Blue Highways: Ironton, Ohio

Unfolding the Map

We have traveled far, and are now in the last chapter of Blue Highways.  We pass through Gallia County, which provides some nice contrasts of nature and progress, and then through Ironton, which once served as an engine of progress for the United States in its production of pig iron.  To see where Ironton sits, please see the map.

Book Quote

"'Inquire Locally,' the road should have been marked.  Of the thirteen thousand miles of highway I'd driven in the last months, Ohio 218 through Gallia County set a standard to measure bad road by with pavement so rough I looked forward to sections where the blacktop was gone completely.  Along the shoulders lay stripped cars, presumably from drivers who had given up.  Yet the sunny county was a fine piece of washed grasses, gleams in hounds' eyes, constructions of spiders, rocks broken and rounded - all those things and fully more.

"At Ironton I took the river road down a stretch of power lines, rail lines, water lines, and telephone lines (the birds sleep across the water on the wooded Kentucky bluffs, they say)...."

Blue Highways: Part 10, Chapter 4

Aerial photo of downtown Ironton, Ohio. Photo hosted at City Data. Click on photo to go to host page.

Ironton, Ohio

The interesting thing about Blue Highways, as we head into this last chapter of the book, are the contrasts that LHM writes about that you might miss if you don't pay attention.  I know that as I read the book, I sometimes get too caught up in where he's going, and I miss a few interesting things that are whizzing by the van in my anticipation of what town is next, or what person he might begin talking to.

It's those moments where I really get into the text that I realize that these juxtapositions are all over the place in the book for us to compare with each other.  In the text above, it is easy to just glance past a theme that permeates many parts of the book.  LHM makes a subtle contrast between broken down and intrusive human-made features of the landscape - the rough road, the abandoned vehicles, power lines, rail lines, water lines and telephone lines - and the sunny county, the fine and washed grasses, gleams in hounds eyes, spider webs, and rocks.  The human made stuff is presented as obstacles.  The road is horrible, the cars have an air of futility.

Signs of progress, such as the lines that provide power, transportation, water and telephone, are intrusive.  I love how LHM writes that the birds don't even use the power lines, preferring the natural trees and bluffs across the river.

I probably come across sometimes as anti-modern in these posts as I decry some of the harmful effects of technology and progress.  I'm not.  I'm as fascinated by progress as anyone.  I'm sitting here typing this on a four year old laptop that is woefully out of date.  It was the height of progress when I bought it, but now it is too bulky, a dinosaur compared to the sleek MacBook Pro that my wife is cursing at right beside me (she's attempting to figure out WordPress and having a devil of a time).  I'd love a new computer.  I have a smart phone in my pocket and am waiting to get the newest Samsung Galaxy III.  We have a Sony 19 inch TV that we got probably 10 years ago from a friend, and I dream of getting an LED or LCD flat panel screen TV sometime.  I regularly surf the web on an iPad provided by my job.

I read with gusto the latest scientific accomplishments, from the micro to the macro, from the human body to the depths of the universe.  I watch science fiction avidly, and am never happier than when immersing myself into Star Trek, Firefly or Battlestar Galactica.  I dream of what the world might be 50, 100, 1000 or even 10,000 years in the future.

Yet I'm no Pollyanna.  I see serious problems with progress.  It has made life better for billions of people, but it has also created just as many hazards as benefits.  Because of progress, the world is becoming seriously overpopulated.  The world is beginning to feel the adverse effects of climate change brought on by industrialization and modernization and I understand that the effects will only get worse.  Millions of deaths and casualties are possible at the touch of a button.  Groups that fear progress, or feel left out of the benefits, have grown terrorism from a global nuisance to a global problem.  Antibiotics have cured untold millions, but have also helped evolve "super bugs" which are harder to cure.

And some progress just hasn't happened like we were promised.  Cars do not run on water, they are still running modified versions of the original internal combustion engine, a concept essentially unchanged since its inception over 100 years ago.  Nor are there any feasible flying cars.  We haven't colonized the moon, or Mars, and in fact haven't sent any person beyond earth orbit since the last Apollo mission in the 1970s.  We could be snuffed out in an instant by a well-aimed asteroid.  And for all our signals to the cosmos, there has been nary a peep back - not even a hiccough. 

We are still at the mercy of floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and other natural phenomena.  People still pick up guns and kill each other in shopping malls, theaters, schools and battlefields.  We are just as likely to go to war as we ever were.  Poverty still exists, even in the richest nations on earth.  People still die of starvation.  In the midst of health care crises, we still argue over whether the government should provide basic health care to everyone.  We still expect much, and are yet unwilling to pay for it.  We are still willing to take and exploit, but not willing to give back much.

To me progress is all it promises, and it is nothing of what it promises.  Which is why I probably identify so much with what LHM writes on a deep level.  I can appreciate the seemingly simple, intuitively complex beauty of nature just as he does.  Despite my love and appreciation of progress, I can still get lost in the beauty of trees, grass, the gleam in my dog's eye, and birds in the branches.  If I get caught up in the modern world, it flashes by like scenery in the windows of LHM's van.  But when I take time to notice, and take in the world as it is, without the flash of progress, I often find peace.

Musical Interlude

The topic of progress dovetails nicely with Ironton, which at one time supplied the pig iron used to build industrial America.  That seamlessly fits with Johnny Cash and The Legend of John Henry's Hammer.  Below is the live recording from his famous Folsom Prison concert.

If you want to know more about Ironton

City of Ironton
Ironton Rally on the River
Ironton Tribune (newspaper)
Ohio University Southern
Wikipedia: Ironton

Next up:  The Ohio River Towns (Franklin Furnace, New Boston, Portsmouth, Friendship, Manchester, Utopia)

Blue Highways: Gallipolis, Ohio

Unfolding the Map

As we cross the Ohio River, and into Ohio, William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) talks a little about the origins of Gallipolis where he stays on what I think is the last night of his Blue Highways journey.  He relates a little of the history of Gallipolis, but as I looked further into it, it seems that the origin of the town came about because of a bit of fraud committed by an unscrupulous French company on some French emigres.  To see where Gallipolis came to be, despite the bad beginning, look at the map.  I wouldn't con you!

Book Quote

"With what was left of day, I crossed the Ohio River into old Gallipolis, a town of a dozen pronunciations, a gazebo-on-the-square town settled by eighteenth-century Frenchmen.  Although a priest once placed a curse on Gallipolis - I don't know why - residents today claim it's the loveliest French village on the Ohio."

Blue Highways: Part 10, Chapter 3

 Downtown Gallipolis, Ohio. Photo by Youngmerican and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Gallipolis, Ohio

It seems that Gallipolis was founded because of that centuries-old American pastime - the swindle.

How many times have you laughed when someone says something like "...and if you believe that, I have some swampland in Florida to sell you!"  How about the age-old jokes about selling some rube the Brooklyn Bridge.  Those figures of speech came into our consciousness for a reason.  It appears that there was a lot of swindling going on back in young days of our country.  The reason swampland in Florida became synonymous with swindle is because a Florida land boom in early 20th century led to many people buying land unsuitable for habitation.

Because it was literally a swamp.

Land swindles in the United States are even older than that.  In the 1790s, wealthy financiers convinced lawmakers in Georgia to allow them and their cronies to buy 35 million acres of land for a paltry sum.  The sale was eventually nullified, but not after people got very angry and, I imagine, some Georgia politicians were thrown out.

Of course, the US government swindled many American Indian tribes out of land, as well as their resources.  The Walking Purchase was a land deal in the 1730s, possibly based on forged or non-existent documents, that gave William Penn, and later Pennsylvania, 1.2 million acres at the expense of the Lenape (Delaware) Indians.  In 2003, the Delaware asked for the right to get back 314 acres of that land, and were rebuffed by Pennsylvania.  The case was brought in federal court, and then appeals court, but the Lenape lost each time even though the court agreed that there was probable fraud in the original agreement.  The Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

The New York Times reported in 2003 that a class action suit brought about by 300,000 American Indians claimed the US government cheated them out of $137 billion over 115 years.  The money was made by the government through exploitation of natural resources, grazing rights and timber leases but somehow did not get into the trust fund set up for Natives and administered by the Department of the Interior.  That trust fund, established in the late 1800s, itself may have been the cause of many swindles.  According to the Times, in 1887 individual Indians owned a combined 138 million acres of land, and today only own a combined 10 million acres, with another 45 million acres owned by tribes.

And columnist Jack Anderson, in 1984, outlined a government attempt to push two Shoshone sisters off of their land by arguing in court that their offer to buy the land, even though refused, gave them title to it.  Such an argument, if legal, would certainly make my efforts to buy a house much easier and a hell of a lot less stressful!

In New Mexico, near where I live in Albuquerque, one of the biggest land swindles ever was perpetrated.  Rio Rancho Estates promised a great financial investment for retirement, financial security, and education of children.  The lots were nothing more than barren desert land, with no infrastructure, which the sellers had purchased for $180 per lot and sold for over $11,000 for "residential" lots and $25,000 for "commercial" lots.  The swindle was the basis for David Mamet's play Glengarry Glen Ross.  Surprisingly, today Rio Rancho is the third largest city in New Mexico, and poised to become the second largest in the near future.

American history is littered with swindles, from the claims of snake-oil salespeople to Enron.  It was in the United States that Charles Ponzi found a gullible public to set up an investment scheme that couldn't help but collapse under its own weight.  That we haven't gotten any less gullible is proved by the success that Bernie Madoff had in maintaining his own Ponzi scheme before it collapsed and ruined the lives of many people.  P.T. Barnum supposedly stated that "there's a sucker born every minute," and even though his contribution of this phrase is under doubt, the fact remains that we all are suckers at some time or another.  We give money to street con-artists who prey on our good natures by saying that they need a couple of dollars for gas to get home to their babies, and take our money given in good faith to buy alcohol or drugs.  We allow unscrupulous mechanics to do subpar jobs on our cars, keeping us coming back, before we finally catch on to the scheme.  We allow people into our lives whose sole purpose is to get things for themselves without a thought or care about who it hurts or how it hurts.  I like to think that it's because at heart, we are a good people who care about others well-being.  Sometimes, we unwittingly let a few sociopaths occasionally yank us around, though on bad days I wonder if the sociopaths are the ones who laugh at us as they make millions and accumulate.

And Gallipolis?  How does it fit into this story?  A group of French aristocrats, frightened by events in France (which would eventually lead to the French revolution), emigrated to the United States.  A company called the Scioto Company sold lands in Ohio to French investors.  They were promised a wonderful place, akin to the Garden of Eden.  In 1790, the former artistocracy showed up to claim their investments, only to find that the Scioto Company had never owned the land.  They had nothing.  Fortunately for them, they were able to petition President George Washington, and as a result the Ohio Company sent some people and they built a log cabin settlement for the disillusioned French.  Gallipolis grew out of this initial settlement, founded on a swindle but turned into "the loveliest French village on the Ohio."

The curse on Gallipolis, referenced by LHM in his quote, had nothing to do with the swindle.  A French priest allegedly cursed the town because it refused to turn away from sin.

Musical Interlude

I'm shocked, but I had trouble finding songs about land swindles.  There are songs about con men, however.  Here's an oldie from Golden Earring called Con Man.

And for a perspective on the cons and swindles perpetrated on Native Americans, here's a live performance of Terri Hendrix and Lloyd Maines doing Jim Thorpe's Blues.

If you want to know more about Gallipolis

City of Gallipolis
Gallia County Chamber of Commerce
Gallipolis Daily Tribune (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Gallipolis

Next up: Ironton, Ohio

Littourati News: Literature Genre Map

Maps don't have to be representations of physical spaces.  Maps can locate places in all sorts of spaces.  Here is a map of genres, which places various novels in space according to their types.

Click here to see Book Country's Genre Map.

Michael Hess

Blue Highways: Spencer, West Virginia

Unfolding the Map

This post is a companion to my previous post, but at the same time it isn't.  While it deals with time and the past, it's a more personal reflection on how past and present intersect in my life.  When one pokes at the unseen on a trip, they may want the unseen to poke back.  Sometimes, however, you don't want to know about the unseen, especially that which you've tucked away for a reason.  That's why I have the symbolic picture of West Virginia's state reptile, the timber rattlesnake, to the right.  If you want to know where Spencer sits on the map...just go to it!

Book Quote

"I hunched over the steering wheel as if to peer under the clouds, to see beyond.  I couldn't shake the sense I was driving in another era.  Maybe it was the place or maybe a slow turning in the mind about how a man cannot entirely disconnect from the past.  To try to is the American impulse, but to look at the steady continuance of the past is to watch time get emptied of its bluster because time bears down less on the continuum than on the components.  To be only a nub in the eternal temporary is still to have a chance to see, a chance to pry at the mystery.  What is the blue road anyway but an opportunity to poke at the unseen and a hoping the unseen will poke back?

"At Spencer, I turned west onto U.S. 33.  The Appalachians flattened themselves to hills, and barnsides again gave the Midwest imperative: CHEW MAIL POUCH."

Blue Highways: Part 10, Chapter 3

View of Spencer, West Virginia. Photo by Richie Diesterheft and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Spencer, West Virginia

I suppose that this post will be an extension of the last post given LHM's quote, above, further reflects on the past and time.  And yet, I think the content will be different because the quote touches on something deeper.  As of late, my thoughts have also been enmeshed in that deeper reflection on past and present as well, and so that's where I will try to go also in this post.

As I write my thoughts are jumbling all over the place.  The week started with a realization that my job is going to expand, perhaps with greater compensation but perhaps not.  Then came news that a close family member may have a serious disease.  These pieces of the present pile on to the ongoing task of identifying and buying a house - a fun but also stressful time as we prepare to make a decision on whether to put up a bid for a house that we like but which we have some concerns about.  We are also trying to decide whether we should make a yearly trip to New Orleans and the Mardi Gras, which we haven't missed since we left in 2004 and which has become very important to us. 

All of these present events, however, get placed with the "continuum of the past," as LHM puts it.  The past year has been, for me, a long look at the context of my life, both the good and bad.  Everywhere I look upon the blue highway of my past, I can poke the "nub in the eternal temporary."  My perceived failures are there to see, like billboards on a dusty plain.  Stop here and have kids.  Choose your career wisely.  Do what YOU want sometimes, not what you think others want.  No outlet down this road.  Well, since you've done it anyway, you'll get burned but learn from it.

I notice these billboards because, like highway billboards, I've painted them in bright colors, outfitted them in lighting and put them, repeatedly, in the most conspicuous places.  My successes and the things I've done right are less gaudy, and set back farther from the highway.  They are little handwritten signs that stand back inconspicuously from the road and which don't draw attention unless I really look for them.  They are life's difficulties that I've overcome.  They are my marriage which I often and sadly take for granted when I shouldn't.  They are the friends that I've also taken for granted but who have been there for me.  They are the professional successes that maybe didn't measure up to the ideal image I had of my life but which have enabled me to live a comfortable life and have earned the respect of my peers.  They are the moments when I have been satisfied and happy.

If I look back over the continuum of my past, and I don't take time to look carefully, I only see the billboards, and those points could make my past seem overwhelmingly full of failure, regret, wrong turns and mistakes.  But once I truly drive into my past, and look for the things that I've pushed to the margins, once I look for the hand-lettered signs, my life's continuum looks different.  I want to stop and poke around, and relearn who I really am.

For "what is the blue road anyway but an opportunity to poke at the unseen and a hoping the unseen will poke back?"  In my life, I have been more than willing to take those chances in the real, physical world in the hopes of learning something I don't know, and of experiencing something that I've never experienced before.  In my early adulthood, on car trips, I made a determination well before ever reading Blue Highways that I would take what I called the scenic routes as much as possible and as time allowed.  I loved traveling through the small downtowns and stopping at the local markets or the diners.  My poking at the unseen gave me a better appreciation for America than the interstate ever could.  I've been enriched by those experiences.

But in my inner life, poking at the unseen has been much more scary.  Even though it is a road I've traveled, to retrace my route, or to stop in at places, both good and bad, that I've been before has seemed fraught with peril.  While I travel forward through my life in time, those experiences have built up the edifice of what I present to myself and to the rest of the world.  To go back and disturb the foundations might reveal something else, something more complex than the image I've constructed.  I would have to rearrange my understanding.  I would have to turn some billboards into hand-lettered signs and make some hand-lettered signs into billboards.  I might discover some billboards that have faded or decayed and fix them up, and write some new hand-lettered signs.

"A man cannot entirely disconnect from the past..." but "to try to is the American impulse."  I won't say that I've failed, but I've tried and it doesn't work.  Everything that happens now must be put in the context of what has gone before, the continuum of the past, just as the events of a journey add up into an overall impression of the whole endeavor.  As I move forward on my life's journey from this point in the present, my new goal is not to disconnect, but to assimilate and embrace, all of the points on my eternal temporary.

Musical Interlude

I have no rhyme or reason for this video, but it just feels right to go with this post.  enjoy Sugar Ray's Someday.

If you want to know more about Spencer

City of Spencer
Wikipedia: Spencer

Next up: Gallipolis, Ohio

Blue Highways: Valleyfork, Wallback and Left Hand, West Virginia

Unfolding the Map

As we wind our way through the mountains of West Virginia, past the tiny towns in the small river valleys, William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) has a sense of going back in time.  How often have we all felt that sense, in one way or another, and how often have we brushed aside the thrill and the melancholy of it all as we charge ahead into the future.  I have, but then again, I've also allowed myself to bathe in it, soak it in, and breathe it.  It's easy to commune with the past and its ghosts, if you are willing to let yourself.  Go to the map to learn where to find Valleyfork, Wallback and Left Hand.  And look at the lovely monarch butterfly to the right, West Virginia's state butterfly.

Book Quote

"State 4 followed the Elk River, an occluded green thickness that might have been split pea puree.  The Elk provided a narrow bench, the only level land, and on it people had built homes, although the river lay between them and the road and necessitated hundreds of little handmade bridges - many of them suspension footbridges, the emblem of Appalachia.  From rock ledges broken open by the highway cut, where seeps dripped, hung five-gallon galvanized buckets to collect the spring water.

"Again came the feeling I'd had all morning, that somehow I'd made a turn in time rather than in space and driven into the thirties.  The only things that showed a later decade were the pickup trucks: clean and new, unlike the rattling, broken automobiles.

"West Virginia 36, a quirk of a road, went into even more remote land, the highway so narrow my right tires repeately dropped off the pavement.  Towns: Valleyfork, Wallback, and Left Hand (a school, church, post office, and large hole once the Exxon station)."

Blue Highways: Part 10, Chapter 3

Mountain scene near Wallback, West Virginia. Photo by SHAMROCKSUE and hosted at Panoramio. Click on photo to go to host site.Valleyfork, Wallback and Left Hand

I'm in a melancholy mood as I write this post, Littourati.  I'm listening to melancholy music, and LHM's quote also has the feeling of melancholia about it.  I've always found the past to be melancholy anyway - times gone by that sit in our memories and resurface in the present, like shadows in a mist, and then disappear again have a tinge of sadness and wistfulness associated with them.

In the book Shoeless Joe (made into the movie Field of Dreams), a farmer by the name of Ray is filled with melancholy over the lost opportunities of his life.  Ray hears a call to build a baseball field, which he does.  Then he hears another call, one commanding him to "ease his pain."  By a process of investigation, he comes to believe that he must ease the pain of the reclusive writer JD Salinger.  After contacting and kidnapping (sort of) Salinger and attending a Boston Red Sox game with him, Ray sees the name of "Moonlight Graham" on an apparently malfunctioning Red Sox scoreboard.  He and Salinger track down Graham to his hometown of Chisolm, Minnesota, only to find that he died some years before after a lifetime as a physician.  Graham had played in one game in the major leagues, but only got 2 innings in the field and never got an at-bat.  That night in Chisolm, Ray can't sleep and gets up to go for a walk, leaving the sleeping Salinger in the hotel.  As he wanders outside into a cold, foggy night, he sees a figure carrying a bag moving slowly in an empty street of a Chisolm of yesteryear.  He follows him and discovers the halting figure is Moonlight Graham, returning late at night from a house call, who invites Ray home.  Graham tells Ray his story, and reveals that despite a full and fulfilling life, that he always missed baseball and his regret over missing that one chance at bat.

I won't spoil the rest of the novel, which is wonderful, as is the movie adaptation.  I bring the novel up because it almost makes real the feeling of turning a corner, and finding oneself in the past, or a different era, and the delicious melancholy that accompanies those feelings.  We've all experienced such feelings, I imagine, even if we might not have recognized it.

The strongest moment I can think of where I experienced such a feeling was in Istanbul, Turkey.  I was walking through a market bazaar when one of the five daily Islamic call to prayers began.  I suddenly felt like I was in a different time, which in itself was strange because the call was being sent through speakers at the nearby Blue Mosque.  Yet I was transfixed in a moment that, even though I noted that I was in the present, seemed like it could have been from any time in the past 1000 years.  I've felt this in other places also.  At Ephesus, again in Turkey, there were plenty of tourists milling around, but when I went around the corner of a ruin and into an area where I was alone for a few minutes, I could almost feel the Greek and Roman ghosts brushing softly past me.  In a really interesting twist, as I marveled at the engineering in the latrines, I could imagine Roman men, almost as if they were really there, sitting on those toilet seats conducting lofty conversations in politics, business, philosophy and science while taking care of far more earthy needs.  While people milled around in the base of the ancient Ephesian theater, I went to the top of the seats and while the wind softly blew and I looked out over the fields that once were the Aegean Sea, now two miles distant, I could feel the Greek and Roman patrons sit next to me, watching a tragedy by Sophocles or a comedy by Aristophanes on the stage below.

In Chaco Canyon, I felt the shoulders and feet of many generations of ancestral pueblo forebears bringing stone after stone to build the great complexes and kivas that served as the center of their religious rites.  In Rome, I could see the crowd roaring in the Colosseum as gladiators fought for freedom, money and the adulation of crowd and emperor, and I saw chariots racing around the Circus Maximus, even though all that was left was a flat oval.  I've also, in my mind's ear, heard the angelic voice of Hildegard von Bingen rising in a lovely and challenging counterpoint to the monks choirs in the 12th century monastery where she entered holy orders near Odernheim, Germany.

But the feeling of walking into a different era is not just confined to the spectacular places of history, but wherever one makes a connection with the past.  I've felt it on the site of the former lumber mill in the Irmulco Valley, which hosted a surrounding town of workers in the early 1900s, but which is only marked by some crumbling brick foundations today.  I've even felt it on trails in the redwood forest, when a shiver goes up my spine as I realize that people have trod the same paths for generations.  And always, along with the thrill of being one the past in a connection through time, is the melancholy when I realize that one day I too will be one of those ghosts, or simply a faded memory, that lightly tugs at the sleeve or thoughts of a wandering passerby as he or she stops in a moment of reverie, and then moves on.

Musical Interlude

I wrote above that I was melancholy, and I'm going to share the playlist that I've entitled Melancholia with you.  It features a variety of music styles and artists, and for 2½ hours you can wallow in some sweet sadness.

Melancholia from mhessnm on 8tracks Radio.

If you want to know more about Valleyfork, Wallback and Left Hand

Wikipedia: Left Hand
Wikipedia: Valley Fork
Wikipedia: Wallback

Next up: Spencer, West Virginia