Long Way Home (10 page)

Part Three

  

M
Y SIDE TRIP
to Ball State University did me good. Whenever you feel the Republic is about to perish for lack of imagination, you should surround yourself with students. All the great dreams are still intact and waiting to be born.

In the classroom, I met budding novelists, poets, essayists, and journalists, some of whom would stay the course and actually achieve their goal. For those who'd decide against the arts and take up dentistry or demolition derbies instead, the discipline of trying to express their ideas and emotions clearly would teach them respect for the English language. The act of writing builds character, writers like to think.

I'd be lying if I said I hastened away. I lingered on the leafy campus and shook off the road dust. Youth may be wasted on the young, but college can be, too, as it was in my case. I had the restless gene and couldn't sit still long enough to study, although now I'd gladly spend a year reading at the Ball State library. As the metabolism slows, the scholarly path looks more inviting.

From Muncie, I set off to rejoin U.S. 50 in Chillicothe, Ohio. The mind-numbing drive led through Mount Pleasant, Economy, and Webster to the dread Interstate 70. Around Dayton, the highway was torn up and strewn with construction debris, but I slipped onto a quiet side road that ran through broad fields of corn. Pork bellies were up fifteen cents, the radio informed.

Chillicothe, population twenty-two thousand or so, lies in the Scioto River Valley, once Shawnee territory. Nathaniel Massie, a frontier surveyor, laid out the town in 1796. A mill went up on Kinnikinnick Creek around 1812 and jump-started a papermaking industry.

When the Ohio-Erie Canal opened about twenty years later, farmers were able to ship their pork, turkeys, grain, and other crops to New Orleans. The railroad arrived in 1852, and though that ordinarily spelled the end to any trade by water—trains were faster, cheaper, and more efficient—the canal survived by a quirk of fate. It flowed from north to south, while the rails went from east to west.

There's still a paper mill in Chillicothe, and it colors the air at times with a slightly acrid smell. On Main Street, several people were just hanging out, sitting on benches or slumped on the courthouse steps, a shadowy army of the unemployed. The Crosskeys Tavern was already busy before noon, judging by the throng of smokers on the sidewalk. The original Crosskeys, a two-story log cabin from Massie's day, catered to brawling drovers and stockmen.

Free blacks flocked to Chillicothe during the Civil War, and the city continues to have a large contingent of African Americans, at least by the lily-white standards of the rural Midwest. It also has the Paints, a baseball team named for Paint Creek nearby. The team plays in the Frontier League—or did until it switched to the Prospect League in 2009—and sells its merchandise at a downtown shop, where I bought a Paints cap, sure to be the first in Dublin. “How'd the club do this season?”

“It could have been worse,” the clerk shrugged. “Ypsilanti did us a favor.”

“How so?”

“They finished last instead of us.”

Every state has its idiosyncracies. Among Ohio's are its drive-through liquor stores, and the fact that you don't pay any tax on take-out food—in Chillicothe, anyway. I discovered this when I bought a deli sandwich to go. A wheelbarrow would have been useful for transporting it to Yoctangee Park for my intended picnic.

In the heartland, portions defy logic. As it happens, Ohioans rank tenth on America's obesity chart, with 28.6 percent of them overweight, but West Virginians are much fatter and hold down third place behind the folks in Mississippi and Alabama, the champions of chubbiness.

Yoctangee Park is a civic treasure. It covers forty-eight acres and stretches to a floodwall that retains the Scioto River, as miserably polluted as all the other streams on my route so far. If rivers are the nation's lifeblood, we're due for a coronary bypass. The ducks didn't seem to mind, though, and they quickly disposed of half my ham and Swiss on rye.

At Chillicothe's vistor center, I dutifully checked on the local attractions. The staff hadn't greeted many tourists since Labor Day, it appeared, because they fussed over me. The head greeter loaded me up with brochures and pamphlets, including a flier for
Tecumseh!
, an outdoor historical drama about the extraordinary Shawnee leader that runs at Sugar Mountain Amphitheater every summer.

“Too bad you missed it. Try the walking tour instead,” she advised me. “That'll get you through the afternoon.”

I'd become a sucker for these tours. This one focused on Caldwell and East Fifth Street, where the city's grandees lived in the nineteenth century—lawyers, bankers, merchants, and bigwigs from the paper mills. They raised chickens and kept horses and cows that were shooed out to pasture daily amid the orchards and vineyards at the end of town.

The Greek Revival mansion at 147 Caldwell was once the residence of D. K. Jones, an inventor who dabbled in explosives. Jones added a wing lined with brick and cement to shield his family from any accidents resulting from his experiments. Captain William Evans, who owned the Queen Anne at 171 Caldwell, installed side entrances to be spared the embarrassment of a recently deceased relative being carried out the front door.

A ne'er-do-well had preyed on the wealthy widow at 174 Caldwell, bilking her of every last penny. The Reverend H. W. Guthrie taught reading and arithmetic at 150 Caldwell and charged only fifteen cents per class, or “less than a 40-cent cigar.” And at 80 East Fifth, Aunt Hat and her sister Lib held séances and communed with the spirit world.

As promised, the afternoon flew by. At the Crosskeys, I toasted the ongoing ingenuity of Americans. Every town I'd passed through, no matter how paltry or dreary, had managed to package an aspect of itself for the possible, although not necessarily guaranteed, entertainment of travelers like me.

The walking tour was small stuff compared to
Tecumseh!
, according to the flyer. Based on a script by Allan W. Eckert, it's been a gold mine for thirty years. I'd never heard of Eckert, but Ohioans love his books. In a library poll conducted in 1999, he tied with Toni Morrison as the Overall Favorite Ohio Writer of All-Time, an honorific that doesn't wear its superlatives lightly. He's not afraid to blow his own horn, either. On his Web site, he bills himself as a historian, a naturalist, a novelist, a poet, a screenwriter, and a playwright.

Eckert's most celebrated novel,
The Frontiersman
, has sold more than a million copies. If you're a particularly ardent fan, you can buy a manuscript from him over the Internet—an unproduced screenplay typed on onionskin paper, say, or a 3,000-word article from
Lapidary Journal
. One fan paid $850 for a copy of his 1,492-page biography of Tecumseh, even though critics had faulted the book for adulterating the facts with fiction.

I knew a little about Tecumseh myself. As a child, I'd seen a terrific action movie about him whose star was Jay Silverheels,
The Lone Ranger'
s Tonto on television. In a nifty bit of serendipity, Silverheels butts heads with Jon Hall, later TV's Ramar of the Jungle, who plays a U.S. government agent. The brutal battle sequences during the War of 1812 were especially effective. Eckert's script works the same angle, it seems, with a “herd of galloping horses and a live military cannon in action.”

EDWIN DAVIS IS
another eminent Ohioan I'd never heard of. A dedicated amateur archaeologist, he became fascinated with the mounds and earthen structures of the Scioto River Valley in the 1820s, and began collecting artifacts as a boy. While studying at Kenyon College, he read a paper on his findings and received an encouraging pat on the back from Daniel Webster, who belonged to the American Antiquarian Society.

Subsequently, Davis embarked on a medical practice in Chillicothe that granted him ample free time to pursue his hobby. By 1845, when he met Ephraim Squier, the new editor of the
Scioto Gazette
, he'd amassed a museum-quality horde of pendants, pipestone carvings, tools, and other relics.

Squier, only twenty-four, had puzzled over the earthworks on his arrival from New York, but when he inquired about their origins, he drew a blank and had to conduct his own research. Davis's expertise found a match in Squier's skill as a surveyor and a writer, and they collaborated on
Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley
(1848), the first book the Smithsonian Institution ever published.

The book's scientific data, though scrupulously vetted, supported a commonly held belief that Native Americans could not have built the structures. Conjecture dictated that they had to be the work of a superior race instead. One theory credited the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, while another sided with the Vikings. Even after the first professional digs at Mordecai Hopewell's farm in the 1890s, some diehards insisted in private that highly intelligent alien beings were responsible.

Hopewell's farm is Hopewell Culture National Historical Park now. I visited on another bright blue day under a sky swept clean of clouds. The culture—some prefer to call it a tradition—refers to the widely dispersed set of populations that made up the Hopewell Exchange System, an elaborate, river-based network of trade routes between Lake Ontario in Canada and the southeastern United States.

The Hopewell Culture lasted from
200 B.C.
to
A.D. 500
. Its members farmed as well as hunted, and depended on the river for mussels, fish, turtles, otters, muskrats, beavers, ducks, and geese. They cremated their dead except for very important figures, who were accorded a burial mound. Some experts suggest that the mounds were built over charnel houses, while others believe they have a lunar orientation and were used as observatories and for ritual purposes.

There's no disagreement over the genius of the Native American artisans, though. Digs at Hopewell have turned up more than two hundred pipes carved to represent animals and birds. Carvings in mica have been unearthed, too, and necklaces and earrings. The wealth of materials employed reflects the exchange system's riches—the teeth of grizzly bears and sharks, freshwater pearls, seashells, copper, and even a little silver.

With its bountiful resources, the Scioto River Valley afforded the Native Americans a very special haven. Lalawethika, Tecumseh's younger brother, recognized this and warned the Shawnee that it might be snatched from them if they weren't careful. Ugly, abysmal as a warrior, so clumsy he poked out his own eye with an arrow, and yet unaccountably a braggart, he was a joke to his people at first, who called him One Who Makes Loud Noise.

In his youth, Lalawethika pickled himself in whiskey. He stayed drunk for years until he keeled over by a campfire at age thirty, and entered a trance state so deep everybody assumed he was dead. The Shawnee readied a burial ceremony, but he woke two days later and announced that he'd received a visitation from the Master of Life, who taught him that white men were the children of the Great Serpent and the source of the world's evil.

Thus enlightened, Lalawethika changed his name to Tenskwatawa, or the Open Door, and became a healer and a prophet. He counseled the Shawnee to forsake European dress and influences, and resort to their breechcloths, animal hides, and leathers. They were to shave their heads except for a topknot, swear off any liquor, hunt only with bows and arrows, and rely on rifles strictly for self-defense.

If they engaged in this rite of purification and adopted the old ways again, Tenskwatawa prophesied, the Master of Life would drive the whites from their land, but that, of course, failed to occur.

G
REENFIELD, OHIO, IDENTIFIES
itself as the home of the country music legend Johnny Paycheck, who once got into a terrible beef at a bar in nearby Hillsboro. When a customer invited Paycheck to his house for some deer and turtle meat soup, the singer supposedly fumed, “Do you see me as some kind of hick? I don't like you,” then pulled out a .22 pistol and grazed the fellow's head with a bullet. The caper cost Paycheck almost two years in Chillicothe Correctional Institution before the governor pardoned him.

On Route 28 in Greenfield, I came upon a little market with a row of tanning booths at the back, a first in my experience. You could grab a can of beans and catch a few ultraviolet rays on your way to Leesburg or New Vienna. I was on my way to Wilmington, another change of plan. Governor Sarah Palin would address a rally there the next day, so I'd left U.S. 50 again, to attend.

The Republicans owned Wilmington. George W. Bush had made a whistle stop once, and even Dick Cheney had showed his rarely seen face there. That August, John McCain met with residents and assured them he'd do everything he could to block a proposed merger between the German courier DHL and United Parcel Service. DHL was the chief client of ABX Air, Wilmington's top employer, and the merger would cost the city about six thousand jobs.

In East Monroe, past Rattlesnake Creek, I traveled through farmland planted to corn, soybeans, and wheat, then took Route 73 to Wilmington. The city offered no surprises, configured to specifications now utterly familiar—malls, suburbs, and a historic district. “Localness is not gone but it is going,” John Steinbeck had predicted, on the money again.

Wilmington seemed pleasant enough. It has a fine new library and a good small college. The city's median household income was about forty-eight thousand dollars in 2008, slightly higher than the Ohio average and only two thousand or so below the U.S. norm, but bloodsuckers such as Payday Loans and Cashland were everywhere. A typically desperate borrower might accept a 400 percent APR on a two-week “deferred deposit advance” against a future salary check.

As usual, there wasn't much foot traffic downtown. Only Smith's Barber Shop looked jaunty. John Wayne, cut from cardboard and nearly life-size, shared one window with a Georgia O'Keefe cow skull in a desert landscape complete with sand and cacti. A second window featured some antique razors that resembled instruments of torture and made you wonder just how painful a shave might have been in 1879.

Inside the shop, Wayne Smith sat in a corner chair and huddled with a furtive little guy who squirmed at the approach of a stranger, as if he'd been interrupted in the confessional. His voice fell to a whisper, and he cracked his knuckles several times and kept glancing over his shoulder in case another phantom should appear. It was all too much for him in the end, so he vanished like a blue streak.

Smith, who's been holding court for forty-six years, didn't budge. He might even have been mildy intrigued by a head he hadn't barbered. Gracious and slow-moving, he's a big, bulky man, although his son Nick puts him to shame. A framed news clip pictured the young giant being inducted into his high school's Wrestling Hall of Fame. Smith also had hung up a photo of his daughter Erika building a house in Coahoma, Mississippi, as a volunteer with Habitat for Humanity.

Yet the most eye-catching photo was an autographed portrait of President Bush, who'd written, “Wayne, it helps to know people in high places.” A friend had scored it as a gift for Smith.

“Very impressive,” I said. “Are you happy with Bush?”

“He's made some mistakes,” Wayne allowed, suggesting an incredibly forgiving nature.

The shop could have been his den at home. One shelf sagged under the weight of the trophies and medals he'd won with the quarter horses he raises on his 105-acre farm. There were stacks of magazines, of course, and also books. Smith liked Allan W. Eckert and Louis L'Amour—cowboy stuff, tales of the Old West. Videotapes were stacked on a counter next to a miniature flag and a few combs and brushes.

I took the squirmy guy's seat. “How'd you become a barber, Wayne?”

“There was five of us kids, and my mother used to cut our hair,” he told me. “One day I complained I could do it better, so she put down the scissors and said, ‘Well, go on, then!' ”

“You're very proud of your own kids.”

“I am. Erika works out at the college. Nick's a farm boy. His mother taught him manners, and she did a good job.”

The economy had affected his business, naturally. Customers postponed their cuts and trims as long as possible, waiting for a special occasion such as a big date or a church social. Like almost everyone I'd met, Smith expected things to get worse before they got better.

“You just have to sit tight, grab your ass, and hang on,” he recommended. He disapproved of the finger-pointing, all those insincere politicians playing the blame game. “Why don't they just come together and fix the problem instead?”

“I agree.” And I did, at least in principle.

“Those Wall Street bankers get me, too. They're capitalists on the way up, and socialists on the way down. When they're making money, they don't want the government around—only when they need to be bailed out.” Wayne was on a roll. “What they are to me is wimps. Somebody should spank 'em.”

Then Smith began to rip into Barack Obama, criticizing the candidate for his “friendship” with the former terrorist Bill Ayres—proof of how radical the candidate really was—and Obama's attempt to “steal” the election with the help of ACORN, the activist group charged with fraudulently registering voters. He did not seem concerned by the scantiness of the facts, nor chagrined to be repeating Rush Limbaugh's exact words.

I ran into the Limbaugh effect over and over in the heartland. In the midst of a sensible and often enjoyable conversation with someone like Wayne Smith, hardworking, independent, religious, and devoted to his family, the person would veer off on a tangent and parrot Limbaugh's latest proclamations that consciously stoke the fear and paranoia of Americans.

Smith quit talking when Olmy Olmstead came in for a trim. Olmy was the assistant football coach at Wilmington College, currently 1–3 for the season. He studied there as well, and would soon earn a master's degree in special education. Olmy appeared to be less interested in the gridiron than in working with the disadvantaged.

“Coaching's a lot like teaching,” he said, hopping into the barber chair.

“Why do they call you Olmy?”

He grinned. “It's my dad's nickname, and the old man stuck me with it.”

Olmy's own football career ended at Wabash College in Indiana in 2004, where he ground out the yards as a fullback and handled the placekicking chores.

“I never got any ink for running the ball,” he joked, “so I figured I'd better score some points with my foot if I wanted to get my name in the paper.”

He felt fortunate to be living in Wilmington after a stint in Columbus, a city too metropolitan for his taste. “It's real friendly here. When you walk down the street, folks say hello even if they don't know you. What brought you to town, anyway?”

“I'm going to the Palin rally tomorrow.”

“You might see me out there,” Olmy said.

Anyone who hoped to attend the Road to Victory Rally needed to collect a free ticket, so I left Wayne and Olmy and claimed mine at a hastily assembled headquarters in a mall next to Rent-2-Own Furniture. The three women doling out the tickets were new to politics and giddy to be included in the Palin buzz.

When I signed the register with a Dublin address, it created a stir. None of the women had been anywhere in Europe, so they asked countless questions and imbued me with a romantic daring I don't honestly possess.

“What excites you about Governor Palin?” I asked in return.

“She's a woman,” they answered, more or less together. They admired her for balancing a career and a home life, and for doing, presumably, the same domestic chores they did. As soccer moms, they identified with a hockey mom. They were kindred spirits. Nobody mentioned John McCain. He'd been shuffled out the back door to cool his heels in the garage.

The ticket was roughly the size of a California ballot. Draped in bunting at the top, it plied the usual red, white, and blue theme. “Country First,” the big block letters shouted. The rally would begin at six in the evening at the Roberts Centre, and the women were ecstatic. As volunteers, they might get to shake hands with the candidate.

THE WEATHER GODS
cooperated with the Republicans. A gorgeous autumn day awaited the imminent arrival of Sarah Palin, who'd gone for a run that morning before a town meeting in Wisconsin.

“God blessed you with the great outdoors!” she exclaimed to the TV reporters afterward. Palin looked so healthy, radiant, and even sexy one had to entertain the disconcerting thought that if she were the candidate, the GOP would have a far better chance than it did with the experienced, albeit aged and wooden, McCain.

The Roberts Centre is in farm country outside Wilmington, roughly equidistant from Columbus, Dayton, and Cincinnati, and accomodates events both big and small. Conventions, weddings, a cat show, an Art & Pottery Festival, and a gathering of the Ohio Gun Collectors Association were all scheduled for the months ahead. The Holiday Inn next door was booked solid with media types.

When I reached the center at about two o'clock, a security guard waved me into a vast parking lot. Although the doors wouldn't open till four, a couple hundred of the faithful already waited patiently in line.

They'd come prepared for the heat, with bottled water and tubes of sunscreen. The temperature was in the high seventies, but the proliferation of concrete and tarmac made it hotter. If you were fortunate enough to spot a tree, you'd be sharing the shade. There wasn't any wind, either, to relieve the sting.

A dozen or so souvenir vendors were confined to a little island concourse. Unable to circulate and hawk their wares, they were in an ugly mood. “Somebody's gotta buy a hat!” one pleaded. As members of a Gypsy tribe, they adhered to their own code of ethics and had strong ideas about right and wrong. The setup at the Roberts Centre was way wrong. It sucked, as Dexter Zaring put it.

I met Dexter on the concourse. He wore a clean white football jersey bearing the number 17 in bright red. In another life, Dexter might have been a quarterback. He had the size for it, and the blond, square-jawed look. Against his chest he held a placard stuck with many different campaign buttons.

“Nice turnout,” I offered as an icebreaker. “You should do pretty well.”

“Nah, I don't think so.” Dexter frowned. “The Republicans are cheaper than the Dems. Too much competition here, plus they've got us pinned down. Are you for McCain?” he asked, and before I could dissemble a reply, he countered, “I'm a libertarian Republican myself.”

“That's a new one on me.”

Dexter leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Actually, I'm just a libertarian. I'm for Obama.”

Given what I know about America, it's shameful to admit that I naïvely assumed the vendors must be GOP stalwarts. They might be dressed in McCain and Palin regalia, but they worked both sides of the street. Dexter's Obama buttons were stowed away for the time being, ready to emerge again at an upcoming Democratic rally in Chillicothe.

At age thirty-eight, Dexter had taken an extended leave of absence from his job as a part-time computer specialist in St. Louis. For the past year and a half he'd been trailing the Gypsy caravan and selling buttons around the country. He'd fallen into the game by accident and had stayed in it because of the whopping profits. He ordered his buttons by the thousands now, and hired a crew of fellow hustlers to help push them.

“It's like a cottage industry,” he said merrily. Each hustler kept 30 percent of what he or she sold, and cleared about three hundred dollars on an average day. Dexter surveyed the crowd, almost all white and growing by the minute. “I gave my African American the day off. He didn't fit in here, but he'll make a killing in Chillicothe.”

“Will you do this right up to the election?”

“I guess so. It's addictive, like gambling. You invest your money, and you get lucky or you don't.”

Dexter had hit the jackpot a while ago in San Antonio. Reduced to his last few buttons, with only forty bucks in his pocket, he maxed out his credit cards to request a new batch from Kansas City, then inveigled a friend to drop him at a hotel where he finessed a room, flicked on the tube, and heard that John McCain would attend a Republican event there the next morning.

At the reception, Dexter managed to thread through the crowd, skip past security, corner McCain, and press a button on him, but a Secret Service agent intervened, and McCain handed it back. Still, it boosted Dexter's notoriety.

“They showed it live on CNN!” He continued to be inordinately gratified by his fifteen seconds of fame.

“Think you'll do this again in 2012?” I asked.

“I won't be able to. The corporations will take over by then. There's a lot of money in this business.”

He'd miss the camaraderie, he confessed. He liked shooting the shit about politics, philosophy, and society over drinks. Sadly, it looked as if another tiny sliver of our outlaw culture would soon bite the dust. Dexter's confreres were a band of old-fashioned rogues, close kin to carnies and racetrack touts. If they struck gold, they'd pop for a new nose ring or a suite in an expensive hotel, but they'd all slept in the backseat a time or three.

“They're mostly unemployable, but they're all right,” Dexter said, almost sighing.

An elderly fellow in a VFW sash bedecked with medals wandered by. “Got any ‘Soldiers for McCain' buttons?” he inquired.

“Sorry,” Dexter told him. “Sold out.”