MAPLE LEAF RAG Part 3: Ohio Is All That

Right now we are in the singular Acadia National Park in Maine where today’s cold drizzle and grey sky has done nothing to extinguish the flaming Fall foliage or our high spirits. We’re digesting a fabulous scallop, shrimp and haddock sea food platter from Chase Restaurant in Winter Harbor. When our nap is over, we’ll start prepping for the border crossing into New Brunswick tomorrow. But first, back to Ohio.

Kentucky gave way noticeably as we crossed the state line into Ohio. Everything seemed to ease out a bit as we headed north toward Buck Creek State Park near Dayton. It was a little like moving into a larger house. The vistas spread out farther giving us Texans a chance to exhale. “That’s better,” said Dahna. “Kentucky’s nice, but I think I’ll be more comfortable here.” The forested areas were free of the underbrush of Kentucky, and seemed to invite you to cut a stout walking stick and hike among the trees like you might do through an English wood. The cultivated fields were larger and they spread out and away opening up a bigger sky. It just got better and better as we approached the park.

I think state parks are like dogs. Some, like Sacha, are prettier than others but they’re all great and Buck Creek was no exception. Our campsite was fine too, only that it was a blind side back in–the bête noire of middling trailer backer-uppers like me. Still, it was the easiest site to get into park-wide thanks to Dahna’s foresight when she picked it out months earlier. Even so, it took a few tries to get the camper in square and lined up with the electrical box and the…the…”Where the hell’s the frickin’ water faucet?” I asked politely, considering my mounting horror. Dahna’s eyes were like splintered glass (J. Agee), “There isn’t one. I think we have to go back out and find a tap and fill our own freshwater tank.”

Well…shoot.

Buck Creek State Park Marina

I did a better job backing in the second time and an hour or so after that Bud and Deb brought their drinks over to join ours. They were winding up a months long trip to the Northwest and were headed home the next day to their place in northern Ohio, dead tired. They were recently retired from a lifetime of the kind of honest productive work you probably associate with Ohio and the American ideal. Making things. They helped bring into view the heart of our country where we happened to be sitting.

Bud’s blunt manner of speech reminded me of my neighbor Ray so I looked at his hand curled around a rum and Coke. Sure enough, his hands showed the effects of a lifetime of hard work. It was a little incongruent that he and Deb were driving a large expensive motorhome stereotypically associated with soft-handed, hard-hearted rich people.

There’s a bit of crosstalk among RVers about class differences between fancy motorhome drivers and trailer draggers like us but most of it is bullshit. True, there’s been some examples of Class A snobbery and trailer dragger crassness but, like most stereotyped things, they dissolve into the gooey soup of statistical norm.

At bottom, it’s simple biology. People are pretty much the same if you get the chance to  sit down with them. It’s true that some people tip over into sociopathy, and it’s also true that sometimes they get together in great numbers for the purpose of destroying, say, a nation now known as a “homeland.” But, all of us want pretty much the same things as it turns out, and traveling brings that into high relief. It eases our fears and anxieties, and soothes the savage breast. Except during a blind side back in.

Our brief time with Bud and Deb was a nice Ohio prelude to our visit with Linda and Jeremy, our friends from Texas, now happily living in Bethany Village near Dayton. Jeremy is one of Dahna’s favorite professors, now retired, whom she met as his student in the summer of ’86. Dahna previously determined that since we were in our mid and late 30s, we were finally mature enough to finish school. So, back we went.

Jeremy had pulled the short straw and was teaching a core Texas Government class that summer. I doubt if he was thrilled about it but Dahna sure was. Several years later when she graduated at the top of her class as an organic chemist, Jeremy remained in the small circle of her favorites. A few years after that I taught their son John at our little high school in Hico, Tx.

Bethany Village is an immaculate planned community of retirees that was founded about 70 years ago near Dayton, Linda’s home town. It is a full service campus of everything from independent living in houses or apartments to full nursing care. Absolutely everything inside or outside the home is taken care of by management, and if anything at all goes wrong, all you need is their phone number on speed dial. In Comanche we have thousands of dollars in a tractor, lawn mowers and a shop full of tools and it’s still not enough but hey, we’s “management.”

We intended to board Sacha for the day so we could all tour Dayton dogless. But, friends being friends, they said she could stay in their house. Sacha promptly reciprocated by marking their territory as her own and we all had a big laugh. No we didn’t. But we did have a big day—a real highlight of our trip. In fact, the entire day was a series of highlights thanks to our friends.

Linda had earlier promised to cook for us and she delivered big time with a wonderful lunch followed that evening by fresh sweet corn and a chicken pot pie to kill for. Fortunately, Linda handed over the recipe voluntarily.

After lunch they took us on a perfect tour of Dayton which ended, perfectly, with the ringing out of “As Time Goes By” by the famous Deeds Carillon. Linda asked a guy with a badge if we could pick out a song and he said, “Sure,” and handed us a list to choose from. Dahna and I both said, “That one,” simultaneously and the big bells followed us in our slow walk out to the car. Dooley Wilson would have approved, I think.

Rick and Ilsa might always have had Paris, but Dahna and I will always have Dayton. Linda chauffeured us and Jeremy through much of the city including the parts that were off limits to her strict Catholic upbringing when she was a girl. The streets there were a little twisty and tight with numerous small establishments that once exerted a slightly profane gravitational pull on Dayton’s teenagers in the 1960s. Maybe even for a young girl like Linda destined to become a nun for a time. But as she drove us out into the larger city we saw muscular brick smokestacks adjacent to the huge buildings that once manufactured the products for a confident and increasingly affluent people. Today, these big campuses are largely “re-purposed” to worthy ends but they’re also useful in nefarious ways.

Our political opportunists point to them as artifacts of a vanished Golden Age and promise to return us to those halcyon days. In thrall to the very forces that depopulated those buildings, they intend nothing of the kind nor do they have anything in common with the men and women who built them. In fact, they would have loathed a man like John Patterson, the founder of Dayton’s National Cash Register.

Patterson was a visionary of the late 1800s and early 1900s whose workplace ideas helped seed the labor friendly policies of the New Deal. He opened his buildings to daylight with numerous large windows, established innovative safety and security protocols for his workers plus health care, child care, schools and he paid them well. His long range business strategy built a powerhouse company that produced enormous numbers of high quality business machines, satisfied customers and employees. NCR made a huge positive impact on Dayton’s and Ohio’s and America’s wealth.

This guy not only knew how to run a business to perfection, he also knew how to save a town, literally. Do yourself a big favor and Google this man. Check out how he anticipated the terrible flood of 1913 and instantly converted his factories to boat building and bread baking. His actions saved a lot of people that day and that’s why you see his name everywhere in Dayton. We still have people like that. If you remember Hurricane Katrina, you should also remember the Cajun Navy, the flotilla that saved countless lives in New Orleans in 2005. We met one of those guys a few days ago in Alma, New Brunswick. (We met a lovely Irish lass there too, but that’s another story for later.)

It’s impossible to overstate the impact Dayton’s Wright brothers had. It’s only coincidence, but the town of Baddeck on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia where we camped is actually the birthplace of Canadian aviation. I’ll say more about that later, but you might be interested to know that Alexander Graham Bell was a big part of it. The idea here is that Dayton isn’t the birthplace of American aviation but of aviation itself. Big difference, or as Bernie might say, “YUUGE!”  That other guy might say it too if he knew anything about history.

Wright Brothers Museum

Before the bells of Deeds Carillon personally ushered us out of the Carillon Historical Park, we toured most of the exhibits there including a full-size recreation of the Wright brothers’ shop. It included a mock up of their manufacturing equipment which looked decidedly Dickensian with a touch of Steam Punk. You wouldn’t want to build their bicycles or airplanes wearing a tie or even a ring.

Their first production bicycle was called the Van Cleve after the Wright family’s ancestors. As Jeremy and I took in the lines of an actual Van Cleve, I ventured that they looked a lot like modern bikes. Actually the Wright bike looked a lot more like my 1957 Schwinn Corvette than a modern bike and when I realized that a few weeks later, I winced a little. Jeremy was decently mum on the subject.

The Wright bicycles were early “safety bicycles” with two equal sized wheels that quickly replaced the more dangerous high wheeled types. You’ve seen these pictured with a derby-wearing daredevil sporting a handlebar mustache sitting atop one of the ridiculous things. It occurs to me now that his ‘stache was named after the deathtrap’s handlebars the damn fool was gripping for dear life. Mystery solved. Ah…bicycles.

About 1970, I was riding my Japanese 10 speed bike home in Houston’s Montrose around midnight. I had a strong Gulf breeze at my back and I was young and strong, so I decided to “stand on it” to see just how fast that heavy monster would go. I shifted into 10th gear just about the time a big “cowboy” staggered out from the pool hall up ahead. He saw me coming in the street lights, my long hair flowing. It pissed him off.

He made an unfortunate snap decision that factored out velocity from momentum’s equation: p = mv where p stands for momentum, m for mass and v for velocity. I figure his mass was roughly equal to mine plus the bicycle, but his velocity was negligible compared to my own. When we met he put his shoulder into it and so did I. The impact caused the bike to wobble as if he were a puff of wind, and when I looked back he was on his keister spinning like a top.

It was a perfect example of the conserving and  converting of linear momentum into angular momentum, poor boy. I’m sure whoever held his beer had a good laugh before calling the ambulance. My Physics students got a laugh out of it too. Well, the cowboy lost that night but I guess he won in the long run, or thinks he did. Be sure to vote.

Linda and Jeremy visited us at Buck Creek the next day for dinner. Dahna grilled sweet chili chicken and I fixed them our Old Crow house drink which they politely sipped. We talked past dark, my favorite thing to do with smart, lovely people. They’re well-traveled citizens of the world and we’re lucky to be their friends. Luckier still, they’ve contributed several fine pieces for this new blog to be published soon.

Mute Swan

When we left for Geneva State Park the next day it was with a twinge of regret. I said, “This deserved way more than three days.” Dahna said, “Yup, I could live here.” I said, “What? And leave Comanche and the Chicken Express behind?” She said, “Pppth.”

Canada Geese