursion. I decided to do something I had been hankering to do for quite a while, which was to return to Mud House Mansion. I had discovered this fascinating old building located a bit east of Lancaster only the month before, so the landscape (barren, winter) would look pretty much the same, but what I wanted to do was to get there very early in the morning and get some good pictures of the mansion during the pre-dawn and dawn minutes, the so-called “golden hour” of photography. Well, the plans of mice and men oft gang agley and my exquisite timing was ruined completely when a woman driving a jeep mounted with a battering ram rear-ended by Pilot in downtown Lancaster. She had a grill guard on the front of Jeep (designed to protect vehicles from deer and such hitting the front of the car), but it was one that protruded well in front of the vehicle and that steel frame ploughed into the back of my SUV, caving in the rear door and doing about $7,000 or so worth of damage. So much for golden hour.
Unearthed Ohio is active again, after some time off for questionable behavior. Unlike most blogs, where inactivity for an extended time portends doom, the extended hibernation here was deliberate. Much of my free time this past year was spent working with a designer and a developer to create a new version of my other website, then I had to import and convert the old content, then catch up, and, well, it was a monumental undertaking. I had to put Unearthed Ohio to the side—though I never stopped the actual photography. Now I can catch up a bit. With this blog entry, I present photographs from a trip I took in mid-February 2014, deep in the heart of the Polar Vortex. As I write this intro, however, I seem to be deep in the heart of Polar Vortex 2: Electric Boogaloo. Two very nasty winters in a row. The one advantage that a winter offers is winter landscapes and last year I took the opportunity of a recent snowfall to do some experimentation with snowy photography, which I present to you herewith.
In which our intrepid hero chances upon the manse macabre…
A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs.
B is for Basil, assaulted by bears.
C is for Clara, who wasted away.
D is for Desmond, thrown out of a sleigh.
Those are the first few lines of the Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet book consisting of 26 different children meeting untimely ends. The Tinies are the work of Edward Gorey, a rather amazing author and artist, whose distinctive visual style was a sort of goth Edwardiana. I first encountered Gorey in high school and fell in love with his dark wit and unique artistic style.
Little did I know that a bit more than 30 years after I discovered Gorey that I would encounter a mansion that looked as if it came right out of one of his books.
In which our intrepid hero gets in touch with his inner Victorian…
For many people, the Christmas season is rather depressing, but I must confess that I typically am filled with good cheer during that time of year, even though I am not Christian. There is just something to the Christmas season for me, a period in which—in theory, at least—there really is “good will towards man” and with the gift-giving, people often do make an attempt to be thoughtful to others. As a result, I am very pro-Christmas, even if from a secular viewpoint. On this Christmas day, I found several examples of this seasonal “good will” that made me think the world wasn’t really all bad.
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 gets to dwell on dwellings…
Are you a home orphan? By that, I don’t mean homeless, but do you no longer have ties to the home in which you grew up? Some of us can easily go back to the home of our youths, because other relatives, typically parents, may still live there. You can revisit your old room, for example. But not me. My parents sold my childhood home in 1988 or so, the year I graduated from college and moved to Ohio.
I grew up in a house on 2624 Hawick, El Paso, Texas. This was a subdivision with streets named on Irish themes built in the late 1950s. My house was built in 1959. It was a tiny house, three bedrooms but only around 1,000 square feet or so. My mother was from El Paso, my father from Pennsylvania. They lived in Pennsylvania after getting married but in 1970 they moved back to El Paso. I was four years old. We stayed at my grandparents’ house until my parents bought the home on Hawick.
In which our intrepid hero hopes that oil’s well that ends well…
Fracking concerns me, I admit it. I should hasten to point out that I do not, as many do, oppose fracking, no more than I oppose genetically modified crops. But I believe both technologies should be treated prudently, with an eye towards identifying and preventing problems. I am concerned about groundwater contamination, I am concerned about earthquakes. I can only hope that Ohio is wise enough to create a good regulatory and oversight foundation and will be proactive enough to try to deal with potential problems before they become actual ones.
Beyond that, though, I am concerned about something that it may not be within the power of the state of Ohio to regulate, and that is that Ohioans themselves will not benefit enough from fracking. One would think that it is a rare blessing that Ohio’s deposits are located in the economically blighted Ohio Appalachia; those areas certainly deserve a break, right? Yet it is those same areas that have Ohio’s traditional oil deposits as well, as can be seen by the hundreds and hundreds of wells dotting the countryside. And that traditional oil wealth seems not to have benefited eastern Ohioans much at all—so will fracking do so, or will the gains simply be siphoned out of the state, much like Ohio’s gambling money largely is? I hope the people who need the money the most get some of it.
Unearthed Ohio 