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." |
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment