Road Trip 2009, Day Two, Part II

Heading out of Pittsburgh, the road passed through the city's Northwestern suburbs - Avalon, Elmsworth, Sewickley -- generic and somewhat dusty, but not the ghosts of their former selves I was expecting (I would get that soon enough). A pristine brown E-Type, an early, six-cylinder model, passed me, its driver waving back when I gave him a thumbs-up. I crossed the Ohio at Rochester, PA, where the river bends sharply to the West and a few minutes later was driving through Beaver, PA - a gem of a town with a textbook Main Street running through the heart of downtown. This was to be the last bit of prosperity I would see all day.

Continuing downstream along PA-39, I crossed into Ohio a few miles later. The industrial landscape of the Ohio River Valley was already in evidence a few miles north of Pittsburgh, but the riverside factories and warehouses there, though I couldn't quite tell what they manufactured, all looked operational. Smoke was billowing from their smokestacks, barges were moored nearby and an occasional eighteen-wheeler would pull out of the gates despite it being Saturday. Once on the Ohio side, however, the level of activity dropped precipitously. The town of East Liverpool, the first I hit in the state, was a dismal place from the first house. Covered with decades' worth of industrial grime, the houses all listed and sagged, many of their windows cracked and hung inside with dirty blankets instead of curtains. Cars - mostly dented Chevies and Pontiacs - sat in driveways or along the curbs, but there were no people on the street, not even sitting idly on the steps of their porches or hanging out aimlessly on street corners. The city was a complete ghost town. As I drove past a block-long single-level warehouse, once blue but now of an indeterminate color, its glassless windows gaping vacantly, a teenage boy rode by in the opposite direction on a BMX bike. Naked from the waist up, his body was completely covered with tattoos. He was my only evidence that the town was not completely abandoned. As we passed each other, he did not even glance in my direction even though mine was the only car on the road.

As I continued South on OH-7, the industry started up again on a vast scale. These were obviously power plants. At least one looked nuclear. The landscape was hilly and not unattractive - I was still in the Western foothills of the Appalachians, after all. I couldn't decide whether the massive smokestacks ruined or enhanced it. I've been in love with industrial landscapes since childhood, but in places where I first experienced them - the no-man's land between Brooklyn and Queens - they were total, stretching as far as the eye could see and consuming not only the entire city but seemingly the whole planet. Here, the iron and concrete coexisted with bucolic green hills and a lazily flowing river. Impressive though the power plants were, the coexistence looked uneasy.


I drove South as far as Steubenville, making a point to cut through downtown (larger, but still dead, with a modicum of car traffic but no more pedestrians than E. Liverpool), then cut West on US-22. Almost immediately, the hills leveled off and I was in the farm country Ohio is known for - flat and monotonous. I turned up the music and settled into a sort of stupor, glancing occasionally to the sides of the road and finding nothing but acres of corn and some other equally plentiful crop I couldn't identify. It was well after 1:00 p.m. when I reached Zanesville, named after Ebenezer Zane, an early settler, and not Zane Grey, the writer of Westerns, although Grey was apparently a descendant of Zane and was born here.

Driving through downtown netted no lunch possibilities - the place was dead. A thrift shop here and there, but otherwise, empty storefronts with equally empty loft spaces above them. If I was looking for the proof that the average Midwestern city was dead, I found it here in spades. I learned later that apparently there is a shopping and restaurant district to the North of downtown, along with an artist colony, but knowing nothing of it at the time (I managed to miss the famous Y-Bridge which Amelia Earhart had used for navigation, too), I stayed on US-22 and stopped at a surprisingly cheerful-looking diner a mile or so outside downtown. It was a retro-fifties job, but small, clean, and well kept-up. There was a number of customers at the tables even though it was well past regular lunch time. Sitting at the counter, I ordered a sandwich from a slim woman somewhere in her forties, friendly, her lively dark eyes and youthfully styled hair hinting at the beauty prematurely extinguished (I wanted to think) by life in a place like this. I asked her what the population of the city was. Not knowing, she called over a co-worked, a much older woman, wiry and stern-looking, who said that it had once been fifty thousand, but was now more like thirty-five. The real figure was about twenty-five, I later learned, but it didn't matter. The question I really wanted to ask was "what do people do here?" and was looking for a polite way to ask it. When I managed something along those lines, she launched into exactly the sort of monologue I would have wanted if I was a journalist writing an article about the decline of the American Steel Belt. "There used to be a lot of work here, but one by one the companies left. The mines were good, too, but they are all gone now. Etc., etc." But thirty-five thousand people, I thought. They must do something. They can't all be on the dole. "So what do people do for work now?" I asked. She never answered, doing some more lamenting about the former employers instead, but perhaps her lack of answer was the answer I was looking for.

US-22 Southwest of Zanesville is designated scenic by the AAA, and indeed it was, to the extent possible in the middle of Ohio. My next stop was Lancaster, the birthplace of General Sherman (of Sherman's March). There was a small monument to him in the middle downtown. Knowing that Lancaster was home to an Ohio University campus, I was hoping to get a cup decent coffee, but to no avail. Downtown Lancaster was every bit as dead as Zanesville despite a small festival going on in a park a couple of blocks from where I parked the car. Strangely, a luxurious boutique hotel shared frontage with vacant stores and a pawn shop.

Having looked up some information on these places after the fact, I discovered that all of them - Zanesville, Lancaster, probably even East Liverpool, have some life - communities, restaurants, festivals, museums, art scenes. But it certainly was not obvious from a casual stroll through these cities' downtowns. To an uninformed traveler, they offer little more than on overpowering sense of having been left behind by time.

From Lancaster, I continued South for a while longer on OH-159, also a designated scenic road, then cut North on US-23, bypassed Columbus to the West on its beltway, and continued Northwest on US-33 to Marysville, OH-31 to Kenton, then US-68 to Findlay where I was briefly forced onto I-75 before taking OH-25 to the Toledo bypass and onto US-23 into Michigan, finally arriving in bustling downtown Ann Arbor a few minutes after 9:30 p.m. I made only one other brief stop, in Mt. Victory, OH, where I spotted a complete vintage Gulf gas station. I hoped it was still operational, but it turned out to be just a façade, the building behind it housing a regular auto repair shop.