Tag Archives: rural

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July 7, 2013

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Excursion 6 (5/4/2013)

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Excursion 6, Part 3 (Builders of Special Machinery)

In which our intrepid hero comes across a graveyard of industry…

It is my opinion that travel is infinitely better when you are in control of the travel.  I hate being a passenger, whether in a bus, tax, train or plane.  I don’t like not being able to make decisions, I don’t like not being able to choose my travel companions, I don’t like looking out the side of something, as opposed to looking out the front.  When I was a kid, I did not like long trips at all—and why should I have liked them, stuck in the back seat for hours.  But put me behind the wheel of a car and it is very different.  Then, even when I am still not the master of my fate it still seems as if I have a role to play.  Give me a traffic jam over a long runway wait any old day of the week.

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July 7, 2013

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Excursion 6 (5/4/2013)

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Excursion 6, Part 2 (The Deception of Distance)

In which our intrepid hero encounters dead trees, dead cars and dead buildings…

One of the most interesting things about taking back-country drives is that the scale of everything changes.  The distance scale, for example, grows enormously.  Ohio is a relatively small state, and I am centrally located within it, so theoretically I can reach even the most distant parts of the state in three and a half hours.  But that is making a bee-line on a highway.  Once you start driving on curvy, back-country roads, especially driving relatively slowly to spot potential subjects for photographs (and stopping on occasion to actually take them), 20 miles somehow becomes a great distant, not a short jaunt.  Sixty miles is a huge distance.  On the other hand, the time scale slows down.  Because you are in no particular hurry, and paying attention to your surroundings rather than the clock, time passes quickly for you.  The combination of these two means that you can spend many, many hours in a vehicle and discover that you have really never driven more than 60 miles away from your starting point (though your total mileage may be much greater).

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June 19, 2013

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Excursion 5 (4/27/2013)

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Excursion 5, Part 3 (We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone)

In which our intrepid hero literally discovers the Theory of Everything…

One of the odd things about dilapidated or ruined buildings is how they juxtapose with the seasons.  If you look at a ruined building in the winter, the landscape surrounding it is as grey and colorless as the building itself; lifelessness upon lifelessness.  However, if you come across the same building in the summer (in Ohio), you will instead see a picture of contrasts:  a gray, lifeless shambles of a building surrounded by vibrant greenery.  Indeed, it may not even be surrounded but invaded by such greenery.  In this case, lifelessness confronts life itself.

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June 17, 2013

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Excursion 5 (4/27/2013)

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Excursion 5, Part 1 (Head South, Young Man)

In which our intrepid hero encounters a mystery building…

One of the saddest things about life is that we can never re-live things we experience.  Do you remember a time when you were deep in the throes of a new love—how that person made you think, how it made you feel?   Do you remember the first time you saw your favorite movie and how it made you feel?   You can’t get those feelings back; you can only vaguely remember and appreciate what it was like to have them.  It’s a less illegal version of that first hit of heroin—even if you married that person you fell in love with and have been happily with that person for decades, you don’t physically feel the same way about them.  Literally, the chemistry is different.  And you can watch that movie again, but you won’t be scared or amused or moved to the same extent that were the first time.  The movie has worn grooves in your brain now; it is no longer as fresh.  You can’t get that “first time” back.

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June 11, 2013

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Excursion 4 (4/20/2013)

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Excursion 4, Part 7 (Visit to the Far Side)

In which our intrepid hero feels a sense of deja moo…

One of the sad things about driving around and taking photographs is that, even if the photographs turn out well, even if one of the photographs actually (purely by luck) turned out to be quite high quality, the person who sees that picture will still not have experienced the scene the way my eyes did.  There are times when I wish I could just invite people into my eyeballs so that they can see a scene in just the way my own eyes perceived it.

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June 11, 2013

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Excursion 4 (4/20/2013)

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Excursion 4, Part 6 (Bridges? We don’t need no stinking bridges!)

In which our intrepid hero discovers a perilous way to check the mail…

There’s a sort of development that I call “strip” development.  I am not referring to a strip mall but rather to an artifact of terrain.  There are many places across the country where there is only a small area of relatively flat land, backed up against a hill or mountain.  On the other side is perhaps a river or maybe another hill.  Along this terrain meanders a road, with a continuous train of buildings and houses constructed in that narrow strip of land between the road and the hill.  You can’t develop to the back, so you just keep on building to the side in a long, thin strip.  In regions dominated by hilly or mountainous terrain this sort of development is extremely common.

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June 9, 2013

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Excursion 4 (4/20/2013)

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Excursion 4, Part 5 (Take Me to the River, Drop Me in the Water)

In which our intrepid hero continues his journey towards the mystical Ohio river…

I am no student of architecture but anybody who looks at enough buildings, or pictures of buildings, will eventually begin to pick up on certain architectural styles from certain eras.  That is certainly true for mundane residences and businesses.  Often you can look at a house and pretty much know when it was likely to have been built, just from its appearance.  Leaving aside signs of aging, buildings go through fads and trends just like anything else.  One such trend certainly appeared in the 19th century.  If one looks at early photographs of American towns and farmhouses, certain types of brick structures appear so often that they are often a signature—though it is true that in the 20th century some buildings were constructed in a “retro” fashion, inspired by or duplicating that earlier style.

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June 7, 2013

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Excursion 4 (4/20/2013)

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Excursion 4, Part 4 (Mo’ Tels, Mo’ Problems)

In which our intrepid hero discovers the Island of Misfit Motels…

Once past Zanesville, continuing eastward on U.S. 40, I immediately began coming across old motels again, relics of the beautiful nostalgic time between the 1920s, when travelling by car became common in America, and the 1950s, when the Interstate Highway System began to suck up all of the nation’s cross-country traffic, leaving the old motor hotels as dry as a farm after the river shifted course.

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June 7, 2013

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Excursion 4, Part 3 (Urnhenge)

In which our intrepid hero revisits Zanesville, glorious Zanesville…

Population is an odd thing.  In Ohio, the population has been stagnant for some time.  There is a small net outflow of population, just barely compensated for by births.  But within the state, population is far from stagnant.  There is an outflow of people, often quite large, from every one of Ohio’s major cities save one (Columbus).  There is also often an outflow from inner-ring suburbs.  Where are they going?  Basically to further suburbs.  Ohio’s small cities and large towns are experiencing equally bad declines, with some having lost half their populations since World War II.  Zanesville, Ohio, along U.S. 40/I-70 an hour east of Columbus, is one such town.  Where did all those people go?  I haven’t been able to find out.

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June 6, 2013

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Excursion 4 (4/20/2013)

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Excursion 4, Part 2 (…But You Can Never Leave)

In which our intrepid hero, his hour come round at last, slouches towards Zanesville…

A number of subjects in this blog will no doubt interest only me.  One subject that fascinates me but may leave others wondering is the small standalone ice cream shack.  They interest me for several reasons, including the fact that no such thing seemed to exist where I grew up.  I never saw one until I was in college—there was a “Dairy King” in one of the small towns that lined the 550 mile-long stretch of nothing between El Paso and San Antonio.  They also interest me because they seem to me sometimes to be one of the last types of truly independent small businesses.  That’s kind of funny, because they are all imitators of Dairy Queen, which actually invented soft-serve ice cream.  Dairy Queen went on to be a huge chain, but these ice cream shacks still look a lot like Dairy Queen looked in the 1940s.

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