Escape from Ohio

Ten years ago in late July Stephanie, Vincent, and I (and Sawyer) escaped from the clutches of Vincent's father in Ohio. Stephanie and Vincent moved to Florida so Stephanie could go to grad school at Florida State, but also to get away from Vincent's father. But that's not what Stephanie's lawyer argued in court in a hearing the Monday morning we were supposed to leave. We got the call at around 11:30 a.m. that we could go ahead and take the Taurus and the big moving truck - already packed up - thanks in part to help from Melissa and family - and head south. We stopped at the family cemetery where Stephanie's grandparents are buried, and later at the South Bloomfield rest area where Vincent called his father, and then - unusually - headed south down 23 and across through Jackson to the road north along the Ohio River, to Pomeroy, Ohio (where I once had relatives), through Pomeroy in the dark, and then across the big bridge to Mason, WV, where Stephanie has a bunch of relatives. I can remember the thrill driving that big truck across the river and into West Virginia. Escape indeed. A complex trip and difficult fall - Vincent not starting out well in his new school, Stephanie and Vincent getting used to living with me far away and with my Mother and my Mother getting used to them, Stephanie trying to juggle work, Vincent, and grad school, and gearing up for another escape-like fugitive episode in Tallahassee and more court hearings in Columbus.

Still - we didn't take 23 on this newest trip - we took the usual road, 33 - but this time with the bypass around Lancaster and the new highway between Athens and Nelsonville. As we drove into Appalachia, we drove through Nelsonville, OH, where we celebrated my birthday in October 1996 by taking a train out of Nelsonville eventually to a Hocking College staff frontier area (college entrance depicted above). Then (10 days ago) we kept driving.

Then, we got to the end of the road, which ends at the Ohio River on the northern end of Pomeroy.

Then we headed down the road into Pomoroy, whose downtown the new Walmart across the river in Mason has hurt. The Walmart was not there on the trip 10 years ago (but had been there on the last couple of trips to Mason).

As we drove along we could see West Virginia on the other side of the Ohio river.

After driving through the downtown we could see the big bridge coming up, which may soon be blown up since they're pretty far along on building a modern, replacement, four-lane (ugh) bridge.

I still like the old bridge better. This is the one I thrilled to be driving over 10 years ago.

At the other side of the bridge is WalMart and a strip mall, and even a new Bob Evans. We hadn't been to Mason for some two years, when there was no Bob Evans and they were just talking about the four-lane bridge. Apparently, it's taken longer to build than they had thought, because they're blasting away some of the cliff on the Ohio side, and they ran into some endangered bats who were in the middle of the breeding season. On the Mason side is the entrance to the Walmart parking lot. Residents joke that this is the bridge that Walmart built.

Having called about three hours early, we arrived and Aunt Velma (Stephanie's 88-year-old aunt, last person from that generation alive on her father's side) was there with her son John, who lives in Huntington but visits on weekends, and another older cousin, Aunt Alphie's daughter. Aunt Velma's daughter Sarah's son Kevin Don, and then his Mother, stopped by later. Their dog Brownie also hung out, though Frisco may have scared her away a little.

Vincent tried out his height on a wall where many cousins had marked their height, including Stephanie when she used to visit during vacation bible school right after Uncle Bill died.

John and I went back across the river to buy some Kentucky Fried Chicken, which was definitely not Weight Watcher friendly. I got into an unusual argument with the cousin (in the blue T-shirt), who eventually emerged as a Republican who began spreading lies and half-truths about Senator Obama, suggesting that he was Muslim, was odd because he was multiracial (I was an odd person to be telling this), and that it was unconstitutional for him to become president because he wasn't born in any of the 48 continental states (as if Hawaii wasn't really a state - Of course, this interpretation would ban me from being president, because I was born in Japan). Normally, I'd have just taken this all in, but at some point I had to argue with some of her factual errors. Aunt Velma and Sarah are - for better or worse- much more taciturn about their opinions - and true to form, Aunt Velma didn't pipe in here. It was a bit like hearing anti-Obama statements during my brief time volunteering for the Obama and Clinton campaigns (see "Election eve").

After talking politics, family (past, present, future), and going through lots of pictures on the walls, Aunt Velma asked for help peeling potatoes (from her garden in the backyard) for Sunday dinner the next day. Vincent was actually intrigued and joined in (for one potato) and joked that we better take a picture now since we won't catch him doing that again soon.

Stephanie used the camera's macros to take these beautiful pictures of plants and flowers on the kitchen window sill at Aunt Velma's house.

Somehow I'd been to Aunt Velma's house more than half a dozen times - even by myself - without being there on Sunday morning, when they attend a United Brethren church (that didn't go with the 1968 merger with the Methodists) in the closest thing to a little downtown in Mason. Stephanie hadn't been there maybe for 20 years, since she attended summer Vacation Bible School. This church was even more evangelical than our old United Brethren church in the Columbus South end, bordering on Pentacostal. Our family members were also very important, as Sarah played the piano, and her new husband Tim, who we saw a new side of, led worship - except for preaching - and pinch-hit as Sunday school teacher. There were several testimonials. I have read research about how religious congregations give working-class people opportunities to exercise and develop civic skills - something I too try to develop at Toastmasters - and I was impressed at how well spoken folks were in testimonials - sometimes in response to Tim's questions on the spot - Table Topics style. The sermon was OK. The scripture was about Jesus dealing with wealth. Tim, an accountant with multiple offices (one where cousin Rebecca worked once, before her aunt and Tim were even going out), and Aunt Velma - with probably the nicest house in town (several streets in town named for relatives...including her deceased husband, and a lumber yard owner, and previous owner of a strip coal mine not far from town)- were somewhat odd people to be talking about this. And - with the talk about class divisions - there was no talk about racial divisions, as per our political discussions the night before.

That's Tim up there before the choir gathered, with wife of six months playing piano.

There's Stephanie's one-time buddy, cousin Rebecca, and her husband, and their daughter (her older daughter was with her father for the weekend.)

That's Aunt Velma and cousin Lenora (?).

Several people in the choir gave testimonials.

Tim led Sunday school, since the regular teacher (another member of the extended family) had a family emergency. I had remembered Tim as very shy, but he was very vivacious in church and talking with us afterwards. He and we are both National Public Radio fans. There have to be some people in Mason and Pomeroy who prefer conventional AM talk radio. He did use a microphone headset that allowed him to project better during his Sunday school lesson.

Here's the view of the new bridge being built from Aunt Velma's yard. Her house is up the hill over the mobile home community, which I believe they also own. They sold some of the land that was developed into the WalMart. The house in the foreground belongs to another of Aunt Velma's sons, whom I've never met. We didn't get to see other family members who live nearby, including Paula and her husband Woody, who moved back there from Florida and who took us to dinner at Lynn's Paradise Cafe in Louisville before Thanksgiving. Stephanie used to go with her grandparents and father on holidays either to Waverly, where Larry's brother lived, or to Mason, and so she has fond memories of visiting Mason, including during the summer when she and Rebecca were buddies. (Rebecca also remembered about visiting Stephanie in the South End for the summer, when Stephanie scared off a girl gang who menaced Stephanie and Rebecca and Stephanie's South End friends.) We've tried to visit Mason at least every year or so, and have stayed in touch especially with Velma and Sarah. We also saw them in Columbus at Graumlich's funeral home, when Catherine, Velma's sister-in-law and Paula's mother, died in Fort Myers, where we visited Aunt Catherine and Paula's sister Lana in August 2000.

Aunt Velma has historically had a big garden in the back yard, between the cow pastures that line her back yard and move further up the hills (former coal mines) and the house. Corn dominates the garden right now, but it turned out that wasn't all that was growing there.

After a Weight Watchers-busting Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner and a similar meal - breakfast with sausage and eggs - I feared the big Sunday dinner Velma prepared, with help, for every Sunday after church. But I was pleasantly surprised with a bounty from Aunt Velma's garden - tomatoes (both creamed and sliced fresh), corn, potatoes that we brought in and helped peel) - and then heavy huge slabs of beef - from - yes - one of Aunt Velma's cows (I saw them early in the morning but didn't get a picture). Aunt Velma fretted over not having dessert but was able to thaw a pound cake and slice it thin enough for all of us to have some. Joining us were the same family members who were at church: Rebecca and family, Tim and Sarah, Aunt Velma and cousin Lenora (and John). We only used two tables instead of the normal three.

In between when Sarah was a married mother of two sons and a newlywed 40-something, Sarah was a divorced city official in Mason, where she was on the town council and was a town clerk.

Vincent was pretty well behaved at Aunt Velma's, considering he had wanted to get back to Louisville, to see a midnight movie at the Baxter Theater. He also raced through about six library books, which kept him occupied.

This is the cow pasture and hills overlooking Aunt Velma's house. This time we never did get to walk up there. Our first visit we did the full-blown hill walk - high above Aunt Velma's house - to the Indian cave now covered over by some version of mountaintop removal - and to the cabin where Aunt Velma's father once lived and where she and Grandpa Gregory (Vincent's namesake) were born. They relocated it from its original location in Mudlick, West Virginia and reconstructed it using the same logs (specially marked for placement) on their back acreage (on Frankenstein hill on the right side of the picture Cardboard hill is on the left and is much closer to walk to).

Before leaving we lingered and chatted with Sarah, Velma, and Lenora. John had already left for Huntington. Rebecca, Rodney, and Kalyn had left also to retrieve Karrigan from her father.

We said good-bye to our family members. We've been told that Velma's health isn't great, and she said osteoporosis and arthritis are bothering her and keeping her from doing as much gardening as she used to (now she tells her grandsons what to do in the garden). We drove past the bridge and the WalMart, then past the facilities of the old coal mine that Aunt Velma and husband Bill and their family once owned (until the Environmental Protection Agency and Internal Revenue Service took it and Uncle Bill passed away). Soon we were driving past a no doubt coal-fired electrical plant that Uncle Bill's coal probably once helped fuel.

Two of the towns down river - both of which our families connect with - have had movies about them. "Mothman Prophecies" - with Richard Gere - was based on stories out of Point Pleasant, WV, whose bridge to Ohio collapsed catastrophically in the late 1960s. Uncle Boyd (Grandma Gregory's brother) and Aunt Garnet once lived there, and we drove past Tim's Point Pleasant office, where Rebecca once worked. We drove over the bridge across the Kanawha River, then looked back to the (rebuilt) Ohio River bridge, whose predecessor bridge collapsed. Further down river we skirted around Huntington, WV, where John lives and where Penny spent the summer of 1983 at a summer internship. Last time we went to Mason, directly from Louisville (I think) we drove all the way through Huntington, through the campus of Marshall University, which we subsequently viewed in the football movie "We Are Marshall" (with a surprise appearance by an actor playing now Florida State football Coach Bobby Bowden).

On the way home we drove near two KY schools Vincent had visited - Morehead State with Stephanie, and Transylvania in Lexington with me - but I was not bold enough to get off the freeway and drive by (since I hadn't seen Morehead, and Stephanie hadn't seen Transy). After a long summer of traveling for all of us, we got home around 8:30 p.m. Sunday.

-- Perry