5.

Once we got into Ohio, I checked the map again, wondering where the highest point in this next state could be found. It turned out not to be too far off our course, so we decided we would jog a bit north and catch a second high point in the day. We decided that, if at all possible, a point of the trip would be to see as many high points in the states we were passing through as possible. It turned out we would only see three, but those three were well worth it. I told Jon that our trip would be “high points by low roads.”

Ohio consists (at least the parts of it we saw coming in the back roads from Indiana) mainly of bricks. The only houses of any merit are of orange or red brick and seem to have sat there forever. The churches in the small towns are all of bricks too. Jon described to me quite a bit about building a house with brick, and we considered things like how to insulate them and cut down on energy loss and the various advantages and drawbacks of having a brick home. I don’t remember the details of it all, but if I ever decide to build a brick home I’ll ask Jon about it again.

We found Campbell Hill, the highest point in Ohio, after a bit of searching. It was quite a bit more impressive than Hoosier Hill, being an actual hill in the town of Bellefontaine or something along those lines. It wasn’t the most scenic hill around though. We found that out when we over-shot the actual high point and stopped to take pictures from another lovely and yet slightly less-high hill. As in Indiana, we had to backtrack before we found the actual high point.

Campbell Hill is topped by a nice little monument and an American flag. A plaque on the site explains that it sat on property owned by Somebody Campbell for years and years, and then became a NORAD site during World War II. The monument commemorates the division or whatever that was stationed here watching for enemy jets. There was a guest book to sign, and I signed it while Jon took photographs. We broke our promise with ourselves and hopped on the freeway that ran by the base of the hill to make up lost time getting to Eric’s house. His mom was preparing dinner for us and we didn’t want to be late.

It was a good thing we hurried, because dinner at Eric’s house was probably the best meal we had over our entire road trip, including the meal at the restaurant in Dublin, Georgia, that Jon claimed had the best food south of the Mason-Dixie line. Eric lives in Dublin, Ohio, and it was nice to see him in his natural state. There’s something about college that kind of takes people out of context, and it’s always a bit disconcerting and yet fitting when you, for the first time, visit the home of someone you’ve lived with for years.

After dinner Eric told us he was taking us to Dublin’s most famous attraction.

“A giant four-leafed clover,” I said. “It has to be.”

Jon nodded. “Stone, probably. And like four stories high.”

Eric just smiled.

Apparently the officials of Dublin decided somewhere along the line that their town would host a monument not to anything related to their national heritage, but to corn, so at dusk of that evening we stood with Eric at the edge of a field of at least fifty stone corncobs six feet high. They were quite eerie in the growing dark, arranged in rows like some kind of white, vegetative soldiers. Jon of course set up his tripod for some photographs, and I wandered over to read the plaques that told the history of corn and its impact upon the Midwest.

The three of us slept in Eric’s basement that night, and when I think of it now it occurs to me how much I’ll miss those guys when we go our separate ways, especially my roommate. I sat at a table that night before we went to bed, writing, and listened to Eric and Jon talk about guns in the next room. Eric has an old shotgun that belonged to his grandfather, and Jon was taking it apart and showing him how to clean it. I could hear him telling Eric how much fun it is to shoot with a twenty-two, saying something about how dangerous it is.

What he actually said was something like, “A twenty-two is pretty much the most dangerous gun in my book, because if you get hit in the head with that, what’s going to happen is it’s going to go in but not have enough force to get back out, so it’s just going to bounce around in there and tear things up.” Then, almost in the same breath, “Shooting one is pretty much the funnest thing in the world.”

I wanted to write something about shooting, somehow relating guns and lead bullets to capturing tiny bullets of light with the cameras we’re carrying across the country. Nothing really came though, so I read on the couch until they came in and we all went to sleep.

4.

According to our map, the route into Ohio would take us by Hoosier Hill, marked by a tiny red triangle as the highest point in Indiana. We had the time, and this entire trip was supposed to be about finding random side-quests, so we turned off the road we were on onto a secondary road. We followed that for a while, down into the white area where the land kind of fell between the cracks on the map and off the marked roads. The country all around seemed rather flat, broken only by tree lines and scattered farmhouses. Finally we saw a sign marked ‘Indiana High Point’ pointing us down another road. This road T-ed off and another sign directed us toward ‘Hoosier Hill’. We followed this next road up a slight rise past two or three farmhouses until it came to a lonely intersection. A sign here again indicated ‘Hoosier Hill’, pointing back the way we had come.

There certainly weren’t any hills in sight, so we back-tracked and stopped at a farmhouse to ask directions. When no one answered we got back into the car and continued until we thought we were at the top of the low rise the road crested. Here we pulled over and found a small sign by the side of the road indicating that there was a geological marker nearby that wasn’t to be moved. We stood looking, and sure enough out in the middle of a cornfield there was a small cement marker or some sort with another sign next to it.

“This is ridiculous,” Jon said. “This road is higher than that point.”

He was right, but we ran out into the field anyway, holding our cameras and loping over and through broken rows of cornstalks. It was windy and cold, and by the time we got to the marker we were gasping.

“It’s the high elevation,” I noted. “Thin air. Feel that wind. It’s usually cold this high up.”

The marker was probably an annoyance to whoever owned and plowed the field, because it looked like he had to plow right around it. Nothing actually came out and said that this was the highest point in Indiana, and without actually standing on top of the cement marker that held the copper geodetic marker it didn’t seem any higher than the rise of the road. But we stood on top of the marker anyway and took pictures of each other, and then and there we were probably the highest people in the state of Indiana.

“Flat,” I said, surveying it from my vantage point. “Flat and lonely. And windy.”

“Get a shovel and we could probably make a new high point.”

There was indeed something lonely to it, to the way the wind swept over the empty fields. It didn’t seem like it should be so cold in late March, but at least there was no sign of the snow the sky kept hinting at it. We ran back through the fields to the car, feeling like we were the only people in the entire state. Driving back the way we came, we almost immediately noticed a rise to our left that was certainly higher than where we had been before. I kept driving.

“The marker was back there, so that’s the highest point, and I don’t care what it looks like.”

We remembered the spot though, and it would be important later in the trip.

Somewhere on our way back to roads marked on the map, Jon caught on to how empty everything seemed. We hadn’t seen other people or passed a car since we turned off the main road that ran into Ohio.

“It’s like we’re borrowing this part of the country,” he said. “It’s like we’re renting it. For free.”

3.

We didn’t get on the open roads though, at least not right away. We had to double back into town and stop at a Meijer’s to pick up film and deodorant. Jon also needed a more detailed atlas. Meijer’s didn’t have one, but we finally found a Rand McNally at a Target. It would prove to be our most important purchase of the trip.

We also passed a comic book store called the Danger Room, and I was foolish enough to stop. It was one of the things we wanted to do on this trip, be able to stop at random places along the way, but I should have been smart enough to stay out of comic book shops. I always want to just go and look, see all the inked robots and costumes and explosions on the covers, but sometimes the temptation to touch is just too great. Then I feel stupid for buying comic books at the age of twenty-two. Today wasn’t any different, and I walked out with three issues of the latest Transformers series.

“They’ll probably be the last comic books you ever buy,” Jon consoled. This was the Jon who spent about a hundred dollars in a camera shop before we even got on the road. “You should savor them.”

So I tried. I neatly folded the plastic bag around them and put them in the side door panel, to be safe and unbending until the long ride home. They’re probably not the last I’ll ever buy though. If I had my way, my bachelor party would be spent buying and reading and organizing comic books, like some last desperate fetish.

But finally we were done with all of that and we finally moved out of the towns onto the roads that hold the towns together. The car was making funny noises, but Jon was almost sure it was simply an exhaust knock and nothing to worry about. We finally found what we’re looking for, out there between Indiana and Ohio. There were all the small towns I’ll never see again, hills, brick houses, churches, graveyards. We were following a tiny red ribbon, Jon driving while I plotted our course on the map, watching the labels and intersections pass.

We stopped to get gas at a Marathon in one of the towns that was exactly what we hoped to find. There were only two pumps, one of which was full service. There was a service garage attached, and the inside of the gas station had a single counter, a single metal shelf of candy, a newspaper rack, a refrigerated display of pop that seemed to be the newest thing in there, and an old-fashioned cigarette machine with those handles you had to pull out. The men in there were old, and they talked to each other and other old men that came in and generally ignored us. In the bathroom there was a “shallow water; no diving” sticker on the inside of the toilet seat. I note it here because it was my favorite gas station of the trip.

Another point of the road trip was to document what we found. We had decided, between this gas station and Nate’s house, that it would be impossible to stop and take pictures of everything we wanted to. There had already been about a dozen assorted windmills, collapsing barns, and old brick houses that we had wanted to stop at, and at that rate we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. Instead we decided that whenever we did have to stop, we’d try to find things there to take pictures of. So after we pumped and paid for gas we drove the car back across the street and got out at an old junkyard we had seen.

The junkyard was probably owned by the old men at the gas station, and it wasn’t so much a junkyard as a used-car lot that someone had forgotten about and allowed to sink into a swamp. The cars were still parked in neat rows, and through their broken windows you could see that some still had their upholstery. They all seemed to be from the fifties and sixties, all cars you should have seen polished and sitting proudly in someone’s garage. Here they were all rotting and dyed the color of rust by time.

We took pictures of them because they were arranged in such nice, swampy rows and it was such a richly overcast day. Jon was impressed because some of them still had their engine blocks, and I was impressed because it looked so cool to see trees growing out of engine blocks. We took our pictures, feeling important and artistic with our shoulder straps and lenses, and then we got back on the road.

2.

In the morning Nate’s mom had made us breakfast. I was never introduced to her, but the four of us sat together and ate scrambled eggs and the thickest bacon I’ve ever had. There were rolls too, as large as my fist, served with apple butter and raspberry preserves. Over breakfast Jon and Nate’s mother discussed horses.

Nate’s family lives on a horse farm. They raise Morgan horses, and I learned more about horses at that meal than I ever knew before. Nate’s mother and father want to donate a horse to the campground that Jon’s dad manages, but there are complications.

“You couldn’t donate it directly to the campground,” Jon explained. “There are still people on the board that don’t think having horses is the best thing for Adrian Christian Camp. You would be donating it to my parents, because the horses we have there now technically belong to them. They take care of them and feed them and everything with their own money until the board changes its mind. Actually, it’s just a few people, so they’ll probably be taking care of the horses themselves until those people die.”

I couldn’t figure out why they want to give the horse away. Maybe it was an old male that’s been gelded or a brood mare that’s too old to get pregnant. (These are terms that I learned that very morning.)

“She’s completely broke,” Nate was explaining. “You could walk right up and smack her on the nose and she’ll just stare at you. That’s why we think she’ll be so good around the kids or whatever at camp.”

Nate’s mom described the cart the horse can pull, and I tried to imagine people riding horse-drawn carriages to the tabernacle at campmeeting. It gives it a country, sawdusty feel. Jon wondered about the cost of something like that, the way to transport the horse down to Georgia, and asked about up-coming auctions in the area. I gave up following it and concentrated on my food.

Eventually the talk about horses ended, and Jon, Nate, and I finally went outside to see them. A cat and a Dalmatian appeared as we walked from the house to the first barn. The cat was completely black and aptly named Sinister. Nate got him at school to be a barn cat and brought him home. Sinister was incredibly friendly. When I picked him up he immediately clambered for a perch on my shoulder. The Dalmatian was Duke. He was just as friendly. If you stood still too long he sat on your feet, waiting for his neck to be scratched.

In the barn there were stalls on either side for horses. Nate went to the first and brought out Clipper, his favorite horse. Clipper was brown with enormous bug-eyes. I don’t know much about horses, so I don’t know whether all horses have eyes that large, but I’ve never noticed it before. I stroked its neck hesitantly as Nate led it out to brush. A barn cat watched us sleepily from a bale of hay in the loft.

Nate handed me the lead rope and told me to take Clipper outside. “Just walk next to him, take him wherever you want.” I knew he was doing it because he could tell I’m nervous around large animals, so I obliged him. I took the rope and led Clipper out of the barn door, around the yard beside the barn, and down the pasture fence.

“Don’t let him push you around,” Nate instructed. “If he starts to crowd you, just give him a push back.”

It was strange leading something so large. It felt as though an animal that could easily crush me or kick my skull in should not be so docile. I asked Nate and Jon about it.

“They’re scared of people,” Jon said, and I glanced at Clipper’s bug-eyes. He did seem to be giving me a stare verging on terrified. “They don’t know they’re bigger than you. They’re scared of everything, and they want you to tell them what to do.”

I led Clipper for a while longer and finally gave the rope back to Nate. There were other horses out here to be impressed and a little frightened by, and we walked along the fence as Nate pointed them out to us and explained how they are related. They have about fifteen horses on their farm, almost all of them Morgans.

“That’s Firefly.” He pointed. “She’s this one’s daughter. That’s Starfire.”

I don’t know much about horses, so I asked quite a few questions.

“We keep them all separated in different pastures because there’s always a dominant horse. Those ones way back there are old, and that one with them is gelded, so they’re all kind of passive. If they were up here with these, the younger ones would kind of pick on them.”

When we stepped outside the day had fooled us into thinking it was warm. Now I pulled the hood up around my face as we talked and kept my hands pushed deep into my pockets. At least it wasn’t snowing here. There was mud, but it didn’t seem much like spring mud.

We stopped at the last fenced pasture and watched a small horse running strangely with its head held to one side. “This one’s blind,” Jon explained to me. “Her name is Faith. She was born that way.”

Watching a blind foal run is probably one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. Maybe watching any foal or colt (I still don’t know the difference) run is kind of heart-wrenching, because they seem so spindly and fragile. I’m not really sure, because I haven’t seen many young horses run. But watching a blind foal run will break your heart, because you see how young and restless and hesitant it is, and then it’s even more scared and helpless than that and yet graceful too. Faith would run in circles, weaving back and forth across the mud.

Her ears perked up as Nate called to her, and he opened the gate and walked out into mud up to his ankles. That was something to see too, watching him get close to her and calm her with his voice until he could soothe her with touch. It didn’t last long though, and soon she was out running again, circling her dark little world.

I learned a lot about horses from Nate’s house, especially when I went back into the house to use the bathroom and found a magazine all about Morgans. It was a monthly magazine (I’m always amazed at how many things can have monthly magazines published about them), and it seemed to me to mainly be a dating service for horses. You could pay thousands of dollars to let your horse mate with another horse with names like Futurity French Commander or Blood Rose Promise III. The magazine would describe the kind of bloodlines the horses had and which of their offspring had won awards so you would know your horse was going to make some outstanding babies.

When we left Jon set up his old camera on a tripod. We had Nate’s mom take a picture of the three of us standing in front of my car, and we decided that would be our morning tradition for the road trip. It seemed a little old fashioned having a camera that wasn’t digital set up on a tripod and posing in front of it. We probably should have been on horses riding from town to town, not in my Firebird.