Land

I took a drive tonight, mostly by accident. I was trying to visit a nearby catholic shrine but I missed the turn and ended up driving about a 50 mile loop through the country. Whoops. But the sun was setting on this the longest day of the year and it was a perfect evening weather-wise.

As I was driving, I noticed that out here in rural Ohio the land seems to never end. And I don't mean never ending like Montana big sky or broad vistas from mountain tops or wheat fields that fill out the horizon. I mean that when you're driving, it feels like you're on one of those old movie sets with the revolving background going nowhere. Out here, a 20 mile drive seems interminable; a minute becomes and hour and a mile becomes an inch. Slowly moving nowhere. It feels this way because there is no difference between one stretch of road and the next. House. Cornfield. Cluster of trees. House. Cornfield. Cluster of trees. And so on. And the road never varies more than 10 feet vertically or more than a couple of feet horizontally. I'm not used to that. In Washington, any place that has redundant scenery almost always has a variable road, giving some interest to the drive.

However static the scenery may seem, it is surprisingly warm and full. Unlike the broad, cool expanses of the West across forests, mountains, and plains, the land here is filled. It doesn't make you feel lost, like a small speck in a never-ending openness. On the contrary, it makes you feel like you've landed in the middle of something. Almost like standing in a crowd, a roomy crowd, but a crowd nonetheless. A member of the Ohio orchestra, wedged in between the silos and the creeks, ready to produce symphony of land.

I'm ready for new land. It's been a luxury to have two weeks in one place, but we're both eager to see more, to meet more people, to do more. So on Sunday we'll join the existing exodus and leave town in search of something more, leaving Tiffin for the retirees. Two more down in the ongoing population decline of this small Ohio town.