To make it easier on myself, I’m setting a general boundary: to the east and south, of course, is the river. And once I leave Pittsburgh, the old National Highway, SR-40 will be my northern boundary.
The only other limitation I’m placing on my jaunt is that I need to be able to get to places either on public transit, rides, or on SHORT walks. In certain areas, this may present something of an issue. But I want to wander off the beaten track a bit, west on 40 and down as far south as maybe Nashville… which I know, exceeds my previously stated southern boundary… but it’s also part of the Ohio River Basin and I know the bus goes there.
SR-40 begins in Maryland and ends in Vandalia, Illinois. I don’t know if I’ll get to the western edge of the old National Highway, but I do intend to visit Cairo, IL, where the Ohio meets the Mississippi.
That still gives me plenty of room to bounce around and take in the Ohio River Valley mud that I was dredged out of.
My original plan… to go west always west to the mountains, the big stretches of the country, the big sky … will hold until Spring. While I’m always drawn to the west coast and I have friends out there I very much wish to visit, I’ve been thinking (again and again) about what geography means.
People place a lot of power on geography. I’m thinking now of those fucked up maps that hung in my public school classrooms, the ones with United States being the biggest thing on the page. I’d say that it was the North American continent that was given a boob job but the the US was always inflated out of proportion with the rest of the continent. It’s no wonder that generations of American kids grew up with no sense of perspective and an unrealistic sense of the US’s place in the world. It all starts with maps.
That power extends to where you’re from…. something I’ve written about a lot. We assign literary sub-canons to geography: Southern, Appalachian, and recently, Midwestern literature have gained some ground against that antiquated East Coast bias that dominated American letters since the 1920’s. But we still tend to use the map we’ve drawn, inaccurate as it is, to determine inclusion in the canon… except for Applachian, though it does tend to get a Kentucky/West Virginia heavy repuatation for a mountains range that stretches much farther.
Where I’m from is worse than fly-over; it’s perpetually mislabled. It gets lumped in with the Midwest, which ignores the influence of the river in favor of the artificial maps lines we’ve drawn on the landscape. It’s my assertion that Ohio River Valley writing is fundamentally different from the Midwest, just like Kentucky isn’t strictly part of “The South.” This makes for a complicated map. But rivers make for complicated maps.
Where I now live where you’re from matters. Louisville, Kentucky is a river town that got a bit bigger, but it still behaves more like a town than a city. The arbitrarily drawn lines matter more here than other places I’ve lived. The reasons for that are complicated, but it all goes back to the river, that artery that drew and in some cases, dragged people westward downriver.
So that space between a 700 mile long highway and a 981 mile long Ohio River, hedged by the Appalachians on one side and the Mississippi on the other. That’s the georgaphy I’m exploring. It’s the mud that made me. And to the mud I am returning. The trip begins at the end of September and will extend (probably) through October.