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November 14, 2013

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Excursion 11 (6-10-13)

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Excursion 11, Part 2 (There and Back Again)

In which our intrepid hero reaches his destination and begins his return to the Shire…

One consequence of growing up in the desert is that I came to enjoy rainy days, rare as they are there.  This, I discovered, was an attitude quite foreign to people living in the Midwest, where I have lived for the past quarter-century.  Yet even so many years later, cloudy days do not depress me as they do so many others and I get a thrill every time a thunderstorm occurs.  Ohio gets its fair share of thunder and lightning, but the most impressive lightning show I ever saw occurred in El Paso one summer night in the mid-1980s.  I left the house that evening on some minor errand, driving on a wide-open street with an expansive view.  The storm had already begun and lightning lit up the entire sky.  Indeed, so many simultaneous lightning strikes were occurring each second that it was almost like an eerie artificial daylight.  I was virtually the only person on the road, so the whole display seemed as if it were some sort of special show just for me.  I have never forgotten that moment.

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October 19, 2013

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Excursion 10 (6/8/2013)

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Excursion 10, Part 1 (My Baby Thinks Three’s A Train)

In which our intrepid hero discovers a three-tiered transport…

One of the fringe benefits of a hobby like this is that it adds an extra flair to many mundane activities.  For example, a friend of mine who lives in Troy, Ohio, invited me over on June 8 to play a strategy game.  Troy is a town north of Dayton that is perhaps 75 minutes away from Columbus via the Interstate.  But if I left several hours early, I could use back roads to get some picture taking before I got there, which is what I did.  Now I wasn’t simply trying to get from Point A to Point B, I was also having an experience.

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September 1, 2013

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Excursion 9 (6/1/2013)

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Excursion 9, Part 3 (Shack Attack)

In which our intrepid hero experiences the concord of (New) Lexington…

In America, there is a great gulf between rich and poor.  Even greater than the gulf in income, I think, is the gulf in empathy and understanding.  Most middle class and an even greater number of wealthy people have no personal experience in what it is like to experience poverty—statistics clearly show that social mobility in the United States is not very high (in fact, among developed countries, the U.S. has one of the lowest rates of social mobility).  I myself am in a somewhat unusual position.  Twice in my life I have experienced extended periods of poverty, while currently I have a comfortable middle class income.  Moreover, because of the university I did my undergraduate work at and because of the job I currently hold, I have met or been friends with many people far wealthier than me, including a couple of billionaires.

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September 1, 2013

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Excursion 9 (6/1/2013)

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Excursion 9, Part 2 (Every Knee Shall Bow)

In which our intrepid hero encounters various signs of religious inclinations…

It goes without saying that religion is a touchy subject, as many deeply held beliefs can be.  My own perspective on religion is slightly unusual.  I was raised Catholic in a city with a significant Catholic population.  However, I still remember from my childhood being passed anti-Catholic comic books published by Jack Chick and being told by one Baptist that I was going to go to Hell for being a Catholic.  I became aware of religious prejudice at an early age.  However, religion did not “take” with me.  By the time I was an adult I had become an atheist.  Yet I always had a great many friends and relatives from a variety of religions whose opinions and perspectives I greatly respected.  Later, as I began professionally to get into the arena of studying (and combating) extremism, I became even more familiar both with religious prejudices as well as prejudices against people because of their religion.   And for more than a dozen years I have been working for a civil rights organization dedicated to fighting against such prejudices.

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August 24, 2013

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Excursion 8 (5/19/2013)

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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.

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August 4, 2013

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Excursion 8 (5/19/2013)

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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.

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July 21, 2013

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Excursion 7 (5/9/2013)

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Excursion 7, Part 5 (Springfield in Spring)

In which our intrepid hero takes some time to soak in some Springfieldian sights…

On my way back home, I passed through Springfield, a town about 30 minutes west of Columbus.  The light was already fading, but Springfield is such an interesting town that I decided to take at least a few pictures anyway, though I will certainly come back for a more extended sojourn (in better light).  Of course, the same things that make Springfield interesting to me may seem undesirable for others.

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July 21, 2013

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Excursion 7 (5/9/2013)

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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.

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July 7, 2013

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Excursion 6 (5/4/2013)

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Excursion 6, Part 5 (A Barn Doomed to Disappointment)

In which our intrepid hero is reminded that the world is always changing…

It’s amazing how very different we can feel depending on whether or not we are going somewhere or returning from somewhere.  The leaving is filled with expectation—hopefully a happy, excited sort of expectation, but we all know we sometimes leave towards destinations we dread.  The return, though, is usually completely different.  Sometimes we are simply anxious to get home and it doesn’t even matter what is around us—we have only that one thought in mind:  GET HOME.  Sometimes we are more relaxed about it and can enjoy the journey, understanding that at its end is the comfort and familiarity of home.  I remember once, when I was in high school, returning home in the darkness from some interminable bus ride from somewhere in west Texas.  I had a Walkman with me and was playing Simon & Garfunkel’s Concert in Central Park.  When the song “Homeward Bound” played, it hit me like a ton of bricks.  As I’ve grown older (and am now pretty close to the half century mark), the song has only become more powerful to me and if I ever hear it while I am coming back from a long trip I get quite melancholic.

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July 7, 2013

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Excursion 6 (5/4/2013)

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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.

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