>Bruce:  As a native of New Jersey, I can relate to your experience of the
>Midwest.  Educated on the east coast (colleges in CT and NY), I moved to
>Oregon -- culture shock! -- and then on to Missouri and finally Ohio.

As a native of them there parts (Maumee, a scant twenty miles north of
Bowling Green), welcome to the land where everyone naturally speaks like a
TV newscaster...nice and neutral.

>I've learned to love it.  What was initially a relentlessly flat landscape
>is now an organic, verdant Mother Earth -- with the arrival of summer, the
>space of the plains is transformed by corn and soybean.  A sorta seasonal
>topography, alternately embracing and liberating.

Thanks to the Black Swamp, not only is it relentlessly flat, but it is
reputed to be some of the richest soil to be found anywhere for the
purposes of agriculture.  I remember the saw about corn being "knee high by
the fourth [of July]; jeepers, the stuff was over my 6-2 head (like a lot
of the stuff Ken writes, but that's another thread entirely) by then.  And
flat?  There was the Blizzard of January '78, which had drifts as high as
the farmhouses between Maumee and Bowling Green because they were the only
things out there for snow to huddle behind.  And those drifts then went
across I-75.  They were flying C-130's [a really, really large and
commodious aircraft] fully loaded with front end loaders and the like into
Toledo airport, one every hour from Fort Bragg for 48 hours, to dig out our
little corner of heaven.  I think it took them something like a month to
burrow through the snow mountain range.  That's as hilly as northwest Ohio
ever was since that glacier back in ought-6 scraped it flat.

>Little livestock in
>this area of NW Ohio, just occasional lamas (wooly, not dalai).

Which brings us full circle back to the poetry thread, as I am reminded of
yet another thrilling poem of rhyming cadence from one of my favs, Ogden
Nash:

A one-l lama, he's a beast.
A two-l llama, he's a priest.
And I will bet a silk pajama
That there is no three-l lllama.

>I was reminded of the contrast between lake state and coastal living
>during a 2-week vacation to parts east earlier this month.  The welcome to
>a NJ place of business was PUSH HARD; the directions on an OH garbage can
>were WASTE PLEASE.  That truly said it all.

This has stood me in good stead as I have for the last sixteen years been
in training as a southern gentleman.  I'll never quite make it 'cause my
people are not from these parts, but I do know how to say "Please sir" and
"Thank you ma'am," as well as how to hold a door for a woman.

>Of course, we're all of us united by good music.

And good poetry.

_________________________________________________

Dan Becker                                              Raleigh Historic
Executive Director, RHDC                        Districts Commission
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