Leave it to peaceful disruptions to bring about a welcome change of pace. When the electricity went dead on Thursday afternoon I made straight for my parents’ house, spent three hours with them and then left to reconcile my own home. I pulled into my apartment building’s parking lot to find it buzzing with tenants who would have nothing of dark, stifling hot rooms. It was the group of two girls and a fellow chatting on a tarp next to someone’s car that started me thinking about getting out and enjoying the sunny evening. Scaling the stairs under emergency lights, I ducked in my apartment to drop off my dress jacket and workbag before resisting a few electric habits. No phone messages, gone if there were any. Everything in the fridge was slowly warming, I knew that; no need to make sure. The television was dead. I actually caught myself turning towards the computer room to hit the internet and check headlines.
I needed to get out.
Bounding back down the stairs, I made my way around the building.. A walk was what I needed - but not a normal walk. Since May I’ve been making off-and-on jaunts inside a tiny subdivision consisting of an oval and an outlet; the houses are vintage 1950s and impeccably maintained. It’s long enough for exercise, short enough for a twilight stroll. But like I said, I didn’t want the usual. A three-way intersection sits to the east of my apartment, beyond it a forested valley. The north-south main road is busy and generally boring; the eastbound break-off is a road I know well by name but not experience, having lived on the other side of town all my life (no need for a shortcut that’s out of my way). It’s old, long and functionally rural - perfect. It was only seven-thirty so I had light to count on. I crossed the main road and began my walk along the north shoulder of the eastbound; grass where it wasn’t gravel.
Houses were rustic; most of them unique, having been built by their first owners. Lots to the north were short in front but made for gigantic backyards extending a couple hundred feet to sidle up against the interstate. It was the kind of big yard you remember from childhood, return to as an adult and confirm that yes, it really was that enormous.
I walked for fifteen minutes when I found, smack dab among this repetition, a giant, empty lot. There it was: a patch of trees and foliage wedged like a sylvan keystone between miles of developed land, the street to the south and the interstate to the north. No rhyme or reason as to why the city, now nearing a satisfying build-out, had missed this green tuft for decades. Curse? Lazy tenants whose house had been swallowed up by woods? Good tenants who happened to be the Three Bears? Preservation, perhaps: one of the few pockets of certified boondock the state of Ohio managed to squirrel away before the despoiling wrath of Big 20th Century Industrial and Urban Development knocked down trees and gave everyone paved roads, heat and running water. I couldn’t tell, only to see for certain that it was a dense forest. I’ll make an inquiry with the zoning board.
Further down was another oddity: two stunted, half-streets jutting from the main road. They both ran the length of lots to either side of me - but a few hundred feet doesn’t provide for many houses. You could find more people on a metro bus than either street’s block party. Stranger still, though they met at the same intersection the two streets’ construction intent couldn’t have been more different. The north street had no more than ten older, smaller, cheaper, haphazard houses before its unsightly dead end; the south street inclined and curved as it crept up a rise in front of the valley, lined with healthily six-figured homes. Two inquiries with the zoning board.
After several more minutes of walking the treelines closed in from either side while the road hugged a hill, dipping and rising and dipping again. Then it split off to a southbound road that dropped into the valley, a wing of the Cleveland Metroparks, and the local water treatment plant - the latter invisible from where I stood, so my nose succeeded where my eyes couldn’t. As the fumes became faint the road rose again, and trees cleared. The sight was nothing special - broad front yards, electrical lines slung on poles tracking a winding road, cars passing every few minutes or so, the darkening eastern horizon as it neared sunset on an August evening - but it flipped a switch in my mind.
Now, most of us are occasionally socked with memories when returning to a familiar place, and déjà vu when we can’t pin down what we’re supposed to remember. I’d only begun to drive down this road each day from the apartment and before that night, I had never walked it - I knew I had no memories of this place. Instead, the moment was Grand Central Station for a crossing barrage of hot summer evenings over the years. It took me back to Indiana, visiting the Nielsens seventeen years ago; Michigan, at the house my grandparents left recently; with my family at camps and resorts in southern Ohio; Pennsylvania, visiting old neighbors; in Kentucky with my OM team, while we waited on our van’s repair with a congratulatory six-pack for the auto mechanics; University of Tennessee, winning first place in all categories, walking back to the dormitory with our trophy and humming “Auld Lang Syne” over and over through a kazoo while OX smoked a cigar. Take a stack of papers that have spent ages in the attic and fling them around the room; pick each one up and read it before neatly filing them all away. That’s what it was like, over in another instant. Back to earth.
I’d gone about two miles when the valley and forest receded; there, lots south of the road ran flat and deep. A ranch was on that side, with acreage in front and buildings behind, a fence stretching for about an sixth of a mile along the road. The place was obviously an attraction: atop a ten-foot tall motte sat a brightly painted oxcart, while further back a carriage rested in the middle of a corral (by day you can see horses as you speed past in a car). A large sign, bearing the design of official municipal business, sprang from the side of the road next to the ranch’s long driveway. “Parker Ranch,” it read in large letters, below that a paragraph I couldn’t make out from where I was.
On the north side of the street, where I stood, a wary Malamute chained to a house next door had begun yapping at me. Between a certain disaffection with being barked at and a pang of curiosity for the story of Parker Ranch, I gave it a “What the hell,” crossed the street and stepped up to the sign.
PARKER RANCH. ADELE VON OHL PARKER. She was a daring stunt rider for Buffalo Bill before the Great Depression tossed her out of a job, the sign explained. Eventually settling outside of Cleveland to found the ranch to my right, Adele taught riding lessons to local youths and saw many a famous face stop by her equally well-known establishment. Gene Autrey was one; another was a circus owner who let his elephants “bathe in the Rocky River.” In 1969, the legend who was Adele von Ohl Parker passed on. Her legacy, concluded the sign, lives from by the preservative grace of Ohio's historical presentation society: horses, carriages and all.
Ms. Parker will always be ridin’ with us - giddyap!
That spot right in front of the Parker Ranch worked as the perfect waypoint for my stroll. Figuring the amount of time I’d taken to walk down, I had enough light left to return to the intersection in front of the apartment, turn, and finish the evening with a lap around the subdivision. So I went back the way I came, taking to the south side of the street once it provided enough shoulder on which to walk. I passed the hills, the half-street offshoots; the big lots and the empty lots.
Halfway back, I saw a boy of about twelve riding his bike towards me, furiously negotiating the edge of the pavement. Gravel, as we all discover in childhood, is the bane of bicycle tires, elbows and knees - and from the grimace on his face the risk of wiping out was, to him, halfway between a game and an obsession. I seldom have anything useful to say to kids, let alone when I’m about to break their concentration, so I kept eyes forward and let the daredevil’s show go on.
He zoomed past, revealing a middle-aged woman across the street and four or five houses down, shaking a tablecloth at the end of her driveway. I’d walked by the house on first leg of the stroll; was it the one with a family barbequing out back? It might have been; a couple of children, fresh from dinner, buzzed about near her.
She was largish and dark haired, and looked like a dozen women I’ve known over the years; friend’s mothers and my mother’s friends. The classic “somebody’s mom.” Continuing to shake the tablecloth, she turned slowly with me, watching out of the corner of her eye. Even from sixty feet away, her body language was obvious as I approached: she was about to say something.
Five, four, three, two -
“Did they make you walk home from work?” she smiled.
Big grin. I hadn’t expected that.
But I should have. The slacks, the leather shoes, dress shirt and tie; sweating from the heat and traipsing my way through gravel on the side of the road. I looked like I’d stepped out of the Disney made-for-television production of Death of a Salesman, where, you know, Willy Loman’s rear left wheel snags, mid-tragedy, on some raveled asphalt. He doesn’t drive off the cliff but instead leaves his suitcase and vanity in the car; trudges home; kisses his wife; releases Biff and Happy from their life sentences as painfully symbolic, one-dimensional supporting characters; cleans up; then goes ahead and gets ordained a few years later. At least I think it ends like that.
“Nah. I’m doing this out of my own free will. These kinds of days let us enjoy things we never would otherwise, you know,” I called back. I’ve got to be in a certain mood to follow one-liners and set up for the cymbal crash. Caught off-guard, I opt for lighthearted philosophy - but it usually works just as well.
She smiled again and turned back to finish with the tablecloth. I passed the house, beaming.
Walking the final several hundred paces on the country road proved to be a startling education in what a difference forty-odd feet make to the perception of a landscape. The south side of the road turned out to be a country diorama. Not a minute after passing the woman, I looked down to the left of the sidewalk to see deep, wide, weeks-old tractor tracks in dried mud and torn grass; points scored, I hadn’t seen anything like that in a while.
Next came a funny little brick house, its architecture somewhere between 1957 and 1958 Guy Williams Zorro. Plastic adobe façades, tall windows with display vases; all stuck on a ranch that couldn’t have been larger than the combined family room and kitchen of your standard mid-1960s colonial. The log-fence-enclosed sideyard - a “sideyard” because, of course, the ground behind the house abruptly fell away into the valley - stopped me in my tracks and I stood there for a minute, gaping in awe. A tiny shed stood at the house’s side; to the right of that was a brick-inlaid fountain with a circular, limestone base; a concrete-and-brick love bench behind the fountain; at the far corner of the lot, a jaw-dropping, brick gazebo just large enough to enclose an avid gardener as he tended to whatever ivy-like plants hung from the latticework. All of these things were connected by a narrow, winding, cut stone path.
I managed to squeak out a “Wow,” and moved off.
Roadkill some fifty feet beyond. Old, sunburnt, only slightly identifiable. It didn’t even stink, it was so dead. Nature’s welcome mat. A country staple.
Finally arriving at the intersection, I went for a lap around the Atomic Family subdivision. As I expected, it was unremarkable. Relaxing, yes; a good end to the walk, without a doubt. But I wouldn’t have invested two hours whipping around and around and around the oval - nor would I put pen to paper about it. In fact, that’s exactly what I did the moment I stepped from the bright hallway into pitch black. Water was out and I quickly drained my warmed pitcher; the apartment had been set to Bake. With a flashlight, I ambled out onto the balcony and scribbled down notes in a legal pad. Still reeling from the temperature inside, I dripped sweat to dot the page, resulting in some very interesting margin formations.
Adversity, my father jokes, prepares you for the important things in life: more adversity. What a perfect evening. Here’s to inconveniences like that one!