Ohioana Library Ohio Legacy Series: Ohio Fiction Writers, An Essay by Karen Novak

The Ohio Legacy Series

A Fiction Writer’s Map of Ohio
An essay by Karen Novak

Reprinted from the Spring 2004 Ohioana Quarterly

I am sitting at my desk, a fourth grader among other fourth graders at Taft Elementary in East Liverpool. We are squinty eyed and tongue biting, fingers aching as we press hard into our pencils and try to do what the assignment requires: draw a map of Ohio. My paper is smudged; eraser filings drift toward the edges. In between attempts at the impossible squiggliness of “The Great Ohio” and the continued erosion of both ends of my pencil, I can’t help but wonder if kids in Utah or Wyoming understand just how easy they have it.

The geography of the United States is a forced marriage of geometries: the right-angle logic of territorial division joined to the infinite curve of the earth. Wars, treaties, human ambitions cannot sway the fact of seas, mountains, or rivers. The resulting patchwork of our union is testimony to American pragmatics in the face of nature. We have been inspired, frustrated, shaped by the shape of the land, nature’s boundaries giving form and purpose to the limitless realms of human vision. Imagine the word pioneer without the implication of the Rockies.

The more you appreciate the form and purpose underlying the making of maps, the more free-handing the geography of your home feels queasily imprecise. When was the last time you tried to draw Ohio? The legally imposed lines are simple enough; architects of statehood prefer the sensibly straight and mitered whenever possible. But then your pencil must negotiate the bumpy cup of Lake Erie’s shore. After that, the river, where the best you can do is serpentine a trail of graphite into an approximation. The more you know of Ohio, the harder it is to capture the complexity. For that you need a different sort of line.

A fine broad river always, but in some parts much wider than in others: and then there is usually a green island, covered with trees, dividing it into two streams. Occasionally, we stop for a few minutes, maybe to take in wood, maybe for passengers, at some small town or village (I ought to say city, every place is a city here); but the banks are for the most part deep solitudes, overgrown with trees, which, hereabouts, are already in leaf and very green. For miles, and miles, and miles, these solitudes are unbroken by any sign of human life or trace of human footstep; nor is anything seen to move about them but the blue jay, whose colour is so bright, and yet so delicate, that it looks like a flying flower.
Charles Dickens, American Notes

Writing is geographical. To work words across a page is to create a topography that, with the rise and fall of letters, raises relief maps in the reader’s mind. Dickens lays out the vast and timeless scale of the Ohio River, but from the perspective of one who is new to the valley, a sensibility that comes from another place. For Dickens, the river is a defining element of the landscape over which he is traveling. Consider the same river arrived upon by Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved:

At noon they saw it; then they were near enough to hear it. By late afternoon they could drink from it if they wanted to. Four stars were visible by the time they found, not a riverboat to stow Sethe away on, or a ferryman willing to take on a fugitive passenger - nothing like that - but a whole boat to steal. It had one oar, lots of holes and two bird nests. . . .
Spores of bluefern growing in the hollows along the riverbank float toward the water in silver-blue lines hard to see unless you are in or near them, lying right at the river’s edge when the sunshots are low and drained. Often they are mistook for insects - but they are seeds in which the whole generation sleeps confident of a future.

This is the river redrawn on a human scale. More delicate, more difficult to span, this Ohio is an obstacle between degrees of freedom, a defining element in the life of an entire nation. It is the same Ohio River that Dickens wrote of, rendered by another master of fiction albeit separated by a century and a half in time. The descriptions share mentions of passengers and birds and the blue of solitude. The difference is one of intimacy, the “in or near” that allows Morrison not only to see those bluefern spores but to invest them with meaning. It is the landscape of a writer’s life that teaches her how to read the world, gives her the blueprint for how to build worlds of her own. Morrison is, of course, from Ohio. She knows the waterways of here hold more than water. She draws the river deep.

* * * * *

Geographically, Ohio is laid out over five major landforms: the Lake Plains; the Till Plains; the Bluegrass Section; the Allegheny Plateau, and the Glaciated Allegheny Plateau. Plains and plateaus and a grassland. Flat, flat, flat, and flat. That’s Ohio; or so goes the thinking of those who have not lived here.

Flat is what I knew of Ohio when my father, overwhelmed, exhausted by the chaos of Los Angeles in the late 1960s, moved us to East Liverpool. First lesson: flat was flat-out wrong. St. Claire Boulevard, back then still partially Dickensian cobble stones, took the slope of the valley with such a breathless descent that to this day I have dreams of careening down those cobbles on a bike with no brakes. In winter, water would fill and freeze the veins between the stones, making St. Claire more of a luge run than a road. Travel would be halted; the city effectively split in two, divided on a spit of ice - as it was divided year-round by other forces - into separate entities of the River and the Hill.

The River powered the city’s pottery factories, which in turn powered wealth up the Hill. Where you lived in relation to either low or high determined who you were; your address was shorthand for your job, income, aspirations. East Liverpool was my first awareness of geography as storyteller and the tiered vocabulary in the land as a language. Local inflections changed from level to level so that altitude registered in the voice. The kids who lived along the River spoke differently from the kids on the Hill, a subtle shift of emphasis and word choice that measured entitlement to the future. It was as though the farther you got up the incline, the more far-reaching your view of everything, including time - the assumption being that those on the top would simply keep rising until they escaped hills altogether. The Hill kids had plans; the River kids had dreams. We went to school together, played together, but never without an awareness of elevation, and with it, our implicit fight against gravities we could and could not name.

My family lived in East Liverpool until 1971 when the regimens of up and down had my parents craving L.A.’s blurred circus once again. In the four years I spent there, I had memorized Ohio’s historical milestones, learned long division of fractions, and grappled with how to diagram a sentence - practical lessons in drawing maps and charting paths through time and numbers and words. I count it as the best of my writer’s education. East Liverpool taught me to listen for the rivers and hills in a story because what is true is never flat.

* * * * *

To my brother
With many fond recollections of days spent in the solitude of the forests where only can be satisfied that wild fever of freedom of which this book tells; where to hear the whirr of a wild duck in his rapid flight is joy; where the quiet of an autumn afternoon swells the heart, and where one may watch the fragrant wood-smoke curl from the campfire, and see the stars peep over dark, wooded hills as twilight deepens, and know a happiness that dwells in the wilderness alone.
Zane Grey, dedication to The Spirit of the Border:
A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley

Perhaps the geography of the word itself, those long O’s at either end, the rounded hollows of sound - O-hi-O - so well captured the solitude and grandeur of this place that even as possession of power changed hands, no one thought to change the native name. The spelling has been altered over time as predominant cultural forces sought to polish language for a better reflection of its own interests, but from ohia to ohiio to its current form, the sound of the land endures steady as the river the Iroquois proclaimed “great” and “beautiful.” The very sound Ohio is compelling, coming as it does with a built-in echo. Ohio is the sort of word that helps you gauge your position between heaven and earth. Call it out loud; wait for what bounces back. Count the seconds. From that you may calculate time and distance. Figure out where you are; give that place a name.

Naming a place is no minor event; it puts a new point on both the atlas and the timeline, thus starting a new branch of history by declaring a where and a when: Once upon a time in a far away land. It is not surprising that people tend to attach their own names to these new stories in these new places. Zane Grey was born into a story already rooted in his name. Grey’s first novels were dramatizations of how previous generations of the Zane clan heroically struggled to transform a hardy green sweep of Ohio valley into industrious Zanesville. In Grey’s mind, the story of the region was inseparable from its people, the land fused with emotional context, so much so that when he dedicates his book to his brother, what he writes of is his love of the Ohio landscape of their youth.

It was that love of the solitary beauty of physical Ohio, Grey’s here that shaded his there in his hugely popular novels of the untamed west:

Dark, lonely cedar-trees, few and far between, stood out strikingly, and at long distances ruins of red rocks. Farther on, up the gradual slope, rose a broken wall, a huge monument, looming dark purple and stretching its solitary, mystic way, a wavering line that faded in the north. Here to the westward was the light and color and beauty. Northward the slope descended to a dim line of cañons from which rose an up-flinging of the earth, not mountainous, but a vast heave of purple uplands, with ribbed and fan-shaped walls, castle-crowned cliffs, and gray escarpments. Over it all crept the lengthening, waning afternoon shadows.
Riders of the Purple Sage

Grey’s sentences climb and fall, vibrant with color, like the fields and forests of his boyhood, lending grace to an unforgiving frontier. That frontier became the stage on which he set the workings of a modern mythos. Grey melded his Ohio-born ardor for the wilderness and family-bred respect for carving sustenance from those wilds into a moral geography for the collective imagination of a growing nation: the American West. Grey’s geography still defines - for good and ill - much of how we comprehend what it means to be American: solitary, proud, heroic, and one with the land we love.

Ohio is loved. The Iroquois pronunciation is Oheeyo. Great and beautiful. Say it slowly; Oh-ee-yo sounds like a desert owl calling across the emptiness.

* * * * *

A satellite map of Ohio landforms is pinned to the wall above my monitor. Computer-drawn map lines have been superimposed over the image to indicate the state’s borders, and the land has been surreally tinted to better distinguish physical relief. The Till and Lake Plains of Ohio’s northwestern region are a cool, liquid blue, which, moving southeast, is threaded with increasing density by the rising red of the Allegheny plateaus until that red takes over completely. From the distance of satellite orbit, Ohio appears to sit atop the sort of slow-motion collision of the extremes that make for storm systems. It is an illusion, of course. What I am actually seeing are incidental scars of ancient history: glaciers and tidal floods. It is what I know of Ohio that colors my intuitive reading of the cartographer’s chosen spectrum.

Intuition also cannot resist pointing to Ohio’s vaguely heart-shaped perimeter as having coined the symbolism of “America’s Heartland,” that legendary concentration of steadfast decency both mocked and courted by those who are sustained by its longevity. But those who would hold Ohio as simple probably also would say it is flat because flat is how it appears when they fly over “The Heart of It All.”

I knew better when I returned to live here again, twenty years beyond East Liverpool, with my husband and our daughters, this time to the Cincinnati area. We had settled, in 1994, on a house in Mason, a quiet, little town surrounded by mostly open farmland. Mason reminded us of the upstate New York region we’d left behind, the bonus being that our homesick kids could be comforted by the proximity of water parks and rollercoasters. We would have amusement park fireworks nightly over our deck, April through September, at 10 p.m. sharp. Those were the ones we could predict.

On one of those first nights, my husband drove out into the storm-thrashed evening to try to locate the essential-as-oxygen doll our younger daughter had forgotten in a restaurant. I sat by the window, listening to the tornado warnings on the radio, anxious for his safety. Lightning and thunder struck in simultaneous blasts, shaking the house down through the foundation. The wind seemed to lift the trees rather than bend them. In my lifetime of zigzagging across the continent, I had survived earthquakes, blizzards, hurricanes, and wildfires. I had never seen the sky doing as it did that night. I had never seen heaven get so close, so ready to spin.

It was a stormy, windy night, such as raises whole squadrons of nondescript noises in rickety old houses. Windows were rattling, shutters flapping, and wind carousing, rumbling, and tumbling down the chimney, and, every once in a while, puffing out smoke and ashes, as if a legion of spirits were coming after them.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The shape of the weather is guided by the shape of the land beneath it. Tornadoes are more likely over open areas where down drafts and wind shears may develop unimpeded. Freedom of movement tends to amplify both the beneficial and the destructive; it makes for the unpredictable. The whole of Ohio lays over an area susceptible to tornado activity, but Cincinnati and the region immediately to its north and west are particularly vulnerable to these sorts of storms.

Storms have centers; eyes, we call them, as though a sentient being were watching us through the lens of trouble. Just as the plains of western Ohio seem to invite cyclones, this area seems to invite trials of human nature. Cincinnati, once the very threshold of uncertain freedom for so many, still feels watched, as though cultural dilemmas cannot be called resolved until resolved here. Those dilemmas are not yet resolved. Old wounds of prejudice and violence cycle unmoving over this place and identify us as certainly as the red spot of Jupiter. Age-old furies of what is just and right remain locked in spiral confrontation with the desire to forget and move forward. Unique to this place? Hardly; but somehow more visible, more painful because this storm centers over the heart of the heartland.

Harriet Beecher Stowe spent her years in Cincinnati watching the skies and the gathering heat beneath them. She assessed the conditions in a novel that warned of whirlwinds on the horizon. Like the land here, Stowe’s writing is broad and straightforward. More interested in utility than in art, she saw her purpose as raising an alarm in the advent of disaster. “I had no more thought of style or literary excellence than a mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house . . . . ” Her storytelling is a statement of unobstructed moral clarity: the mistreatment of other human beings is wrong and what is wrong shall be righted - one way or the other. That is the quandary of living in an open land: you can see what’s coming from a long way off, but you are left precious few places to hide once it arrives.

If it must be so, it will be a mournful spectacle. If it must be so, the country will have reason to tremble . . . .
Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The big city on the big river that divides worlds, Cincinnati’s geographical propensity for big storms appears so laden with portent that it begs metaphysical interpretation. This is the stuff of fiction. It is also the truth of the land, and truth is the vein from which great fiction writers mine their stuff. Stowe told the truth she saw in Ohio and named the forces of a storm that would change, is still changing the shape of truth for the whole of the world.

* * * * *

A map of the literary history of Ohio, where writers’ names are plotted instead of places, shows the largest concentration of authors falls directly along the demarcation between plateaus and plains. Logical explanations are readily apparent: this meeting of landforms marks the path of direct transportation between major cities; those cities arose out of practical acknowledgment of geographic realities; cities tend to give rise to writerly types because the more people, the more conflict; the more conflict, the more stories. Nevertheless, overlay a map of Ohio writers on the map of the land and you will find a line of language bisects the state on a diagonal between river and lake. It is a fiction writer’s exercise in map drawing.

Fact: Lake Erie is visible to the naked eye from the surface of the moon. Over such a vast distance, the details of our cities and roadways and histories are lost. Only the basic shapes of the earth are discernable: seas, mountains, rivers. Those shapes are undivided by any human design, a reminder of the inherent fiction in maps. Still - and take it on faith of imagination - if you can find Erie, you can locate the pinpoint of reflected light that would be Ohio, some 240,000 miles away. You wouldn’t recognize it by a twinkly field of electric-city brightness or the scar of a highway. You would recognize it by associating meaning between landmarks. Essentially, you would have to draw the map of Ohio in your mind and then project it across the empty dark.

Fiction is geography forged from the right angles of hard experience engaging the infinite curve of emotion. Fiction is how you find Ohio from the surface of the moon. Or in the moonscape of the American West. Or in a bluefern spore. I like to imagine Morrison, still Chloe Anthony Wofford, growing up in Lorain on Erie’s shore, a girl without any conscious desire to become a writer. I imagine her watching moonlight and storms altering the shape of water and with it the landscapes both before her and as yet unseen. Somewhere within her imagination, maps were being drawn, charting significance onto the world - a geography so subtle, so rich with life that hope itself could be located in a seed floating on a river as a real place in Ohio.

Karen Novak is a author living in Mason, Ohio.