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.