July 27 to August 1, 2016 Hey! Oh, hi. O!
From Ann Arbor we drove south to a state campground at Indian Lake. The Cowsills song was, supposedly, inspired by this big lake ringed by resort towns. Well, it used to be ringed by vibrant resort towns; now it is ringed by shells of once-lively resort towns. What is it with lakeside and riverside holiday towns that they are all seem to have fallen on such hard times—grass a foot tall growing up through the holes in old mini-golf greens; rusted remnants of kiddie rides glimpsed in junk shops and peoples’ back yards; little wooden structures that once sold burgers or ice cream falling down, some with the menuboards still hanging over the counter. Have consumers’ tastes changed so much that these little amusements can’t satisfy them, or have the rivers and lakes grown so polluted that people avoid them?
The beaches of Indian Lake that we saw were littered everywhere with goose crap, the water warm, cloudy, shallow. The camp was huge and fairly empty in midweek. We found a good hike in a nearby forest and toured the little towns on the periphery of the lake, staying two nights. We left there for Cincinnati, a few hours south, taking back roads. Ohio countryside is beautiful in this region. It rained as we drove. During our entire trip it has rained only at night or when we were on the road. I don’t think there has been a single day when we were stuck in the camper because of weather.
I have a modest attachment to Cincinnati. I lived here part of a year as an infant when my father was lured there by his older brother with reports of a good job at a printing plant. It didn’t work out for reasons unknown to me. (In St Mary’s County we knew a woman whose family owned the printing plant in question.) My first memory images contain details that my mother said must have come from our time in Cincinnati. When I was twenty or so my friend Tim H. called from Cincinnati where he was finishing a year of music school and said that his 1964 blue Dodge Dart that I admired could belong to me if I came to get it; otherwise he was going to leave it in Cincinnati. Brenda dropped me off early the next morning in front of what is now Bert’s Diner in Mechanicsville and I hitchhiked to Cincinnati in ten hours, as long as it takes to drive there; had dinner with Tim and drove the Dart home. It was a push-button automatic. I turned on the lights as the sun went down and all the little lights on the dashboard lit up (P,R,N,D,L) and I felt like a man that fortune had favored.
We stayed at a county campground on the edge of the city, Wilton Woods. It was the weekend and the place was packed with local families. They all had campfires despite the fact that the temperatures were sweltering and the humidity was near 100 percent. On Sunday just about the whole camp emptied out and it became a nice place to stay—we could hear the birds, for one thing.
Took a trip into the city. The downtown area was pretty much deserted, like a lot of downtowns on a Sunday. And it was so hot and humid that only the panhandlers were out with us. There are a lot of panhandlers in Cincinnati and they all seem to follow the same protocol—standing still in the median at an intersection holding a small hand-lettered sign. No spoken entreaties, no going from car to car. Maybe the city enforces some code of conduct.
We spent several hours in Spring Grove cemetery, one of the beautifully-landscaped, park-like cemeteries of the mid 1800s that the major cities treated as important public spaces. Cincinnati was something like the 6th largest city then and a manufacturing powerhouse, and the markers of the cemetery are gigantic works of stone, many over twenty feet high—obelisks, angels, trees carved out of stone, a sphinx here, a life-size statue of the decedent there. Cincinnati is considered the first truly American city—the first one to arise after the Revolutionary War and the first inland city in the country. The cemetery is Cincinnati at the height of its wealth and status. It is still an appealing city, a little barren in the downtown area but rich with architectural ornament. It is like a smaller-scale Pittsburgh, with two rivers instead of three, and the remains of an industrial past.
