Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Weird Ohio
Ohio welcomes me in the middle of a broad reservoir whose name I fail to note. The world is so flat here that you can dam the smallest creek and end up with a reservoir about three miles wide, so there's no reason to think it's a river of any consequence.
US 6 is going to take me straight across to Cleveland, where my plan is to meet Lake Erie and follow it around to Toledo. On the way I pass through a cute little town called Hartsgrove, and make the mistake of circling around the town square a second time to try to catch a picture (which turns out not to be even worth posting). On the way back around, I see this:
and this:
and foolishly decide to investigate. Now, had I thought about this for longer than three seconds, I'd have considered that a museum in Hartsgrove, Ohio, whose population appears to be about 150, is unlikely to have a well-balanced proprietor inside, and that I'm still trying to be on a schedule of sorts, and that tangling with a non-well-balanced museum proprietor might not serve that schedule.
But I push on the door, and it opens, and inside is - well, let me cut to the chase. I spend at least an hour in the building, and I never get to see the museum, because Curator-Author-Founder Nick Pahys, Jr., DDG-CH-AdVS, subjects me to all manner of discourse about the way history is taught in school, my religious training, why I couldn't teach English well (because I didn't know that John Hanson was the first US President, in particular), his nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize, and the definition of the word "whoring." You get the idea. He proudly points to his picture on the title page of Weird Ohio. He shows me his listing in Great Americans of the Twenty-first Century or some such volume - there are several like on the shelf - as evidence of his authority. At times it's all I can do to keep from laughing, mostly because I'm imagining the conversation if various friends were to stop in, and you know who you are, and you should not do so.I cannot do this man justice. The folks at "Roadside America" did pretty well, though.
I never find out why John Hanson was the first president of the United States, although it seems to have something to do with the Articles of Confederation (the Old Testament to our current constitution's New Testament, I am informed). I am told by Mr. Pahys that my willingness to continue in this state of ignorance shows that I just don't care, and I openly concede the point to him. I do not pay $39.95 for his book. I do not climb the stairs to the second story museum, because there is no clear indication of how many more hours of conversation I may have to endure before and during my tour. All I can think of is how I long to see the sun again.
Eventually I do. I take the scenic route (proof, again, of my lack of interest in the Truth) through Chardon, Ohio, and the bucolic suburbs east of Cleveland, and then the considerably less bucolic suburb of East Cleveland. And Cleveland itself, where route 6 becomes Euclid Avenue.Fifteen or twenty years ago, when I lived in Ohio or was doing a recruiting tour for Pomona College, I would drive down Euclid Avenue and Superior and St. Clair, and admire the mostly empty but still magnificent architecture, both the enormous homes of the city's old industrialists and the giant, vacant warehouses and office buildings. The place had great bones, and if they were in a city and a state that had a clue, they'd be loft apartments and dot-com headquarters now.
On this trip, they're mostly gone. The place just looks empty. It's as if they've finally decided to leave the fifties and its relics behind and move right on to the urban planning of the seventies. Euclid is lined with suburban style strip malls and grassy lots and various outbuildings of the Cleveland Clinic, which takes away the squalor but also removes yet more property from the tax rolls. They're paving a spiffy boulevard, which will enable whoever still works downtown to flee even faster at 5:02.
I can't get through downtown fast enough. Actually, I can barely get through downtown at all, because Euclid and several other streets are closed for a festival that no one seems to be attending. Things are better on the west side, but I still feel like I've just visited a dying friend.I pick up US 2 and follow the Lake Erie shore through a torrential thunderstorm, passing through Lorain and skirting Sandusky, crossing Sandusky Bay and up through the Catawba peninsula. I've never failed to see a heron here by the side of the road, and I don't today. The storm clears, and it looks like this:
