SOUTHEASTERN OHIO, BACK ROADS, ROUTE NUMBERS

Here are some buildings I liked in my recent and epic wanderings in southeastern Ohio. Also, the Amish hill country north of here, around Wooster and Millersburg, is gorgeous in an agrarian way. To try to hang on to a theme, the campuses at College of Wooster and Kenyon College (in tiny Gambier) are extremely attractive, too, as are their towns.

“Maps are a way of organizing wonder.”
Peter Steinhart, “Names on a Map” (1986)

Color season has begun. Shake a leg. Here is the southeastern quadrant of Ohio. Could you name as many as five towns prior to this map? Can you picture the towns or the hill country? Click to enlarge (though only a little, I'm afraid).



I recommend these fine drives on southeastern Ohio’s back roads (there are more, but these will get you started):

from just north of the quadrant:

Rt. 800 Urichsville to Barnesville
Rt. 83 Millersburg to Coshocton to Reinersville to Beverly

Within the quadrant:

Rt. 339 Macksburg to Beverly
Rt. 36 Coshocton to Gnadenhutten (mostly 4-lane, but open, rural, pleasant)
Rt. 147 Batesville to Sarahsville.
Rt. 285 Winterset to Caldwell (averaging about 30 mph).
Rt. 513 Middlebourne to Batesville
Rt. 78 Woodsfield to Caldwell to McConnesville to Glouster
Rt. 564 Caldwell to Harrietsville

western part of the quadrant:

Rt. 60 Zanesville to Marietta
Rt. 550 Marietta to Athens
Rt. 13 Athens to New Lexington
Rt. 7 along the Ohio River is sometimes beautiful, sometimes pocked with industry.

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Dylan Thomas, "Fern Hill." Ohio on Two-Lane Roads.

I’m just back from a two-lane road trip to central Ohio, and spring was making an Ireland of the buckeye state.

For fellow blue highway travelers, let me recommend north-south Routes 19 and 314 (connected by 224) from Magee Marsh to Sparta. It’s a stretch of two-lane, rural, understated beauty and mostly gentle curves—not a city to be seen or smelled, except for the short, harmless tacky-strip in Willard.

The parallel to that is Routes 61 and 4, which are also excellent, though construction on Rt. 4 could become a problem over the summer. Rt. 61 takes you through Galion, not a tiny town, but a pleasant one.

As for poetry, what I said about cummings yesterday is also true of Dylan Thomas, though I don’t think serious readers are quite as embarrassed to have found the Welshman important to them.

To be sure, Thomas is self-indulgent and redundant as he wallows in the wonders of nature, but I don’t think many would call him a philosophical simpleton, unless they’d say the same of Wordsworth. Also, who can fail to love the richness of the images in “Fern Hill,” even in its excesses?

Fern Hill - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

And who would dare to claim immunity to that conclusion? If you haven’t at least tried to sing in your chains, why are you still sitting here, bothering us, stealing our oxygen?

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