Category: Like Life

Leta and I walked around downtown Piqua on a quiet, somewhat chilly Saturday afternoon. We had coffee at a local ice-cream parlor, chatting with the proprietor; he said that much of his business was party catering out of a truck. I found a fallout shelter sign on the wall of the YMCA where I used to play bumper pool.

Evidence of the city’s milling and manufacturing past is still quite evident. This building is close to the river, just a few blocks down Main Street from what used to the the movie theater and is now a Hallmark store.

The centerpiece building of the downtown square, once the Orr-Statler Block and then the Fort Piqua Hotel (where the Greyhound buses would stop), is now the recently-restored Fort Piqua Plaza. The public library is the main tenant; I can’t turn up the story of how and why the library moved out of the Flesch mansion on Greene Street.

We didn’t have as much time to explore Cincinnati as we had hoped, but we did make it to my first intended destination: the American Sign Museum, located in an industrial district between the Mill Creek expressway and the rail yards.

The strength of this place is its collection of neon and other lighted signs, but there are some fun non-electrified artifacts as well. This Big Boy adheres closely to the original design: three-dimensional slingshot in the back pocket, striped pants, saddle shoes, and a zaftig physique. You can also find some well-authenticated Burma Shave signs, not the dime-a-dozen reproductions.

The examples of neon on display are just stunning, and many of them in remarkably clean condition, especially considering the proprietor’s disposition against restoration work. Leta was extra fond of this tavern sign, at right.

This Crosley sign features a lateral lightning bolt that zings on and off, much too quick for my point and shoot.

Long before electronic ad rotators and carousels on web pages, before windowshade roller signs at the ballpark, these flip-down rotating ads were in service. No, there’s no such thing as progress.

Just a few blocks back toward the freeway, at Colerain Avenue and Hopple Street, we stopped for cheese coneys and chili at Camp Washington Chili, then back on the road!

Fortified with gluten-free donuts, we set off south from Columbus to visit three Scioto Valley sites dedicated to preserving earthworks built by pre-European peoples. We talked a lot about the “mound builders” when I was going to school as a boy in Ohio, but I can’t recollect actually visiting any of the sites.

The first two were built by what we know as the Hopewell culture, Mound City, north of Chillicothe (first capital of Ohio)…

…and the Seip Earthworks, southwest of town. This section of a circular wall has been reconstructed; original or not, it’s impressive.

The orderly groundskeeping by the NPS makes you wonder what the Hopewell did to keep these enclosing ceremonial walls tidy. Certainly they didn’t have access to golf course fescue for planting.

We continued southwest, and after recovering from a wrong turn in the town of Bainbridge and chasing the setting sun, we proceeded to Serpent Mound, near Peebles. Current scholarship now attributes this work to the Fort Ancient people. The two approaches could not be more different. Where the Hopewell sites are geometric and situated on level ground, the Fort Ancient construction is organic, undulating along a ridgetop. It reminds me of Andy Goldsworthy’s wall at Storm King. The one thing the sites have in common is proximity to a watercourse.

Last week I donated Alberta, my venerable Ford Explorer, to one of my local public radio stations. She and I had a good run: we traveled (usually on birding/hiking trips) to Louisiana, Key West, Niagara Falls, the Adirondacks, twice to the beaches of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Cape May, several trips to Delmarva. She carried set pieces to a theater competition in Geneva, N.Y.; we took Mom birding in southeastern Indiana; during nesting season, my waders were always in the cargo area.

The biggest body damage she sustained was a scrape in the driver’s side rear fender: I ran into a support column in an otherwise empty parking structure in Vienna. Another time, a driver banged into her in Falls Church, but he nosed down and hit her square in the hub cap: you can’t see the damage at all.

It was the multiple trips to the shop that did her in: she was on her third transmission; we repaired the brakes last October only to have them fail again in May. But we still got past 200K miles before Della came on the scene, and we finished up with 208469.4. I will miss her.

Leta and I took a quick road trip to Ohio last week. First stop was Bexley in the Columbus suburbs to visit friends. On our way out of town we stopped at the Cherbourg Bakery, which makes an excellent line of tasty treats, all of them gluten-free and Leta-friendly.

Next to our parking space on Main Street, we found a mileage marker from the original National Road. We had covered the 254 miles from Cumberland much more quickly than those who traveled before us. Distances from Wheeling, to the east, and nearby Columbus, just 3-1/2 miles to the west, are somewhat legible in this image. (Point and shoots don’t do well with inscribed stone.)