Mother of Presidents

I seek the back roads of Connecticut's old Western Reserve.

The places where you no longer need a map.

The places where a weather-battered general store sinks at an intersection where one road takes you to Burton, and the other, eventually, to Cleveland.

Freed from the platted irregularities of towns plunked down wherever there happened to be good and sufficient water to power a mill, or places where canal boats deposited their wares, or a places where someone came up with a better way to make matchsticks or mechanical harvesters or ball bearings, you find yourself in the pure geography of the American frontier.

You get away from the varicose population centers, snarled with curving streets and cul de sacs and outerbelts. You find yourself in Rootstown, or Atwater, or Palmyra, one of those perfect five-mile square townships with an eponymous village at its core, with a white frame congregational church on a patch of green, in a place where Connecticut veterans settled on plots granted to them for their suffering after the British burned coastal towns.

And so I find myself in Troy, Ohio, on a President's Day weekend when the grass is winter gold.

An Amish boy ties his single-horse cart to a post at the Marathon station.

A wood frame warehouse peels paint perceptibly.

Twin tire tracks transect a windswept graveyard.

I don't know anything about Troy, Ohio, but its little cemetery has the best collection of cast metal grave markers I have ever seen.

Cast metal grave markers remain crisp and legible, while neighboring stone markers weather to become blank slates. A flag has fallen  to the grass next to a Civil War veteran's grave.

 I am stalking a dead president. James A. Garfield, to be exact.

The last president born in a log cabin.

A president raised by a widowed mother on a hardscrabble farm in these very hills.

A President who drove canal boats, who studied at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, who roved on the Ohio frontier as a Disciples of Christ preacher, who returned to the Eclectic to teach classics, and within a year became its president.

A President who rose to the rank of Brigadeer General in the Civil War, who was eventually elected to this country's highest office.

Because I am in that part of the Western Reserve where the roads, except where they are Indian trails, run straight and true, I know if I head toward where the sun rises, I will find myself at Hiram, where the president taught school.

And so I do. A handsome brick Disciples of Christ church anchors one corner in Hiram, Ohio, while across a one-light intersection on a windswept little hillock, a little frame meeting house, like the one the president might have preached in, faces route 700.

A statue of the slain president rests on a sandstone pedestal. In Ohio our most important monuments always sit on a base of our native sandstone.

From there I settle on some winding roads through the Charin Valley, through the headwaters of the Cuyahoga. I know if I head due north, eventually I will find myself at Lake Erie.

And so on a February afternoon when winds whip clouds rapidly across a sun trying valiantly to shine down on brown grass, I find myself in a cemetery where angels with eroded faces gaze toward a brilliant firmament, and alabaster obelisks to barons assert themselves toward the sky.

On another hillock, a monument to a martyred president, this one an impossibly ornate sandstone pile crowned with gargoyles and friezes depicting a president's triumphant moments and agonizing death in sharp relief.

On this Presidents Day weekend I am the only one here at Cleveland's Lakeview Cemetery. Massive turquoise-painted wooden doors atop a grand staircase are splintered and locked.

I wander the hillsides past polychromatic stone "garden crypts," rendered all the more colorful by a season's lush moss carpet on sandstone walls. Statues of winged mercury, shrouded urns, allegorical maidens.

This grand place seems so far from those humble township centers.

I meander due south, down route 91, toward home, past the replica log cabin of Garfield's birth at Moreland Hills, and marvel at how sometimes the journeys you take, when you lose the map and just follow the roads, take you where you never intended, but needed to go.

These backroad rambles. These purposeful excuses to drift and tarry.

Certain intersections, where the boards are battered and weathered, where the graves are marked and tended, where the native sandstone is worn and mossy, can transport you to a revelatory place, where you see these hills where you were born and roved, not as a tired and spent place, but as a place where chestnut trees towered, and homesteads were forged, and classics were taught at windswept hillocks where geography decreed that roads would transect, in an unlikely woodland republic.