Wooster of the Middle West

Route 30, the old Lincoln Highway, makes its way across Ohio the way those old highways do. It dips and undulates to connect East Liverpool to Van Wert, by way of Minerva to Canton to Massillon to Mansfield.

Somewhere just shy of Dalton, just after Stark County rolls into Wayne, on a ripe and sultry July morning, I drop off the highway and onto the back roads. This is not the flat expanse of the Great Plains, where vast grids of corn stretch to an infinite horizon. This is Wayne County, Ohio, where farms snuggle onto hillocks and little creeks carve valleys and grain elevators crown the hill.

Hello, Ohio.

At Mt. Eaton, where Winesburg, Canton, Massillon and Dover Roads converge on a hilltop, Sugar, Chestnut, and Berry Streets form the tiniest of urban grids. On this busy market Saturday, buggies outnumber autos in the elevator parking lot. At the meridian hour, over a lunch of Trail bologna and local cheese on a hot picnic table in the gravel parking lot, I watch a Saturday unfold.

Horses trot at a surprising gait right through the center of town. In the market, Mennonites and Amish in homemade trousers and a variety of bonnets make the processed hair and bedazzled summer T shirts of the "English" seem all the more garish. Suddenly it seems like flip flops and faded tattoos and halter tops are a bit TOO much exposed flesh. Boys with blond bowl cuts under straw hats purchase big bottles of Mountain Dew, and I try to be patient as a woman in front of me pays for her purchase with a personal check, rendered s l o w l y, in exquisite school marm cursive script. Outside, a team of horses pull a flattopped wagon, upon which half a dozen Amish children sit on collapsible nylon canvas camp chairs.

I wander the tiny grid and find something just feels right about little garages that resemble barns or stables, with sun baked planks shedding brittle paint. Clumps of day lily brighten dooryards. A horse nuzzles over a plank fence right in the center of town. A hand numbered "For Sale" sign on a sagging, asphalt shingled house on the corner of Berry Street. And of course,  the cemetery, the yellow brick school house with bell tower, and definitely the grain elevator NEED to crown this hilltop village, in perfect situation under a warm meridian sun. I'm getting my Walker Evans on.

Windows down, I take to the highways once more, turning off the GPS, relying on the names of roads and my sense of what lies beyond to take me where I need to go.

Which is how I find myself, in Wooster. I approach from the south, where the elevators and fairgrounds and feed stores tell me this is the seat of an agrarian land.

I wonder the tracks, where factories abut the railyards still. I trespass into an abandoned cold storage warehouse, where brittle plank walls peel a sign painter's art. I remember an old brick building at Pittsburgh Street, with rooms to let, a seedy bar, a ramshackle barber shop, and though sad to see it gone, I remember that even twenty years ago it seemed to have stayed on too long. Ditto, over on the "proper" side of the tracks, Freedlander's Department Store with its sales desks linked by pneumatic tubes.

I marvel at the stone pile of civic virtue, the Wayne County Court House, with its heaving Berea sandstone statues of Atlantes, and remember Arn Lewis showing slides in Art History, to illustrate whatever is the proper term for building columns in a humanoid form.

I ascend Market Street, where Protestants of every denomination build spires that somehow embody their sect's way to Truth. Without looking at signs, I think I can tell the Presbyterians from the Episcopals, the Disciples from the Methodists, the Brethren from the Seventh-Day Adventists.

On Bever Street, Founder's Row, houses ascend in an architectural fantasia: American Foursquare, Tudor Revival, great Victorian piles, Queen Anne shingles. I think about how houses, mostly stolid and stout, though some flamboyant, so predominate this landscape. I think of how citizens project themselves into a community, the face we present to our neighbors.

Atop the hill, I enter the Oak Grove, and seek the boulder with the old brass plaque telling the story of how James Armstromg Reed knelt on this hill, gazed across the Killbuck Valley, and prayed himself a college.

"Riding across this hilltop a late September afternoon in 1865, he halted and gazed upon the wide valley and slopes beyond, then dismounted, knelt down, and prayed that here should stand a college dedicated to the glory of God and to humane learning."

I imagine this hilltop, without all the houses below, an open vista to a valley I can no longer see. These  trees were here when he knelt after a wilderness horseback journey and prayed. These trees, this grove, retain at times--if you you pause, if you seek the boulder, if you leave the heat and bustle and enter its shady canopy--the serene aura of a sacred place.

The twin turreted towers of this college, so boldly built in the wilderness, arose on this hill, fulfilled a vision, and anchor a campus of mostly yellow brick in a Collegiate Gothic style.

I think about this day's journey, this random but purposeful ramble, the need to leave the highway and enter the back roads, to feel the earth rise and swell, to see how a barn is banked perfectly into the hillside, a farmhouse hugs the ridge, a town rises to a yellow brick school house with bell tower.

Tiny Mt. Eaton, mid size Wooster: two American cities, in the Ohio heartland, built on hilltops, rising to their citizen's aspirations. A house, a town, a college, a life: a need to leave a mark, build a place.

I think about my need this sweltering afternoon, to walk this city, from the tracks to its peek, to enter its alleys, to trespass its abandoned shells. It is my visceral need to connect to this place, and I do it through walking for miles, purposeful but with no real plan. I realize this afternoon, though I have never forgotten, I am from this state, I am from these towns. Not this town, not Mt. Eaton, but towns with spires, towns on hilltops. When I return to my hometown after periods away, I feel the need to dip my toes her crooked river. When I encounter an old Ohio town somewhere off the main highway but with a rail spur, I feel the need to walk its streets and read its spires.

I remember my grandfather, resting on a boulder, after we'd hunted the hillside for elusive morels. He urges me to Mt. Pleasant's summit, his town's highest peak, so I could look down and see Lancaster's red brick streets and white frame houses, its proud fairgrounds, its rich loamy fields that went on forever, or at last to the Hocking Hills.

This need to ramble. This need to seek out remains. Things that are faded. Things that are rusting. Things that still speak of their maker's care and pride.

Hello, Ohio.

I know your back roads, like the palm of my hand.

Where The River Burned

Biking through a sun dappled cottonwood grove. A river, slow and wide, meanders on my left. A stagnant canal, thick with duckweed, oozes rather than flows to the right.

Turtles sun themselves on mossy logs.  A Great Blue Heron, perched on spindly legs, seems deep in a reptilian slumber, until I notice alert, ink-black eyes staring into the murky canal slurry. It darts its head below water, and emerges with a fish flopping in its beak. Spindly legs remain planted and have not moved from their perch in the pea green sludge.

A fawn, still speckled and furtive, stares me down from the middle of the path. She darts her head to the left and the right, unsure which direction to retreat. She chooses the river. Leaping over brambles and boulders, in an instant white spots blur to white tail, and then nothing.

The canopy opens.

I am in a clearing, the sun beats down on wildflowers and red crested sumac. Above the canal, on a mountain made of slag, the carcass of a wire factory looms. Chemical distilleries and petroleum tanks. An enormous blast furnace's mouldering hull.

For hours previous, my sylvan idyll was interrupted only by the ruin of an occasional sandstone canal lock, lichen crusted and mossy, or an old iron bridge trestle, picturesque with rust. Now, looming before me, suddenly, the dregs of the Industrial Era. I find myself, after 37 languid miles, engulfed in Cleveland's Industrial Valley.

My journey along this old river, my river, this winding Cuyahoga, is full of surprises.

My hometown's eponymous river has a reputation that precedes me.

In 1969 she burned. A conflagration that lasted just 30 minutes, it was extinguished without much fanfare, perhaps because it wasn't the first time. 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948, and 1952 also brought flames to the thick oily sludge the river became once it reached Cleveland.

In my  travels, my hometown's namesake sometimes got a funny reaction. Cuyahoga? Isn't that where the river burned?

A lifetime of that barb perhaps made me defensive.

My prose turns downright purple when I describe her craggy cliffs, her mossy glens, her silver barked beech trees, stretching sinewy arms to a cerulean sky, anchored to a tenuous steep sandstone foundation, flecked with lucky rocks.

I explain to people, my part of the river, upriver, is where she bends, at the great gorge, and cascades in virile cataracts through sandstone canyons. She then makes a sharp turn north, to eventually dump into Lake Erie, just thirty miles from her headwaters after a meandering 100 mile course.

But all they know is the burn.

I have paddled her headwaters at Hiram.

I have searched her source in Geauga County.

When I was away from her, I felt the primeval need to dip my toes in her sweet, oleaginous waters whenever I returned.

I know, in quite deep particularity, her shores and her islands, at her massive bend here at Summit County, her highest point, the base of her "U."

But, in all these travels, I have never traced my river to her destination. I had never seen where the mouth of my river meets the placid Erie shore.

So on this day, halfway through my fortieth year, I set out to see where the river burned, on a 1977 French Motobecane racing bike, perpetually stuck in low gear.

I start at that old beauty spot, the Prospect Street Bridge, above the Highbridge Glens, where Victorian ladies in bustles descended to amble along picturesque riverside trails, and mustachioed gentlemen trolleyed in for a day's excursion. They marvel in sublime awe at sandstone caverns. Otherworldly ice formations drip from steep ravine walls.

By my earliest memories, at our nation's Bicentennial, it was just machine shops and old rusty turbines, auto dealers and parts stores perched atop those canyons walls, with barely a hint of what lay below. I remember the old Glens restaurant, dark leather booths and special steak dinners. I assumed it was named after some guy, Glen.

Along the lip of the Gorge I continue, past rows of postwar houses. At Babb's Run I begin the descent, down North Hill to Merriman Valley. This is where things bottom out, the rest of the journey is flat, along the towpath, where mules once trod.

Through the old Western Reserve villages of Peninsula and Boston and Brecksville, Greek Revival farmhouses and bank barns, old mossy canal locks and rusting steel bridges, portend the industrial ravages ahead.

Boston Store, circa 1836.

Stanford Farm Bank Barn, circa 1830s

Deep Lock, Peninsula, Ohio

Alexander Mill, at Valley View, circa 1852

1888 steel trestle bridge, spanning the Cuyahoga, at Brecksville, built in Massillon, Ohio.

And, everywhere, the bridges, dwarfing you at Stumpy Basin, looming at Boston Mill, positively Brobdingnagian at I-480. This old river, meandering and languid though she seems, carved herself a chasm, deep and wide.

Brecksville Viaduct

I-480 overpass

Art Deco canal overpass, at Valley View.

Shortline Trestle, Cleveland.

Finally at her destination, my river meets the inland sea beneath colossal industrial ruins. From a rusty freight train trestle, I view my river, wide and concrete walled, excavated for freighters. There is no discernible oily sludge, her waters almost smell sweet.  Towering all around me, ruins of an era slowly folding in on itself, and I can't help but think: this old river's best days, may be those yet to come.

Someone once said, do something new every day. If you've lived beside the bend of a river all of your life, and never thought to trace its course to that place where it ends, this might be the day. You might find yourself in an unexpected place, the place where the river burned.

Daylily Nights: Barrel Run Crossing Winery and Vineyard

This June evening, in the old township of Rootstown, just where the Norfolk Southern tracks transect Industry Road without regard for the Western Reserve's careful right angles, a stand of daylilies open their tawny throats to the sun.

From a stand of tawny roadside daylilies, Angelica archangelica raises its yellow umbels.

The common roadside daylily, a gift from the Orient, escaped cultivation. Its presence along country roadsides, often in a lowlying ditch, is a clue that a place has been settled a very long time. Somewhere nearby somebody once brightened a kitchen garden or a dooryard with progenitors of these same orangey flowers.

Heritage Daylily Farm, Peninsula, Ohio.

The genus name of the tawny daylily, Hemerocallis, means 'beautiful for a day.' Just after the solstice, when days are their longest, its orange trumpets blare just for one day, reminding us to live each of these long summery days, to cast aside care. These rampant field flowers, perhaps the ones chosen so long ago to illustrate truth to those gathered on the Mount:

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

In this rural corner of Portage County, Ohio, we are at that point in the Western Reserve where all the corners are square. Roads, townships, county lines: all platted on regular rectilinear quadrants. Mantua Center is right smack dab in the center of Mantua township. Palmyra centers its eponymous township. At the center of Nelson, the main roads converge in a diamond: a Methodist Church, a town hall, and Greek revival houses of the better sort let you know you are at the center of things.

An old maker, in the churchyard of St' Luke's Lutheran Church, in what is now Cuyahoga Falls, marks where the townships of Stow and Northampton once converged.

And so it goes: it's how the wilderness was tamed, it's how Connecticut sold off its rangy Western Reserve.  Intrepid surveyors, with chains and markers, through the swamps, ravines, and gorges, without regard to terrain, made their way west from the point where stone markers delineated Pennsylvania's western edge.

Back East, in the old state with its thin stony soil and long winters, you drew your lot, and based on your losses in the war, you received a plot, graded  1, 2, 3, or 4, based on a surveyor's snapshot perception of the quality of each  plot.

Due west, the fabled region, Connecticut's Western Reserve: an "earthly paradise," with rumors of fat loamy soil, and endless stands of black walnut, hickory, oak and chestnut. In winter dreams, a poor man in Connecticut becomes a landed gentleman on the Ohio frontier.

A stone marker, at the Norfolk Southern tracks, in Rootstown.

This June evening, we sit near those tracks, as trains rumble on the Norfolk Southern line, bound toward Ravenna, laden with coal. The perfect sound of summer in the Western Reserve: a distant train whistle, the clang of a rural roadside railway signal, the lowering of a red and white striped gate.

Barrel Run Crossing Winery and Vineyard, a new venture for an old family farm just outside of Rootstown, sits just off those tracks.

If the tawny trumpet of the daylily signals summer's peak, so, too, the startling rampant growth of a grapevine on a sunny slope. Its leaves unfurl to alarming proportions, its tendrils grasp out, attach themselves to whatever will pull its broad leaves closer to the sun.

As Galileo once said, "The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do."

The magic of this season, and each summer's abundant growth. On this night, on this terrace, with trellises laden with ripening bunches of Frontenac, Marquette, and Vidal Blanc sloping out toward the railroad tracks and the old rectilinear roadbed lined with orange lilies, you can almost hear the swelling of those sweet grapes, you can almost feel those broad leaves stretching, those tendrils grasping, ever closer to the evening's still warm sun.

There is nothing wrong with sophisticated undertones, or notes of tangerine or oak or licorice. But on this summer night I relish a sweet grapey white wine of Niagra and Frontenac Gris, grown right on these slopes, reminisccnt of wild grapes you might pluck from a low hanging vine.

Daylily nights: we turn our faces to the evening sun, just as the abundant broad leaves of the vineyard outstretch for yet more rays, the sun in no hurry to slip from the Western Reserve's horizon, at which point the daylily will shed its orange trumpets, that blared just for this one perfect day. Summer's very essence, in this sweet chalice of life.