The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
A few months before my 40th birthday I had a brilliant idea. To celebrate all those trips around the sun, I would drive I-40 from coast to coast, stopping at various landmarks and attractions along the way. I even had a title for the book I hoped to write about the adventure, “Forty: A Cross-Country Midlife Crisis.” This idea dropped on me out of nowhere as I was waiting in line at a toll booth on the Ohio Turnpike and took firm root by the time I returned home several hours later.
Of course, traversing the country alone didn’t seem like all that much fun, so I called my collaborator on ludicrous adventures, Carl, and ran it past him.
“Interesting. How long do you think it would take?”
“I’m thinking a week, maybe 10 days. We can rent a car on one end, drive it to the other, then fly home. I-40 runs from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Barstow, California. It’s 2,500 miles.”
“Sounds doable. Let me think about it.”
Carl, also turning 40 that summer, called me back a couple of days later and declined the invitation.
“I’d like to do it, but I only get so much time off and I just can’t spend that much of it away from my family.”
It was a perfectly reasonable, indeed commendable, decision, and without a running mate, my cross-country midlife crisis concept faded into oblivion.
I thought about that road trip, abandoned 20 years ago, this past week as I drove from Charlotte to Ohio for a family wedding. It’s exactly 500 miles, a long but reasonable day’s drive, from my house to the wedding venue in Tiffin, an hour south of Toledo, but I decided to break it into two days and do a little camping, fishing and sight-seeing along the way.
The first leg of the trip, Charlotte to Athens, Ohio, was about five hours, and I arrived mid-afternoon. Regular readers may remember that I spent a couple of years at Ohio University in Athens in the early ’80s. In those days, U.S. Hwy. 33 was a two-lane country road that ran through every podunk town with a stoplight, but it’s now a four-lane limited-access highway from the Ohio River to Columbus; as fast, if not faster, than taking I-77 and the Turnpike to northwest Ohio.
I arrived in Athens mid-afternoon and discovered it was move-in week on campus. The streets of downtown were clogged with cars loaded from floorboard to headliner with clothes, linens, furniture, area rugs and other necessities of dorm life; the sidewalks jammed with confused-looking parents and their wide-eyed progeny.
I fit right in.
The restaurant where I had hoped to have dinner, Souvlakis (Home of the Super Beef Hoagie), wasn’t open yet – according to the sign on the door, the owners take summers off to travel – so I wandered around some of my old haunts, or at least the spaces where my old haunts had once been. School Kids Records is now a used furniture store, and The Junction is now J-Bar. The Athena, the only movie theater I’ve ever walked out of in the middle of a film (“Hot Skin” for those keeping score at home), is still there, as are the College Book Store and a couple of Court Street bars I didn’t frequent. Campus Sundries, my go-to spot for snacks and beverages back in the day, is essentially the same store but is now called Union Street Market.
Knowing that Souvlakis might not be open, I had scoped out a craft brewery with a full menu as my next stop. Little Fish Brewing Company is located in a part of Athens that I had never visited, indeed, which likely didn’t even exist in the ’80s. I made a selection from their extensive beer list and ordered a dish with a name I couldn’t pronounce, basically a spicy lamb meatball salad. My first beer, a corn-based lager, was meh, but my second, a Blue Moon-style wheat ale, was pretty good. The unpronounceable food was excellent.
I overnighted at the Burr Oak State Park campground, a half-hour north of town, and got an early start the next morning. The second leg of the trip was Burr Oak to my hometown of Port Clinton, three and a half hours to the north. Since I had plenty of time before my 3 p.m. fishing charter, I plotted a more rural route that took me through several small towns.
The first of these was Corning, 10 miles outside the park on Route 13, and I was relieved to make it there as I was running on fumes by that point. Corning’s lone gas station is called John’s Place and it is one of those gas station/restaurant/grocery/hardware combos that are the mainstay of small rural communities. What must have been the entire male population of the town over the age of 50 was standing outside drinking coffee and shooting the bull – a Norman Rockwell painting, if ol’ Norm had been from southeast Ohio. As I stood pumping my gas, my attention was drawn to a mural on the side of a building across the highway, so I procured my own cup of coffee and walked over to have a look. The mural depicted soldiers dressed in uniforms representing the various branches of the armed services and marching toward a waiting train. What an excellent way to honor the town’s veterans!
Three-plus hours and a dozen small towns later, I arrived in Port Clinton, “Hometown of Anson Award-Winning Author John B. Marek.” Actually, they haven’t gotten around to putting that sign up yet, so they’re still going by “Walleye Capital of the World,” which is fine since I was there for walleye. I started with a walleye sandwich at Jolly Rogers, a local joint known for its fresh-off-the-boat fish. They recently moved from the hole-in-the-wall location they opened in the mid-’70s to a larger space a hundred yards down the road. The new place is an improvement by any objective standard, but it was still a little sad to see the effects of time marching on. After finishing my meal, I had just enough time to stop by Bassett’s Market for a packaged sandwich and bag of chips to take on the boat for dinner, as the charter wouldn’t be returning to the dock until 9:30.
The Sassy Sal is what’s known in the sport fishing world as a head boat, so called because you pay by the “head.” It can hold up to 25 fishermen, but I wouldn’t want to be on it with more than 10. Fortunately, that night it was just me, a man from Cincinnati and five 30-something graduates of Central Michigan University who get together for a summer trip every year.
Late August is the tail-end of walleye season and we had to motor 90 minutes, all the way to the Canadian border, in order to find fish, but everyone on board got at least one. I caught two walleye, two catfish and a white perch.
I finished my trip to Port Clinton the next morning with a visit to the Lighthouse & Maritime Festival at Waterworks Park. A few years ago, the town erected a replica of the lighthouse that once stood near the park, along with a statue dedicated to the lighthouse keepers who served there. The festival was small but included an excellent wooden boat show and a dozen or so vendors with goods ranging from sea glass jewelry to original paintings. The festival marked the end of the “freeform” part of my trip, as the wedding was scheduled for that afternoon and I would be driving back to Charlotte the next day.
Circling back to the I-40 idea, I realize after a trip like the one to Ohio that it is unlikely I would have made it to the West Coast. Somewhere around the Mississippi River I would probably have lost interest. There are only so many small towns to explore and so many roadside attractions to take in before everything starts to look and feel the same. And as those of you who’ve made it all the way through these arduous 1,300 words will surely attest, the book that would have come from it wasn’t rocketing up the bestseller lists.