east-bound and down

"All the sciences and arts are taught as if they are separate.  They are separate only in the classroom.  Step out... and they are immediately fused."
~~ Aldo Leopold





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Thinking about Ohio, lately, after tracing the provenance of Johnny Paycheck:  I lived in the "Buckeye State" from age zero to fourteen -- in Tiffin, Akron, Mineral City, and Rootstown.


On a map you look at the north-central part of the state, and move a little to the west, and find Tiffin, in Seneca County.  Then you could draw a line from Tiffin, east to Akron, then south to Mineral City, in Tuscarawas County, and back north past Akron, to Rootstown, in Portage County.


The lines come out like a capital "T" lying over on its side.


My parents liked to travel, or "go for a drive" and see things, and we went on vacation every year -- and I always had the feeling that I had been "all over" Ohio, riding in the backseat of a Volkswagen or Rambler or something else ... 


But I probably was never really in the western part of the state, except for when we traveled through it to go out to Minnesota, or Colorado, and, now that I consider it, I don't think we were in southern Ohio, except to go through that, on a trip to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, driving across scenic sun-splashed country which my father announced was "Appalachia."




(I've heard someone pronounce that "Appa - latcha" -- with four syllables.  My dad pronounced it "Appa - LAY - chee - uh" -- five syllables....)




I remember, sometime in childhood, being kind of surprised and amazed to find out that people in southern Ohio have a southern accent.  And now, years later, I'm -- (looking up synonyms) -- "caught unawares" to learn that Appalachia is partly in Ohio.


(Appalachia is way bigger than I had thought it was.  I thought it was parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia.





But a map on The Free Encyclopedia shows us that Appalachia actually goes through part of thirteen states:  Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York.)




The Free Encyclopedia says, |||"Appalachian Ohio is a bioregion and political unit in the southeastern part of the U.S. state of Ohio, characterized by the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and Appalachian Plateau. 


The Appalachian Regional Commission defines the region as consisting of thirty-two counties.  This region roughly overlaps with the Appalachian mixed-mesophytic forests, which begin in southeast Ohio and southwest Pennsylvania and continue to north Georgia and Alabama. 


The mixed-mesophytic forest is found only in Central and Southern Appalachia and eastern/central China.  It is one of the most biodiverse temperate forests in the world." |||





Those colored-in parts from the bottom & running up the right-hand side are all part of Appalachian Ohio.  32 counties -- seven of which sounded familiar to me (some kind of ancient memory-mystery)...  Coshocton; Mahoning; Muskingum; Pike; Trumbull; Tuscarawas; and Ashtabula. ...


I'll look for you in old Honalu-lah
San Francisco, Ashtabula
You're gonna have to leave me now, I know
But I'll see you in the sky above
In the tall grass, in the ones I love
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go   





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