Phthursday Musings: Crossing Ohio

There was a window of time, 2004-2007, where I took multiple drives east out of Illinois. I went to New York City twice, D.C. two or three times, and also trips specifically to Pennsylvania, once to Lancaster and once to Reading. A couple of these trips might have been jumbled together - I think I went from New York to D.C. via Delaware one time. I liked going out of the way. One trip to D.C. I actually went via Charlottesville.

For most of these trips I was living in Normal, a place from which driving made a little more sense. It was roughly 3 hours to O’Hare, and if the destination was something weird like Reading, no good flight in was going to be had anyway. I also had my first new car, a 2004 Nissan Sentra, which got what was good mileage then. So I was armed with all sorts of excuses. But the thing was, I liked driving about as much as anything.

One particular trip popped into my mind this weekend while in the car. It was summertime, and I’m pretty sure D.C. was the destination. I took a circuitous route across Ohio, I think taking U.S. 35 out of Dayton and switching to U.S. 22 at Washington Court House (one of the stranger names of a city that you’ll find!) I had in my possession a large stack of CDs from WESN. In summer months, record labels would keep sending discs to be reviewed, but most of the students were gone. I was a DJ again and I took it upon myself to grab 20 or so discs to review. I only remember one of the discs that I reviewed - it was by the odd French-German duo Stereo Total - but I remember that particular journey east as being exhilirating. I can picture in my mind driving down U.S. 22 somewhere between Lancaster and Zanesville and feeling alive.

[image is from Google Maps]

Most of those long distance trips took me all the way across Ohio. I spent three years at Ohio State with many drives back and forth to Illinois during that time, so I was already well-acquainted with at least the highways along the western half. Ohio is a surprisingly long state - not Pennsylvania long, but a lot wider than Indiana or than Illinois along most routes. There’s also what I consider to be an intriguing mix of space and stuff. If you exit Columbus by U.S. 33 and stay on it all the way into Indiana, jog a bit to get to U.S. 24 and take it west into Illinois, you can make it all the way to Peoria - on federal highways the whole time - without going through a city larger than 25,000 people. But there are a lot of those cities in the 10,000 to 25,000 range sprinkled around the state, often county seats, and in Ohio they’re often a little older and a little bigger than what you get further west. They have stories.

A lot of my framework for understanding politics is built upon drives like this. While we all have a sense of the distinction between urban, suburban, and rural, we also understand that a lot of places aren’t purely one of the three. There’s also those damn statistics: the U.S. essentially treats every place as being either urban or rural, in that every place either is or is not considered part of a particular metropolitan area.

Last week it was reported that recommendations have been made to the federal Office of Management and Budget to change the definition of a metropolitan statistical area from one where the core city has at least 50,000 people to one where the core city has at least 100,000 people. I think there are nuances to what’s meant by “core city” but this change, if it were to take effect, would cause 144 of the current 392 metropolitan statistical areas to be downgraded to “micropolitan” statistical areas. Those cities between 10,000 and 25,000 that I mention above? They’re considered to be micropolitan statistical areas, all the way up to 50,000.

I don’t know exactly why OMB is being asked to make these changes. But whether there’s intentionality or not, what I glean is that America is increasingly saying that these formerly “mid-sized cities” are really not cities anymore. Instead of being grouped with Chicago, they’d be grouped with Centralia. Not quite urban, but also not really rural. Something else. Something… lesser.

In some cases we’re talking about places with large state universities: Ames, Carbondale, Lawrence, Missoula, State College. Their reputations won’t take a hit. (But will it negatively impact them in other ways? City leadership in Corvallis thinks it will. I’ll bet they feel the same way in Carbondale.)

It’s the fallen I’m thinking of though. Alas, Decatur. In the 1980 census, Decatur had 94,081 people. In the 2020 census, it looks like it will be below 70,000. A place like that, which has pretty much been left out to dry by all levels of government… now potentially being told by no less than the federal government that it’s really just not a city anymore.

I’ll bet, if you exclude the large college towns, and look at the Midwest in particular, you’ll find that many of the places on the list are super hotbeds of Trumpist support.

I mentioned the intriguing mix of space and stuff. I think there’s an equilibirum there… and I think we’re losing it. I mentioned that these big towns and little cities in Ohio have stories. I think those stories are getting buried. I think it used to be that if you went from place to place there was more of a sense of the places being different, and now there’s more of a sense of the places being the same. In part this is just the erosion of Main Street, the omnipresence of chains and corporate presences. But I also think there’s a different kind of flattening. (Part of it is that the semi-rural places have lost a lot of their rural character, because there are fewer and fewer family farms. To be clear: it’s not that they’re less rural; it’s that they’ve lost that character.)

At first when I thought to write about a largely unnotable drive across Ohio, I had thought about it more as a metaphor for pandemic living. Something about that whole “journey, not destination” thing, something about how if we’re not going anywhere it means we’re also not going anywhere.

I want to get back out on the road. And when I do so I want to take it slow. I want to be leisurely about it. Oh, it might drive certain members of my household batty, but I prefer the state highways to the interstates much of the time. One of the things I would really like to do is visit the remaining counties of Illinois I haven’t seen. I did this map a while back but I think it’s still right. Black is a place I’ve lived, orange is a place I’ve been:

Look, nobody has romantic thoughts of one day visiting Pike County, Illinois. I get that. It’s all a bit arbitrary. But so much of life is arbitrary. Why not Pike County?

Get in the car, head somewhere southwest, and let’s see what the weirdest thing we can find is. Guess what? It took me under a minute to find that Griggsville, in Pike County, is the self-proclaimed “Purple Martin Capital of the Nation”, that there are over 5,000 birdhouses along city streets, and that all of this was because of one man’s vision for an alternate way for the town to control the mosquito population. That kind of stuff is awesome. Sign me up!

A place like that is not just some lesser statistical error in my mind. Griggsville is a place with a damn story. Maybe it’s not the stuff of Greek tragedy, but I don’t live in ancient Greece here. If I’m ever going to visit Sparta, it’s probably going to be Sparta, Illinois. And I’ll enjoy it. I’ll take pictures of my son beating up the town water tower. I’ll buy the local newspaper (if one still exists) and see what crazy hijinks people get into there. On the way there maybe I’ll listen to some weird jazz, or the Too Much Rock podcast, or maybe even some Stereo Total. While there I’ll buy the weirdest candy I can find. The Creator and various distributors willing, maybe I’ll find some Cherry SKI along the way.

I’ve been thinking specifically about driving through Ohio though. Maybe through some of it and then into Kentucky. Ahh, if only that darn Indiana wasn’t in the way.

Ohio being the only other state where I’ve lived for an extended period, and having been there only sparingly in the last 20 years, I feel like I have… catching up to do? Unfinished explorations? I’m not sure exactly.

The book I’m currently slowing moving through is Car Bombs to Cookie Tables: The Youngstown Anthology. Youngstown… you talk about a place with stories. This is the best of the Belt series of anthologies I’ve read so far. It feels like the model for what at some point has to be the Rockford anthology.

Youngstown. Toledo. Places I haven’t really been, except maybe through or around or near. But these are vital places to me. Hell, I even want to see what the deal is with Lima, before it gets kicked to the micropolitan side.

I don’t know how anything like this will ever happen anymore, not with a child whose own social calendar is pretty much booked solid with soccer practices for the next ten years. But I hope I can figure it out, at least a little bit.

If we don’t make it back for a drive across Ohio, maybe we’ll at least pull off a drive to Ohio, Illinois. It’s between Princeton and Dixon on Illinois 26. It’s dinky. But I’ll bet even Ohio, Illinois has a story or two to share.