Ohio Connections Literary Exhibit
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By Donna Spencer
Like many of my fellow hillbillies, I have a set of peculiar connections to Ohio, a strange startle of memory and meaning when I cross the river into Ironton or Coal Grove or Gallipolis or Marietta. For four generations now, my family has been crossing some bridge into Ohio and then skittering back across a few hours or years later. Ohio’s never really been home, but there always seems to be some reason to be there.
My mother was born there, in Middletown, the eldest child of an Ohio woman and a farmer from Clearfield, Kentucky, who had come north to find work. Middletown to Clearfield, back in the 1930s, was a long and difficult trip, but they got back when they could, and eventually they were able to stay.
When I was a girl they lived in Greenup County just across the river from Ohio. If we drove a while west we could take a bridge into Portsmouth; a shorter distance east and we could take a bridge into Ironton. Even through the Lennon Sisters sounded angelic when they sang “Beautiful Ohio,” I knew that crossing that river meant entering an exotic, sinful land.
Ohio was where my mother and aunt, pretty young women in a powder-blue ’61 Chevy, went to buy the beer that they took back to dry Greenup County and drank secretly in their parents’ garage. It was a drive made on Saturday afternoons. I’d doze in back seat the size of a bed, counting telephone poles, listening to their voices, watching the smoke from my mother’s Salem drift out the open window. Ohio was where I tagged along with my uncle to the drag races, thrilled by the crowds and engines revving in the dark, staying up late and falling asleep on the way home.
To an eight-year-old hick whose idea of a big city was Ashland, Kentucky, it might as well have been Europe. The accents seemed foreign; the landscape and the laws were different. There was unfailing glamour in the toll booth on the bridge, in the river below us, in the casual way that we crossed the state line.
In time, my grandparents left Greenup to retire on the farm in Clearfield. One by one the counties of eastern Kentucky voted to legalize liquor. People got saved and quit buying beer, and drag racing went out of style.
At 25 I was crossing the river again to meet my new husband’s family in Coal Grove, just down the road from the place where I had once hidden a six-pack of beer under my skirt when the state patrol pulled my mom over for a bad tail light. Even though we had met in Kentucky, he came from the sort of people who tended to land in Ohio and stay put. His great-aunt, born in Baltimore, came to Coal Grove with her parents as a small child in 1914 and lived there in the same house for 90 years. His grandparents were nearby in Ironton. Divorced for many years, they both lived in Sherman-Thompson Tower (which wasn’t a tower at all but one of those big apartment buildings for elderly people) where they hung out together all day and then went to their separate apartments to sleep.
We’ve made the drive to Ironton and Coal Grove too many times to count. From Kentucky it was just a quick whiz up I-64 and through a pair of Cannonsburg overpasses inscribed in spray paint with my favorite love poem: “I love you baby dool” on the the first, “I swear” on the second. From Minnesota it was a twentysomething-hour drive that always seemed to end with the sun rising into our bleary eyes on that last stretch of Route 52 as we followed the river from Cincinnati. From Athens - in the ten years that we actually lived in Ohio - we picked up Route 93 in Jackson and followed it for 40 miles, usually with an overloaded coal truck in front of us and a pickup truck behind, gunning its motor and edging out looking for a chance to pass.
We marked the seasons on Route 93 by spotting deer or fabulous Christmas displays or Easter trees or flags, driving down past The Beauty of Holiness Church and the Short List grocery store and the sign that said “Eat Pork.” We drove it once with a dead cat that we loved too much to bury on a rental property, and once with a new baby.
From West Virginia, where we live now, we’re back to crossing a bridge,
something we’ve done so often that “Welcome to Ohio” was the first phrase our son learned to read.
It is my husband’s theory that the corner of the state where he grew up is really an
annex of Kentucky or West Virginia, and even though I still cling to the sophisticated
Ohio of my childhood I do see his point. It’s never really been home, even when we lived there.
But as long as someone dear to us is there, it’s pretty close - and if there should happen to be beer or drag racing, so much the better.
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